This Protest Floats

Because The Army Corps of Engineers has still not abandoned a plan to dump a quarter million cubic yards of toxic sludge off the Pardee Sea Wall, Morris Covers came out in force on Sunday to keep up the pressure, both by land and by sea.

More than 100 landlubbers, including the three-crab strong Rivetta family (in photo, left to right: David, Audrey, and Nicolas) gathered at Sea Wall Park to protest the plan. They were joined by a flotilla of 43 kayaks and power boats including The Cautious Sedation, which processed around the proposed ​“borrow pit” dumping site in the Cove with a single-minded message delivered to the Corps with honking horns and fluttering pennants: Find a Plan B.

The Corps’s Plan A calls for 250,000 cubic yards of dredged waste from of Bridgeport Harbor, much of it carcinogenic, to be dropped into a 30-foot hole that already exists less than 700 yards off the sea wall.

Click here for the Corps’s description of the plan. Click here and here for previous protest stories.

Despite extensive public hearings with the Corps, neighbors do not believe that the CAD — the confined aquatic disposal unit that is supposed to contain and cap the sludge in the harbor — will do the trick. They fear the toxic junk containing chromium, zinc, and, worst of all, PCBs, will escape and come in with the tides and currents, poisoning the beaches and the fish, perhaps even appearing in low-lying basements along Concord and other nearby streets.

According to Ben Northrup, one of the leaders of the protest, the Corps program staff was to have submitted its plan in the winter. When it did not, neighbors decided to keep up the pressure. Hence the flotilla, with power boats organized by Larry Smith of the New Haven Yacht Club and the kayak contingent by Brian Virtue. Click here for the group’s website.

Virtue was flying a skull a bones on black background on the stern of his sleek yellow boat. It’s meaning? ​“No poison in the Cove,” he said.

At 2:30 Northrup blew a nautical horn, the signal for boats to begin to process around the borrow pit. The boat horns were joined by klaxons of support from cars passing by on Townsend Avenue as they slowed at the stop sign at Parker Street.

As they did, Northrup said that the Corps has not responded yet to key issues such as the true toxicity of the PCBs hailing from Bridgeport or the potential infiltration from the CAD to area beaches and even houses, should it breach.

Giuseppe Volpato, Lisa Bassani and their 18-month-old daughter Sofia live on Nelson Street, where their basement regularly floods after a big storm. ​“We don’t know if it’s seawater or ground water coming up from underneath,” he said.

He said if the water in the harbor spoils, ​“it can’t help soak into our basements.” Volpato said that after a storm half the houses on nearby Concord Street are bailing water.

Area politicians such as state Sen. Martin Looney, a Cover himself, had in the fall pronounced Plan A ​“virtually dead.” They were out again Sunday to publicly pledge that the dead, which are not yet dead, will nevertheless stay dead.

“There has not been any change from the point of view of the State of Connecticut. [Gov.] Malloy [as a candidate] was here in October and committed no state permits would be granted [for Plan A],” Looney said.

Even if the Corps goes against vast local oppositional sentiment and recommends Plan A, it still must receive a state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and permit and coastal site plan review.

“The Army Corps has an opportunity. It has not abandoned its plan. So we want to re-affirm our opposition to it,” Looney said..

Reached by telephone the prior week, Army Corps staffer Michael Keegan, who is in charge of the project, said he and his colleagues are still revising the ​“dredge material management and environmental plan” and gathering more data in the harbor.

What kind of data gathering? ​“Measuring velocities of the currents,” he said, in response to concerns expressed by residents that the cap would give way or be disturbed by storm currents.

“From engineering we know this is not an issue, but we want to satisfy people. When people think about storms, they see waves, erosion, and they relate that to the same energy at bottom of the harbor. And that’s not the same. It’s a whole different dynamic. So we’re doing some measurements so we can have some real-world measurements to convey to people,” he said.

Keegan said he expects that a plan will be finalized and sent to the New York office in the fall.

Keegan was asked if protests like Sunday’s flotilla will affect the final decision. ​“I don’t think it would,” he said.

Northrup, when told Keegan’s remarks, said that only confirmed the necessity to keep up the pressure.

Among the area politicians who reaffirmed their opposition Sunday were Annex and East Shore Aldermen Al Paolillo and Arlene DePino; U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, and Mayor John DeStefano. Mayoral candidates Clifton Graves and Jeffrey Kerekes showed up, too. Looney reiterated that the Army Corps should know ​“the community opposition is no less vigilant now than in the fall.”

Looney said Plan A should be dropped and a Plan B, with a Bridgeport-related solution, should be found. A stay-in-Bridgeport solution will cost $52 million, because a hole would have to be dug there; the much reviled Morris Cove plan would cost $5 million less because we already have a pit.

Northrup and his colleagues are not resting on their successful protests. They have begun to make preparations on legal and legislative fronts.

While applying the public pressure to torpedo Plan A, he said, they’ve already lined up signatures requesting a full hearing before the federal Environmental Protection Agency should the Corps submit Plan A.

The project requires a state financial match, usually 25 percent of the cost of a CAD. ​“What we’d love to see is language inserted in a state bill that prohibits any state funding for a plan in New Haven Harbor,” Northrup said.

They’ve already begun to work on this. Stay tuned.