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Carson Beach bathers beware: State issues water-stinger alert; also warns people going to beaches at Wollaston and Nahant

DCR reported today that lion's-mane jellyfish have floated into the waters off Carson Beach in South Boston, Wollaston Beach in Quincy and Nahant Beach in, well, Nahant.

The state's posted purple flags at beaches there to warn people about the gelatinous beasties, which are large and have long, stinging tentacles.

Nahant was home to 19th-century scientist Alexander Agassiz, who, in 1865, described the largest lion's mane ever found: Some seven feet in diameter with 120-foot-long tentacles. The jellyfish that now make regular appearances at Boston-area beaches tend to be a bit smaller than that.


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Comments

Now, I'll refrain from taking shots at Quincy seeing as they allege that they were never funded like Boston to clear up the harbor but...

"EPA requires Quincy to spend $100 million to reduce sewage flowing into Boston Harbor

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/09/metro/epa-requires-quincy-spend-1...

Over the past decade, in violation of the Clean Water Act, Quincy has discharged a range of pollutants into the harbor and surrounding waterways, including E. coli and other harmful bacteria, federal officials found. Sometimes, with heavy rains, outfalls from the sewer system spread sewage along the city’s coast, including Wollaston Beach and the Adams Shore area."

It's like SoCal - don't go in the water after heavy rain.

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The reason we have a state-of-the-art treatment plant at Deer Island (and far fewer pipes just dumping raw sewage into the harbor and the Charles) is because Quincy's city attorney used to jog on Wollaston Beach and got so disgusted with what he'd wind up running through that he eventually went back to the office and sued, which led to the Sludge Judge, the creation of the MWRA and the construction of the new treatment plant.

The cleanup of Boston Harbor was surprisingly triumphant.

You can see Deer Island from the beach (along with the supports left over from the bridge to Long Island, but that's another story).

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....and not cleaning up their shit.

The we wear big boy pants people in the City of Presidents just got a little more short pantsy.

I hope we get more downpours to remind the people of Squantum it is their crap messing it up for a lot of people.

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I like to bag on Quincy about Long Island but I can't see that anyone in city government is trying to fight this, only arguing that the reason it is still a problem is the lack of federal money like Boston got back in the day. $100M should fix some problems.

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They aren't fighting this resolution because this resolution is the one they fought to receive.

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It's too bad the harbor cleanup gets somewhat overshadowed in history, since it largely happened in parallel with the Big Dig, but both were huge in transforming the city. Going from worst-to-first in terms of urban harbor pollution was so crucial.

The Charles was also cleaned-up immensely, but that's not even remotely the same level. As bad as the Charles was, the harbor was filled with multiple visible discolorations (and dare I say, floating "chunks") from sewage, and literally smelled like sh*t.

Prior to the mid-to-late 2000's, if you mentioned "Boston" and "water" to me, my first association was always the Charles, but after this, I actually think of the harbor first. It was a big psychological change in viewing the city as a whole.

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Don't forget Nut Island.

I never went back to swimming in Harbor faced beaches always would go to non-harbor facing beaches.

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That's true for nearly every waterway in MA.

If it isn't sewage, its septage, fertilizer, and dog shit.

Quincy needs to get its act together. If MyRWA can shame Belmont out of 20 years of games and denial about their shitty dumping problems from McDirty Hospital, Qunicy has another think coming if they think they can continue to get away with this shit.

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Do not walk in the mud.

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Bush also played a critical role in cleaning up Boston Harbor. It happened during his 1988 presidential campaign against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Peter Shelley was one of the attorneys who led the fight to clean up Boston Harbor. He was on the boat with Bush when he came to denounce how dirty it was.

"And his goal was to rub Governor Dukakis's face in the fact that the federal government was a plaintiff trying to clean up the harbor and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was a defendant trying to delay that cleanup," he said.

Shelley says Bush's intervention played a key role.

"It had a huge impact," he said. "The fact that Vice President Bush was able to stick this label on the harbor as 'the dirtiest harbor in America' — which as far as I know has never been documented — it was a political line that stuck, was something that we used regularly to pressure the state, the Legislature to do something about this infamous category that the harbor had suddenly been thrust into."

In a way, Bostonians have George H. W. Bush to thank — at least in part — for the now-clean waters of Boston Harbor.

from WBUR
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/12/01/george-hw-bush-mass-obituary

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What really happened is that a federal judge was jogging on the beach and stepped in a pile of human shit - triggering a huge lawsuit under the clean water act.

If Bush piled on, so much the better. But it started with a pissed off rich guy with access to the levers of power. The legislature couldn't be bothered at that time to do anything other than grandstand over gutting the state higher education system, ignoring the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts even though there was money on the table to comply, and wank off incandescently about prop 2.5.

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This is like a sewer calling a sceptic tank brown.

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Beaches in MA have to be tested regularly - all of the listed beaches are tested daily.

You can find up to the day data for those beaches here: https://ma-beaches.healthinspections.us/beaches.cfm

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