The Harvard town beach of summer swim lessons and weekend boat launches was a landscape transformed this week. A four-foot-high pile of dark sediment filled the parking lot. A bright yellow front loader scraped the road leading to the beach. Blue pipes rested near the racks that held canoes only three months ago. And across from the boat ramp lay a newly excavated depression, the latest man-made alteration to the pond in the town’s ambitious multi-year plan to stave off the weeds that entangle swimmers’ feet and —if left uncontrolled—would steadily turn it to wetland.
Rich Nota, director of Harvard’s Department of Public Works, says the sediment will be given a chance to dry in the parking lot until early spring, after which it will be hauled to the town gravel pit. Bruce Leicher, chairman of the Bare Hill Pond Watershed Management Committee, says he and his team hope to mix the nutrient-rich sediment with dirt and sand from other town projects and possibly bag it for resale. At a Nov. 17 Board of Selectmen meeting, Leicher and fellow pond committee member Bill Johnson said they thought that money from the dirt—good for gardening and lawns—could potentially make future dredging projects self-sustaining.
An excavator scoops sediment into a waiting dump truck as a portion of Bare Hill Pond is dredged. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Bare Hill Pond has been on the state’s list of endangered ponds since 1999, due to the ongoing invasion of milfoil, fanwort, and water chestnuts, as well as high concentrations of phosphorous and other nutrients. Through a combination of weed pulls by flotillas of volunteers and drawdowns of the pond each fall, the committee has dramatically reduced the presence of water chestnut plants near the town beach and nearly eliminated invasive weeds between the northern islands and Harvard shoreline that made paddling there almost impossible 10 years ago. Leicher says native species are returning to both areas, and that the life of the pond has likely been extended to 1,000 years, compared to the 100 years lake specialists originally thought might remain before it morphed completely to weed-filled wetland.
The drawdowns—ever deeper each year, thanks to a pumping station installed in 2006 at the dam that controls the pond’s height—as well as the weed pulls will both continue, but now the committee wants to attack high phosphorous concentrations with a combination of new watershed catch basins and by dredging from the pond bottom the phosphorus-rich peat formed by the accumulation of dead weeds. Financing is being provided through a creative combination of federal, state, and town funds, including a four-year $584,950 grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency that so far has not required any increase in the annual budget of the town’s Conservation Commission, which oversees the work.
While the Pond Committee wants to dredge the area directly in front of the town beach to eliminate weeds there—the greatest source of complaints from town residents—DPW workers found that because of a depression there, left from an earlier excavation, they were unable to expose the bottom during this year’s six-foot drawdown. However, the drawdown did expose an area opposite the pond boat ramp, so the DPW and committee decided to use the $40,000 allotted for dredging this year to remove as much peat there as could be done with the available funds. The money funded seven days of work, as it turned out, resulting in a roughly half-acre depression and a pile of peat.
Nota says the DPW and Pond Committee are already making plans for how they will dredge the beach swimming area next year. “In the meantime,” he says, “I hope the town will be patient with us. We’ll have the beach cleaned up in time for the new season. But we have our work cut out for us.”
