The recent attention paid to sewage spills in the Merrimack and Connecticut Rivers is welcome, and overdue. When a pipe breaks and millions of gallons of untreated wastewater pour into a river overnight, it makes headlines, and it should. Beaches close, fisheries shut down, and elected officials take notice. Friends of Lake Warner and the Mill River works on just as important an issue that rarely makes the news.

Two kinds of water pollution

A sewage spill is a point source event: sudden, visible, and traceable to one broken pipe or one failed system. Nonpoint source pollution is different. It is the slow, steady runoff of phosphorus, nitrogen, and bacteria from lawns, farms, and parking lots, carried into our streams every time it rains, and often accelerated by undersized culverts and aging stormwater infrastructure that were not built to handle today’s storm intensity. There is no single moment when it happens, no single agency to blame, and no emergency bill written to fund the fix. That makes it easy to overlook.

A regional problem

Here in the Pioneer Valley, we do not have to look past our own watershed. In 2023, a sanitary sewer overflow at the Amherst Wastewater Treatment Facility sent untreated sewage into the Mill River itself, prompting a public health warning for the river. That was a point source event, and it got the attention it deserved. The nonpoint source problem in this same watershed is just as real, and far more frequent. Last week, elevated E. coli bacteria forced Puffer’s Pond, fed by Cushman Brook within the Mill River watershed, to close to swimming again. It is a closure that has become a near-annual occurrence, driven by stormwater runoff carrying bacteria into the water. The Mill River watershed, which drains roughly 19,500 acres through Amherst, Leverett, Sunderland, and Shutesbury before reaching Lake Warner in Hadley, also has tributaries running well above the state’s phosphorus targets day in and day out, fed by a mix of agricultural runoff, urban stormwater, and legacy nutrient loading. The neighboring Fort River watershed faces a similar story: documented nonpoint source pollution flowing into one of the last free-flowing tributaries of the Connecticut River, one that supports some of the most sensitive mussel and fish species in New England.

Impact of climate change

The problem is not that these watersheds never make the news. It is that the chronic, everyday pollution driving those closures rarely gets the same sustained attention as a single dramatic spill. What they will produce, quietly, year after year, is degraded water quality, more frequent algae blooms, and a river system less able to absorb the increasingly intense storms our region is already seeing. As climate change drives heavier and more frequent rainfall, nonpoint source pollution does not stay flat. It gets worse, because more intense storms wash more sediment, more nutrients, and more bacteria off the landscape and into the water, faster than our floodplains and stormwater systems were built to handle. Addressing NPS pollution in our local watershed increases our climate resiliency.

Our work and the need for assistance

Watershed groups like Friends of Lake Warner and the Mill River, and our neighbors at the Fort River Watershed Association, have spent years collecting the data and building the partnerships this work depends on. Funding mechanisms exist to support watershed-scale planning and prevention, but they are modest, competitive, and slow, especially compared to the speed with which emergency dollars can materialize after a single dramatic spill. We are asking our state and federal representatives, and the public, to recognize that the rivers running through our own backyards deserve the same urgency as the ones making the news. An ounce of watershed-scale prevention, upstream, before the water ever reaches a lake or a river mouth, is worth a great deal more than a pound of emergency response after the fact.

Brian Pearson is an Amherst resident and board chair of the Friends of Lake Warner and the Mill River.