Editor’s Note: This summer, King’s Beach received the worst water-safety rating in the region. In the first of an Item three-part series exploring the beach’s past, present, and future, today we explore its history.
This year, bacteria-ridden outfalls from drainage pipes rendered King’s Beach closed for swimming for roughly 90% of the days between Memorial Day weekend and Aug. 20. It received the worst water-safety rating of any beach in the region in the Metropolitan Beaches Water Quality Report Card compiled by Save the Harbor/Save the Bay this summer.
The pollution, caused by a combination of combined sewage overflow (CSO) events, day-to-day pollution from illegal sewer-line hookups in Lynn, and antiquated piping in Swampscott, has made headlines for more than a century.
How did this once-sparkling oceanfront become so polluted that it’s rarely, if ever, safe for swimming? It started in the late 1800s, when Lynn and Swampscott’s municipal sewage systems — like many others at that time — were composed of combined water and sewer pipes through which sewage and stormwater flowed directly from homes to the ocean.
Wastewater collection began in Lynn in 1866 with the construction of a stone and brick sewer on Union Street. In 1879, the city engineer reported that all but 7.5 miles of major streets had been sewered.
One of the first written accounts detailing pollution at King’s Beach was an article headlined “Boston’s Offal” published on Sept. 1, 1891 in The Daily Evening Item. The story featured accounts from Lynn, Swampscott, and Nahant residents, as well as fishermen, who were frustrated by the beach’s odor and seemingly constant pollution from trash and sewage dumping in Boston and Lynn.
“There is a source of danger to health, and a financial cost to this nuisance among the shore towns. Swampscott has had several fine summer residences vacant this season because the former tenants could not put up with a repetition of sights and smells inflicted upon them,” The Item reported in 1891.
Reports of foul smells, unsafe swimming conditions, and visible waste and trash at King’s Beach made headlines through the turn of the century. In 1929, Lynn and Swampscott funded the construction of a 20-inch-wide conduit pipe from Eastern Avenue in Lynn and Pine Street in Swampscott, which centralized the municipalities’ sewage outflow through Stacey’s Brook.
This initial conduit, Lynn Water and Sewer Commissioner Robin Grace said, created the infrastructural framework with which CSOs pollute the beach today.
“The bones of the sewer system that we have now started a long time ago — it’s just been upgraded and modernized,” Grace said. “That original pipe is the same CSO pipe that’s still leaking stormwater onto King’s Beach.”
From 1929 through the 1960s, sewage outflow onto King’s Beach through Stacey’s Brook continued to draw public attention while the Commonwealth took a closer look into the issue.
In an article titled “Angry citizens demand cleanup at King’s Beach” published in the July 29, 1957 edition of The Daily Evening Item, Richard Greeley, then the head of Water Pollution Control at the Department of Public Health, said the pollution was caused primarily by Swampscott’s sewage leaking into its stormwater pipe from 1929.
“This sewage seeps into the storm water drainage pipes, which go into Stacey Brook,” Greeley said.
It wasn’t until 1968 that Swampscott Town Meeting voted to approve the creation of a water and sewer chlorine treatment center at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and New Ocean Street for $1.65 million — a project that was completed in 1973.
When the federal government passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, both Lynn and Swampscott faced federal pressure to reduce their waste emissions. In 1976, the Environmental Protection Agency sued the City of Lynn for discharging its waste into Stacey’s Brook in violation of the legislation.
In response to the EPA’s suit, Lynn created its Water and Sewer Commission in 1982. The commission began building its $65 million Primary Wastewater Treatment Facility in 1980. It began disinfecting combined stormwater and sewage in 1985. By September 1990, a $53.8 million Secondary Treatment Facility opened.
By the early 2000s, the EPA had passed a number of regulations overseeing chemical pollutants in the ocean, rendering Swampscott’s chlorine treatment plant illegal. Swampscott, Saugus, and Nahant began paying to pump their sewage into Lynn’s treatment centers.
The only problem is that Lynn still has a combined sewage and wastewater system. During heavy-rain events, sewage from across the region combines with stormwater and overwhelms the system, forcing sewage-laced water, which would otherwise be processed at the treatment center, to be pushed out into the beach through the city’s pipes from 1929.
“There are parts of the city that are still not separated, so they’re still carrying stormwater, along with wastewater when there’s a heavy-rain event. It’s a heavy-rain event system that was designed many years ago to prevent the wastewater plant from being inundated with too much water,” Friends of Lynn and Nahant Beach Vice President and LWSC Executive Board member Michael Celona said.
In 2015, the EPA issued a consent decree to the City of Lynn concluding that the municipality’s sewage pollution violated the Clean Water Act. In response, LWSC began the West Lynn Sewage Separation project, an ongoing effort to separate the city’s stormwater and sewer lines.
Today, illegal sewage connections to stormwater pipes are the main reason for dry-weather pollution at King’s Beach in Lynn. In Swampscott, old clay pipes still leak sewage into the town’s stormwater drainage system as well.
“It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,” Grace said. “Even if you went through and fixed it all today, something else could happen tomorrow. Another person could either do unpermitted work or they could actually attach it to the stormwater pipe instead of the sewer pipe.”
