STUCK WITH SHARPS
Merrimack neighbors need help
Fifteen cities and towns along the Merrimack River are calling in professionals to help clean up a plague of hypodermic needles washing up on the waterway’s banks, beaches and boat ramps.
“We have a major epidemic going on with this crisis,” said Newburyport Mayor Donna Holaday. “If people are throwing needles into the river, we need to find a way to stop them from washing up on our beaches. We need to do anything we can to protect our children, families and animals on our beaches.”
Last summer, Newburyport was put on high alert after a lifeguard stepped on a discarded sharp at a local beach.
Representatives from nearly every Massachusetts community along the river have invited bidders to apply for the task of collecting needles. The winner of the contract is expected to be announced next month.
Municipal leaders are expected to meet tomorrow to discuss the two bids for the three-year contract, which will have an annual price tag between $300,000 and $400,000.
Beverly Woods, executive director of the Northern Middlesex Council of Governments, said the communities are working out different ways to share the cost.
“It’s important to have people who are trained professionals to ensure this paraphernalia is disposed of effectively,” Woods said.
Needles have become a rampant problem around the region. In Boston, the Mobile Sharps Collection Team scours parks, streets and alleys for discarded needles seven days a week.
Rocky Morrison, who heads up the Clean River Project, a Methuenbased nonprofit that is one of two bidders for the Merrimack job, said the hazardous trash is “flowing out of the river ... (and) ends up in the ocean. They’re all over our beaches — where our kids are playing.”
Volunteers from the Clean River Project collected about 1,700 sharps in 2017.
Holaday said the discarded needles are a “grave concern” to public safety and just one of the pollution issues haunting the 117-mile river.
“It’s not just needles and cars and tires, it’s also the fact that upstream we have the combined sewer overflows. Last week our bacterial levels were through the roof,” she said.
As previously reported in a Herald special report, state records show that combined sewer overflows pour about 2.8 billion gallons of untreated wastewater and raw sewage into state rivers — especially the Merrimack — every year.
The river was once named one of the filthiest in the country. In October, a wastewater plant in Lowell discharged 32 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the river during a storm.
Holaday said she was forced to close all Newburyport beaches over the Labor Day holiday weekend in 2015 because bacteria levels from the overflows were so high.
She said it’s critical for towns along the river to come together to find solutions for its rampant pollution.
“I’m optimistic that we will get there, and I feel strongly that this needs to occur,” she said. “You have a much stronger voice when you come together with other communities in terms of making a difference.”