The State of the Sound: It Needs Our Help

When spring brings a beautiful sunny weekend, Rye residents’ thoughts turn to their coming summer on the beach. Perhaps that is why a presentation on the environmental crisis in western Long Island Sound attracted a high-powered, knowledgeable audience to the Rye Meeting House on Saturday, March 9, including newly elected State Assemblyman Steven Otis, who lives in Rye. 

Sponsored by the Committee to Save the Bird Homestead, the event featured speaker Tom Andersen, former environmental reporter and author of This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound (Yale University Press).  Andersen covered the 1987 disaster when lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, due to untreated sewage in the western Sound forced lobsters and other marine animals to leave its waters in droves and caused enormous die offs of many species. Not surprisingly, Andersen is now New York Program and Communications Coordinator for Save the Sound, the nonprofit that advocates and does legal work to protect Long Island Sound.  His talk sounded a loud alarm about the current state of the Sound, especially along Westchester County’s shores, after the unusually warm winter of 2011-2012. 

Andersen explained that the heavily populated western end of the Sound, which borders Rye’s beaches, is suffering from pollution by sewage and storm water – a tragedy for “such an incredibly beautiful body of water.”  Warmer waters also mean that the ecosystem is changing.  Over the last century, the Sound’s average temperature, Andersen said, has risen one degree Celsius.  During the very mild winter months of 2011–2012, environmental surveys found that the Sound did not cool off, as it usually has in the past, allowing fish that prefer colder waters to return.  Among other results: “Warmer water naturally holds less dissolved oxygen than cooler water. Warmer water also is more conducive to the growth of algae, which feed on nitrogen and remove oxygen from the water when they die and decompose,” explains Save the Sound’s Green Cities-Blue Waters blog.

Subsequently, in August 2012, oxygen levels in the Sound off Westchester and Nassau Counties dropped to almost nothing – a catastrophe for marine life.

With warmer temperatures, the Sound’s lobster population has already crashed –“the Sound used to be a very rich lobster habitat, the farthest point south where lobsters could be found,” Andersen said -- and two species of flounder are dwindling quickly.  “The Sound is turning into Barnegat Bay,” according to Andersen, referring to New Jersey’s arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is considerably warmer than the Sound and which, therefore, has provided habitat to different species from those customarily found in the Sound.

Although nitrogen in treated sewage is “by far” the biggest threat to the Sound, Andersen said that storm water runoff and raw sewage from combined and deteriorated sewers are hazardous to marine plants and animals, and to people, too.  Bacteria and other pathogens shut down Westchester beaches for 140 days in 2011, and 111 days in 2012.

What can residents who care about the Sound do?  Andersen said that in the past 40 years, there has been far less advocacy for the Sound in Westchester County than in Connecticut.  He recounted that last year, newly elected State Senator and Rye resident George Latimer (then a State Assemblyman) said that he used to hear from his constituents that Long Island Sound was an important issue, but that he rarely hears it anymore.  One reason might be that sewage treatment plant upgrades are “enormously expensive,” according to Andersen, and lead to higher taxes. 

Let us hope that state officials will hear more about the Sound soon.  Beginning in 2013, Save the Sound is asking for citizens’ help in tracking the 17 sewage treatment plants in Westchester, New York City, and on Long Island to make sure that their discharges do not threaten the Sound.  Although federally mandated upgrades of Westchester’s sewage treatment plants, including the use of nitrogen-eating bacteria, will mean that less nitrogen will be discharged into the Sound, audience members questioned whether these improvements will keep pace with warming of the Sound’s waters.

Andersen expects the current colder winter of 2012–2013 to help the Sound’s ecosystem.  Moreover, Assemblyman Otis, who remembers fishing for flounder in the Sound when he was a boy, said that his request to join the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee “has been honored” and he is already working to “make the Sound a priority” for the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation. 

After Andersen’s presentation, Anne Stillman, president of the Committee to Save the Bird Homestead, which operates the Meeting House, noted that events like this “are meant to provide a forum to discuss what matters – and the Sound affects everyone in the region.”

 In Westchester County, Save the Sound promises to replicate its success in Connecticut “one backyard at a time.”  To participate in future Save the Sound volunteer efforts in Westchester or to reach out to local officials, contact Ellen Peck, epeck@savethesound.org, 203-787-0646, x. 109, or sign up online at www.savethesound.org.

Ann Marie Cunningham is a veteran science reporter who grew up in Rye, and used to narrowly avoid stepping on flounder in the shallows off Rye Beach.