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Waters in Essex a Spot for Samplepalooza Event

A one-day water quality testing event, which is held across four states at locations covering more than 1,000 river miles, included the waters off the dock at the Connecticut River Museum in Essex for the first time in 2019 and returned this September.

The event, Samplepalooza, is spearheaded by the Connecticut River Conservancy (CRC), but enlists the help of environmental officials and volunteers in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

“When collecting information about the health of the Connecticut River and its tributaries, we want to get as clear a picture as we can,” said CRC Executive Director Andrew Fisk. “The more locations that we can get this information from, the clearer the picture.”

The location in Essex was chosen for Samplepalooza as it is also monitored as part of the Unified Water Study with Save the Sound, according to Ryan O’Donnell, CRC’s water quality monitoring coordinator.

Water samples from Samplepalooza are tested for nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements, to better understand the impact of certain pollutants on the waterways in each of the four states and ultimately Long Island Sound.

Although nitrogen and phosphorus are natural to the environment, when found in over-abundant quantities, they can have negative consequences on the health of humans, fish, and other aquatic species, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“Nitrogen from the Connecticut River and other rivers entering the Sound has been determined to be the cause of the anoxic ‘dead zone’ documented by researchers in Long Island Sound,” according to the Samplepalooza 2014-2019 report.

The dead zone is an area of water where the amount of oxygen available to aquatic life is so low that it makes it hard for certain species to survive.

The U.S. EPA uses large growths of algae, or algal blooms, as an example of when elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorus are present. These algal blooms can lead to the death of fish and contaminated drinking water for humans.

“One of the things about Samplepalooza is we’re trying to get people throughout the whole watershed to be thinking about our downstream neighbors…Essex and Long Island Sound,” said O’Donnell.

A collection site in New Hampshire or Vermont, as an example, could potentially be contributing to a “problem with nitrogen way, way downstream that you are never going to see,” he said.

In 2019, Essex was one of three Samplepalooza sites. The other two Connecticut locations were Middletown and Thompsonville.

For nitrogen, Essex’s results were higher than the locations in New Hampshire, but well within the established criteria set by the U.S. EPA. The results for phosphorus were well over the criteria.

These results were “what we would expect to see,” said O’Donnell. “We would expect to see the highest concentrations there, accumulating as it is going downstream.”

Any type of analysis comparing one year to the next could not yet be done since 2019 was the first year of sampling in Essex, according to O’Donnell. Samples from the 2020 Samplepalooza are now being analyzed at the labs, with the resulting data compiled in the next Samplepalooza report, which will be published by the spring, said O’Donnell.

The CRC uses a quality assurance project plan, or QAPP, to help ensure that the data collected and analyzed meets U.S. EPA requirements for water monitoring projects, according to Fisk.

“It’s important that the data is rigorously overseen and quality assured,” as key decision makers are potentially using it “to make expensive, complicated decisions,” in terms of pollution mitigation and prevention, said Fisk.

The monitoring efforts of the CRC will help contribute to data used by the U.S. EPA and other agencies “to set ecological thresholds, loadings and effluent limits for the Connecticut River watershed,” according to the 2014–2019 Samplepalooza report.

“There wasn’t anyone really doing this nitrogen monitoring on a regular basis, so some of what the EPA was doing was looking to implement new standards and we wanted to make sure they were using data from our river itself, rather than proxy data from other rivers, in a different part of the country,” said O’Donnell.

Plans are underway for a 2021 Samplepalooza and Essex will once again be a testing site, according to O’Donnell.

The 2014–2019 Samplepalooza report is available at www.ctriver.org.