Sound Schoolers Test The Waters

The traffic from the Q Bridge rumbled overhead, oblivious to the scene below at the mouth of the Quinnipiac and Mill rivers, as two students on a small Sound School boat lowered a piece of scientific equipment into the water, at surface and at depth.

The reason: to continue a years-long project of gathering data about the Mill River and, in turn, foster a better relationship with it.

Wednesday morning’s boat trip out of the Sound School was part of the ongoing Urban Waters Initiative from Save the Sound, which this summer is hosting a series of events intended to further its mission of, as its website states, ​“creat[ing] and nurtur[ing] new connections with residents and community organizations of Fair Haven, Connecticut in order to amplify community voice and leadership in environmental stewardship and justice within the lower Mill River watershed.”

July 12 saw a community conversation about environmental justice at JUNTA’s offices on Grand Avenue. On Aug. 3, ​“Explore the Mill” will feature a touch tank with Mystic Aquarium at 162 James St., from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. On Aug 17, ​“Mic at the Mill” will have a storytelling workshop with drawdown project at Bregamos Community Theatre, 491 Blatchley Ave., from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. On Aug. 22, Fair Haven Public Library at 182 Grand Ave. will host a recycled art workshop from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Chill at the Mill, on Aug. 24 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., will wrap up the summer programming in style with workshops, music, and activities at 162 James St.

This Wednesday, however, was largely about the science of water testing, and giving a glimpse of how it’s done. On hand were Charles Mulligan, aquaculture instructor and director of the Environmental Justice Program at the Sound School, and several students in the Sound School’s summer marine science program, to demonstrate. The students, Mulligan said, ​“have been monitoring water chemistry runoff and what’s happening in coastal waters for the last four years.” They were now there to explain ​“what we do when we get on site, why we do it, and what we’re measuring.”

To get to the program’s water testing sites, however, first required a trip by boat across New Haven Harbor, from the Sound School in City Point to the mouths of the Mill and Quinnipiac rivers under the Q Bridge. ​“It’s a different perspective when you view it from the water,” noted Lys Gant, Save the Sound’s watershed stewardship coordinator, and they were right: the urban landscape that seems so dense when inside it suddenly seemed small and distant compared to the sound and sky. A seagull took flight from the water; nearby, a cormorant skated along the surface.

Mulligan pointed out that the harbor sees a number of different uses, from industrial and commercial to residential and recreational. ​“A lot of the areas are densely populated, some of the areas are not.” The program was monitoring eight different sites up and down the waterway. One key variable affecting their findings was whether there had been a heavy rain recently; there had been such rainfall the day before. With rain, ​“a lot of what’s in the watershed,” the area that drains into the Mill River and Quinnipiac River, ​“is going to wash into the waterways.”

“We’re concerned about that,” he continued, because changes in the chemistry of the water ​“can affect the physical layout of the water, the chemical profile of the water, and eventually cascade through the food chain,” from plankton up to the fish that commercial fishing boats are trying to catch. In other words, ​“what washes out of the watershed from either highway runoff, commercial runoff, boat discharge, or from different commercial uses of land” can affect the fish we eat and the way we live and play on and near the water.

The students were gathering a lot of different data. ​“We are concerned about everything from salinity and temperature” to ​“conductivity” — which can indicate whether certain pollutants are in the water — ​“dissolved oxygen, and water clarity.” The students would also be measuring nitrogen and ammonia levels, ​“which tell us something slightly different about what’s happening in these waterways.” The measurements would help assess how much unused fertilizer was being washed into the river. ​“It’s a nutrient for grass. It’s also a nutrient for phytoplankton.” Changes in the physical attributes of the water could affect the water’s chemical balances and ​“alter what’s available” to the animals that lived there. The students thus also took information on biodiversity; a decrease in biodiversity would suggest a stressed environment. The students would be taking multiple readings, which would then be compiled and entered into a database.

The wealth of information, Mulligan said, allowed for greater understanding of the changes in the water and what might be effecting those changes.

Save the Sound’s boat passed under the drawbridge at Forbes Avenue, beneath the wide spans of the Q Bridge, and through the swiveling bridge at Chapel Street to arrive at its first testing site, just downriver from the abandoned English Station Power Plant on Ball Island in the Mill River. Mulligan pointed out that testing there was crucial in order to monitor just what might be coming out of the station, which previous owner United Illuminating still has not remediated despite a recent lawsuit and other threats.

The students lowered instruments into the water to collect samples. Other instruments could be lowered into the water to take readings.

Several chemical tests could be performed on the boat. Mulligan pointed out that the data so far wasn’t straightforward; it didn’t always follow, for example, that rain should always, in every circumstance, lead to increased agricultural runoff. ​“We’ve had days where we see some heavy signatures and days when there’s nothing,” he said. The students ​“have to figure out what it means that they don’t see what they expected. When you’re talking about science, it doesn’t always go the way you expect.”

Other times, multiple trips led to an experiential understanding of a fish kill. One day before a rainstorm, the students found the water under the Q Bridge teeming with fish. The next day they had all died off. Nitrates in runoff were the cause, though not directly. The nitrates that entered the river fed the algae in the water, which in turn attracted the fish. The algae, however, depleted the oxygen dissolved in the river, which in turn killed the fish.

Having acquired samples from two sites, Mulligan directed the boat back under the Q Bridge and back out into the harbor. Gant’s shift in perspective happened again, as the real scope of the bridge felt more apparent when passing underneath it on a boat than when driving across it in a car.

With some time remaining before the boat had to return for lunch, Mulligan had it cruise to the mouth of the harbor, past Lighthouse Point, where several people caught several porgies, a sea robin, and a black sea bass, which were all thrown back.

The most feisty catch was of a sand shark, which was examined and promptly liberated by George Baldwin, who teaches genetics and biotechnology at the Sound School. Fishing, he said, turned out to be just as important as collecting data, in terms of helping create a deeper connection among the students with nature. Through fishing they learned the different species of fish in the water, and how fickle catching a fish can be. They also gained a foothold in establishing a longtime love of outdoor, natural spaces, whether forest or sea.

“That is the real world,” Baldwin said. ​“Not what was made by man for the past few thousand years.”

Mulligan was circumspect about what has been discovered through the project’s four years of data, but straightforward about why the data should continue to be collected. To him, a connection between human activity in the watershed and changes in the physical and chemical makeup of the waterway was clear. Less clear was how exactly that activity was interacting with the host of other factors — the weather, the changes in the tides, rain intensity and frequency — that led to changes in the water. ​“That’s something way more complex than four years of data is going to establish,” he said.

However, ​“we’ve definitely succeeded on the front of raising awareness” and of ​“establishing a connection,” a fact that shouldn’t be undervalued. ​“We know we are connecting and we are having an impact and a footprint on this river.” And ​“the more people that are well-versed in talking about it, the more there’s going to be a sense of raising the motivation to do something about it.”

“If you’re going to have any type of measureable change and impact on the system, it starts at the ground level,” he said. ​“The more people are aware of their impact, the more they might consider their actions and that might impact the system.”