Credit for protecting watershed extends far beyond one man
To the editor:
Has the Gloucester Daily Times coverage of those who saved the Babson Reservoir watershed been somewhat self-serving?
Giving so much of the credit to Joe Orange - a former Essex County Newspaper employee and retiree - ignores many others who worked very hard for decades to preserve the Babson Reservoir watershed.
Some of them attended the Gloucester City Council meeting of Tuesday, Feb 12 at the urging of several city councilors, and other city and town officials. They spoke at the microphone, identifying themselves, but their comments were ignored in the follow-up coverage, in the Times, of Wednesday, Feb. 13, and Thursday, Feb. 14. Only Orange's remarks were quoted, self-serving as they were.
Having worked since 1983 as an active volunteer and former city councilor at-large, I also served for many years as past chairman of the Watershed Advisory Committee, formally established and appointed by the mayor and City Council, in the process required by the City Charter, as opposed to the current claim that Orange and The Times make to his heading up that post.
I've been reminded lately of the first time I approached Orange in 1983, as president of the concerned Cape Ann League of Women Voters, representing both Rockport and Gloucester.
We were in the midst of the early 1980s' serious prolonged drought. We were drinking water pumped from the former Nugent/Morse piggery swamp, up over the hilltop at what is now the end of Pond Road.
That water was not being run through a water filtration process. It was pumped up over the hilltop and dumped into the Alewife Brook, which, dammed up, is the cornerstone of the Babson Reservoir.
At the time, Orange was working in Newburyport for the Daily News of Newburyport, Essex County Newspapers. When he finally returned the phone call, after several weeks, he rebuked me for bothering him, and declined any inclination to assist.
After we became good friends, I was shocked that he also used an inside game with the Gloucester Economic and Industrial Commission. They tried to expand the Blackburn Industrial Park by building the roadbed into an extension of the park, below the Varian plant, which was to bend east, around Railcut Hill, to what is now Great Republic Drive, even after the near disastrous oil spill on the sloping Varian parking lot - an event I watched as it happened.
Experts were brought in to clean it up, before the public was apprised of the spill.
The Babson Reservoir was then protected only by a fragile sand dam, in the wetland down below the parking lot, which stopped the oil flowing down the hill into the Babson Reservoir. The public was badly misled, misinformed at the time about the facts of the oil spill and the roadbed.
We almost lost the whole reservoir then, as the state would have stepped in and prohibited our taking drinking water from it, even after the spilled oil was removed from it.
That would have forced us to buy our drinking water, at enormously inflated costs, reflected in our local tax rates. That happened in the Salem-Beverly and Reading-Wakefield water supplies, which were accidentally polluted along Routes 128 and 1A.
They had to pay for cleanup and buy drinking water to comply with local, state and federal water laws, off the local tax rates.
Many others who tromped many miles through the Babson watershed for umpteen years - also attending endless related meetings which Orange never attended - were equally surprised. They showed up again, and spoke on Tuesday night, Feb. 12.
These were wonderful folks who have given freely of their time, then as now, just acting out of continuing concerns, for protecting Cape Ann's local water supplies.
It takes hundreds of citizens, thousands of hours over many decades to preserve an irreplaceable watershed, and running through both Rockport and Gloucester watersheds.
The Times needs to credit all those who've worked to protect local water supplies - not just one who was, at one time, one of their own.
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CAROLYN M. O'CONNOR
Rocky Neck
