State Sen. Brendan Crighton discussed the current state of King’s Beach with residents and officials from Lynn, Swampscott, and Nahant at a Friends of Lynn and Nahant Beaches meeting Wednesday night.
After sewage-laced wastewater that runs from the Stacey’s Brook outfalls onto the beach led to the beach’s closure for roughly 90% of the summer, Lynn and Swampscott officials are working to combat the pollution at its sources while seeking state funding for large-scale pollution-mitigation infrastructure. Crighton opened the question-and-answer portion of the meeting by updating attendees on the Commonwealth’s recent efforts.
Although the Commonwealth has been most receptive to the construction of a 7,500-foot outfall pipe at Stacey’s Brook — an estimated eight-year project expected to cost $50 million — Crighton said other options, such as construction of a UV light treatment facility to zap the bacteria-ridden water prior to its arrival at the beach, are still on the table.
A pilot UV light treatment program, Crighton said, is expected to be up and running by next spring.
“It’s not early in the process of this being a problem, I think it’s early on in the process of us taking a deeper dive with a willing administration to roll up our sleeves, answer the tough questions, and do the tough work. We will be piloting the UV treatment, hopefully this spring. We should be starting the sampling and prep work soon,” Crighton said.
With a roughly $25 million price tag and an estimated three-year cleanup time, the UV light treatment option remains the preferred option of the Swampscott Steering Committee, a consortium comprising Lynn and Swampscott officials and private stakeholders.
Safer Waters in Massachusetts President Vi Patek, of Nahant, expressed concern with the extension pipe’s impact on Nahant’s beaches, mentioning that a 7,500-foot extension pipe at Stacey’s Brook would merely push the infected water closer to the shores of Nahant and Marblehead. Crighton responded that similar concerns are being raised at the state level, and that he’s pleased with how outspoken Nahant residents have been on the issue.
“I share that exact question, which is one of the things we’ve been wrestling with our friends in the administration on. There’s a reason why it’s eight-plus years to get this done. It’s because you will be dealing with several government entities on both levels,” Crighton said. “It would need to pass so many environmental tests that it makes me wonder about its viability… This is very much a preliminary look at what the options are and frankly, none of them are good, none of them are fast, none of them are cheap.”
After being asked for a general timeline for the King’s Beach cleanup, Crighton explained that the process of source elimination, which involves reinforcing or “re-sleeving” century-old clay pipes in Swampscott and searching for illegal sewage connections to Lynn’s wastewater pipes, will likely take a long period of time.
If efforts to fund UV treatment infrastructure are successful, Crighton said Lynn and Swampscott would be able to continue their source-elimination efforts while the infrastructure cleans the water, allowing the beach to reopen in approximately three years.
“If we just go source elimination, it’s a much longer-term thing of just kind of playing whack-a-mole and trying to track it down. If we were able to get the funding and move full-speed ahead, we could have a more realistic timeline over the course of three years. So, in the meantime, that leaves all of us very frustrated trying to focus on ways we can improve flagging and notifications,” Crighton said.
Lynn resident Lori Kotkowski, who lives on Kings Beach Road, asked Crighton whether Lynn would be able to collaborate with Boston in order to reduce instances of combined sewage overflows, which occur when heavy rain overwhelms Lynn’s wastewater-treatment facilities, causing sewage-laced water to flow directly into the ocean.
Crighton responded that CSO instances would likely not be affected by the proposed source elimination efforts at King’s Beach, before referring the question to Lynn Water and Sewer Commissioner Michael Celona.
“Treatment plants are built to treat mostly clean water or our surface water, pond water. There really is no way that they’re going to send that to the treatment plant to get treated. It screws up the equipment, there’s a variety of different reasons. One option that could be considered would be pumping the Stacey’s Brook outfall water through some of the existing pipes and emptying it into Lynn Harbor untreated since it is a combination of regular water plus some sewer water,” Celona responded.
Celona added that the LWSC recently voted to spend $500,000 to thoroughly check roughly 20% of the city’s pipes using CCTV cameras. This effort, he said, will significantly expedite the process of finding and repairing illegal sewage hookups.
Save King’s Beach activist Elizabeth Smith said she is hopeful for LWSC’s source-elimination efforts and the Commonwealth’s work toward planning pollution-mitigation infrastructure, before pointing out that Swampscott’s source-elimination progress, as shown in the town’s last Environmental Protection Agency report, has been more gradual over the last few years.
With the Town of Swampscott currently discussing whether to allocate $2.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding toward King’s Beach, Smith noted that the town has not funded source elimination since 2020 and asked Crighton if the Commonwealth could put pressure on local communities.
Crighton responded that while he has been working directly with the municipalities responsible for source elimination, progress will ultimately depend on funding and support from the federal and state governments.
“I have talked to the Healey administration and have let them know that we want to focus on working with them on the treatment side, but we want both communities to be held accountable on the source-elimination side. My authority as a senator is not to oversee these types of projects or to come in and assess penalties, and it is more or less finding the funds for it, which we found, looking at the policies, and pressuring this administration to make sure that they are overseeing all of this,” Crighton said.
