BOSTON — Imagine the East Coast’s largest cities mixing a brew of salt, motor oil, trash and grocery carts, and dumping it into rivers and harbors.
It’s allowed in emergency situations.
Some officials staring at massive snow mountains in densely populated areas of the winter-walloped Northeast want to do just that, though others warn dumping snow in water comes with big problems.
“There’s a lot of stuff in this snow that if I isolated it and threw it in the river, you’d have me arrested,” said John Lipscomb of New York-based environmental group Riverkeeper.
Snow from the East Coast’s pounding winter is being plowed into banks that are narrowing roads and highway ramps like hardening arteries, blocking drivers’ sight lines, and forcing schoolchildren to break paths like cattle as they walk down buried sidewalks.
In a normal winter, the snow melts on a good day or is carted off to designated dumps, where its pollutants are eventually filtered through the earth or treated before ending up in sewers.
This is not a normal winter. Many East Coast cities, including Boston, New York and Hartford, Conn., are on their way to setting seasonal snowfall records. The extra snow means extra road salt and human refuse that gets swept up by plows.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t directly regulate dumping snow but recommends against dumping it in water. It also urges state and local governments to include snow-disposal restrictions in storm-water-management plans. Some states and municipalities restrict dumping snow in waterways out of fear of harming aquatic life and polluting drinking water. Massachusetts is one of them.
Even so, state Sen. Jack Hart has called for a “Boston snow party,” with snow being poured into Boston Harbor as tea was long ago. Despite the state’s long battle to clean up the once notoriously polluted nook of Massachusetts Bay, he is getting support from unlikely allies.
Bruce Berman of the group Save the Harbor, Save the Bay said that he normally wouldn’t support such dumping but high snow banks are making it dangerous to move around Boston and that the deep and active harbor can handle it.
“When there’s a compelling reason — and believe me, these storms have given us a compelling reason — to snow dump, I support it,” Berman said.
The hazards of too much snow mixing with a lot of humanity were evidenced by a blizzard that paralyzed New York after Christmas. Many pedestrians simply gave up trying to use sidewalks, instead walking down the middle of partially plowed streets. Uncollected trash piled up for days.
Ed Coletta of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection cautioned that besides the junk that ends up in snow piles — everything from common trash to grocery carts — it can freeze in large chunks and threaten boat traffic.
