City meets the sea at Baker Cove in Groton, and the result is a maze of urban runoff

Groton - With lobster docks, picturesque homes and marinas along its shores, Baker Cove looks like the kind of waterway any community would be pleased to have within its borders.

But the sparkling open waters and coastal ambiance of the cove belie an often invisible problem. The cove, a tongue of brackish water between the east side of Jupiter Point and the mouth of the Poquonnock River, is polluted.

For all 20 of the years Ed Martin has served on Groton's shellfish commission, the cove has been closed to commercial and recreational shellfishing because levels of indicator bacteria exceed state standards. The state lists Baker Cove among the state's "impaired" waterways, meaning it is failing to fulfill its potential best use - in this case supporting harvestable shellfish - because of poor water quality. The tidal inflows from Long Island Sound into the cove aren't to blame, but, tests show, the fresh water coming from the north is.

"Most of the pollution is coming from upstream," said Martin, who is chairman of the commission. "But there's no reason Baker Cove cannot be open, if we solve the problems."

An open Baker Cove would be a productive area for hardshell clams and oysters, Martin said.

The beginnings of a possible solution are in the works. Over the past year, Judy Rondeau, natural resource specialist with the Eastern Connecticut Conservation District, has been leading a study of the cove and the watershed of Birch Plain Creek, which forms the boundary between Groton City and Groton Town, and two other watersheds that feed it. Her purpose is to identify the pollution sources and write a remedy plan.

The study was funded by an $18,000 grant administered by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection as part of its ongoing responsibility to carry out the mandates of the federal Clean Water Act that pertain to impaired water bodies, said Eric Thomas, DEEP environmental analyst.

"It's not a single pipe (polluting the watershed), it's a whole suite of issues," Thomas said. "It's not atypical of watersheds in urban areas."

Baker Cove's problems are an example of what environmental experts call "nonpoint source pollution" - the cumulative effects of many relatively small pollution sources throughout a watershed adding up to one large problem in the receiving waterway.

A few of the problems in Baker Cove and waterways like it range from accumulated pet waste washing into streams to storm drains discharging untreated runoff to degraded natural plant buffers on lawns and golf courses along the streambanks that, if left intact, would filter out pollutants.

In recent years, tackling nonpoint source pollution has become a focus for many watershed groups and environmental officials, after more obvious, single-source pollution problems from factories, fuel tanks and other elements of industry have largely been addressed.

By paddle or by foot

To identify the pollution sources, Rondeau and a team of volunteers has painstakingly traversed the 4.19 square miles of the three watersheds first by kayak, and, when creeks, tributaries and feeder streams became impassable by paddle, on foot.

The search took them to the underbelly of modern civilization - through narrow railroad tunnels and under bridges, behind shopping plazas, amid the Dumpster lots of condominium complexes and into grocery store parking lots, searching for hidden culverts and ditches that channel waters away from commercial areas.

They found storm drains and outfall pipes discharging untreated runoff full of sediments, trash and vehicle residues from roadways and parking lots, and sewer manholes in wetlands.

Tests of water samples collected behind the Big Y and along Leonard Drive found some "extremely high" levels of e-coli bacteria, Rondeau noted, of about 10 times the state's clean water standard. E coli is used as an indicator of water quality. Levels of fecal coliform, another indicator bacteria, were especially high at discharge pipes near Groton-New London airport and a bus lot off Tower Avenue.

As they followed the waterways north, their work took on more of the flavor of a kind of forensic ecology, as the streams became lost entirely in sections only to emerge at another point, and they were left to piece together what once lay in between.

"Birch Plain Creek is an extremely fragmented urban stream," Rondeau wrote in her report, now in draft form and scheduled to be finished next month and turned over to DEEP and town and city officials.

"Its headwaters appear to originate north of Interstate Route 95, however construction of the highway has largely disconnected the stream from the area," the report continued. "The stream is culverted under buildings, parking lots and roads in multiple areas as Groton has developed."

Typical of many urban watersheds, the three that feed Baker Cove are about half covered over in "impervious surfaces"- roads, sidewalks, driveways, parking lots and buildings - instead of forests and grassy areas that would absorb and filter runoff and pollutants. There are five times more than the maximum buildings and pavement recommended to maintain clean water standards in a waterway.

A case study

Syma Ebbin, research coordinator at Connecticut Sea Grant and assistant professor at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus, lives on Jupiter Point and worked with Rondeau on the Baker Cove project. She served as the project's local guide, drawing on her knowledge of the area from spending her summers there since childhood and from serving on local land-use panels.

For Ebbin, the project took on both personal meaning, because of her deep family connections to the area, and a broader one. The story of Baker Cove and the watersheds that feed it serves as the kind of case study she and others who teach college environmental studies classes can use to show what's happened to many urban watersheds.

"No one's been saying, 'Let's degrade Birch Plain Creek,'" Ebbin said. "It's all been incremental."

As Groton developed, municipal land-use agencies would consider projects site plan by site plan, letting sections of the creek get buried or filled along the way. Ebbin tried to piece together what happened over the years, where old factories were located that might have discharged pollutants, or where missing portions of the creek lay hidden. When current research documents failed, she searched on foot, and turned to her relatives and old maps. Still, she ended up with gaps in the story.

"It's been marginalized, because no one's been looking at the big picture," she said. "It's like the death by 1,000 cuts."

What's been lost, she said, is both the original integrity of the creek and the other two watersheds, and the "free environmental services" that intact watersheds perform in keeping receiving waterways clean and buffering homes and businesses from flooding.

"Not only is the creek fragmented, but our history is fragmented, because we don't even know what we've done," Ebbin said.

In Rondeau's report, she lists dozens of actions that should be taken over the next five years to begin the process of cleaning up the watersheds that feed Baker Cove. Included are estimated project costs, ranging from $200 to $200,000, and grants and other possible funding sources to pay for the work. Submission of Rondeau's study will, in fact, be necessary to obtain several of the grants. The city and town would be the main parties responsible for undertaking the various actions. In some cases, she said, the municipalities are working on some of the steps recommended, such as upgrades to storm drains.

If successfully implemented, the result would be that Baker Cove comes off the state's "impaired" list and opens to shellfishing.

"It's not going to get any better until somebody does something," said Martin, the shellfish commission chairman.

j.benson@theday.com