'Very Encouraged': Swampscott King's Beach UV Light Pilot Shows Promise, Raises Questions

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — While the UV light pilot program to treat sewage affecting the ocean water at King's Beach has shown encouraging effectiveness, questions remain about the ability and cost it would take to upscale the program to become a permanent solution to the pollution at the Swampscott and Lynn beach.

Former Water and Sewer Advisory Board Chair Liz Smith, who remains heavily involved with the pilot program, said that while the program has encountered issues related to seaweed clogging the system and heavy rainfalls overwhelming it, it does appear to be working in terms of treating the bacteria in the outfall at about the halfway mark of the pilot program.

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"We have seen things as we've expected," Smith said. "Such as, when it rains, and fortunately it hasn't rained as much this season — we've been fortunate — but when it does rain, a lot of junk does come down the stormwater drains. Either it gets blocked by the screens we've put in to block the seaweed that's come up, or some of it does go through the system, and we find plastic bags, cigarettes, plastic bottles in the UV tanks. None of that is helpful. ...

"You can see (from the data) when there's rain, the effectiveness goes down, and then it picks up very quickly. So we're very encouraged by what we're seeing."

Smith said some of the trash issues may be exacerbated by the ongoing sanitation worker strike, leading to more plastic and trash finding its way into the system.

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"We know UV can kill bacteria," Smith said. "But we don't know how it will perform in this environment — a tidal environment. The people who make the UV system, the company called Trojan, out of Canada, when the tech was here setting things up, he said they were really excited about this (pilot) because they had never put a system into a tidal location like this."

Smith said the King's Beach has been open about 80 percent of the time this summer, compared to being closed more than three-quarters of the time in recent years. However, she noted that the past two summers have been very rainy summers, which will lead to the type of stormwater runoff that often raises bacteria levels and forces the closure of beaches.

She said the rain effect is worse when the rain is torrential.

"We don't want this to lead people to believe that the UV pilot is the golden ticket (to a clean beach)," Select Board Chair Katie Phelan said. "It may be. But we don't have that data yet. ... The other part of the pilot is to understand scalability, cost. If we determine the pilot works, (then next is) what it has to look like to work on a grand scale consistently and not have some of these issues."

The Select Board gave a preliminary denial to Interim Town Administrator Gino Cresta's request for an additional $20,000 to cover cost overruns because of the seaweed clogs and other factors.

While Select Board member Doug Thompson said some of those costs may be anticipated in a pilot program, Cresta said he anticipated the resistance and may suggest the pilot program be cut short by the number of days necessary to alleviate the need for more money.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)