At 35 years old and counting, the Downriver Classic is believed to be the longest running canoe/kayak race in the state. The primary fundraiser for the Qunnipiac River Watershed Association, the race brought several dozen paddlers to the Meriden course, finishing under the Red Bridge.
Read the coverage from the Meriden Record-Journal. Photos below from Ian Christmann.
The 6th Annual Quinnipiac Riverfest brought the crowds down to the historic and scenic Fair Haven waterfront for an afternoon of live music, beer tasting, boat rides, and more.
Held every spring on the Sunday in the first weekend in May, Riverfest is the second part of the Fair Haven Waterfront Weekend, which starts on Saturday with the Fair Haven Family Stroll for Quality Early Childhood Education. The weekend is organized by the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association in collaboration with local businesses and the City of New Haven. Riverfest is hosted by the Quinnipiac River Marina and Boat House Café, a full-service marina and restaurant that has become a favorite local breakfast spot since a recent renovation.
The family-friendly celebration had craft activities for children.
The Quinipiac River Watershed Association brought canoes and led guided rides on the river with the help of volunteers. The association also distributed information about their efforts to protect the river and tips for how everyone can help keep the water clean.
Local musicians, headlined by Goodnight Blue Moon entertained the crowds.
Local breweries poured samples of their latest craft beers
The New Haven Fire Department brought a rescue boat for kids to explore.
Vespoli, the Fair Haven builder of world-class racing shells, was on hand to display the sleek boats used by the some of the best crew teams in the world.
Outdoor training sessions typically begin for the Yale Crew teams in late February or early March, depending on when the ice breaks apart and opens the wide, flat, fresh water of Lake Housatonic in Derby, home to Yale’s Gilder Boathouse. Not this year. An unremitting stretch of freezing temperatures created an unusually thick layer of ice on the Housatonic, forcing coaches to look for alternative practice sites for the start of the season.
“The earliest I’ve ever rowed outside was February 6th and the latest was the first day of March. This year we have blown through that record,” said Andy Card, coach of the lightweights. “This is unpreceded in my 26 years at Yale.”
With the first race just a month away, Card and the other coaches searched for thawed sections of water up and down lower Housatonic. Everything was locked in. They looked on the Saugaguck River in Fairfield County and as far away as New London.
Then, an option close to home presented itself to Card as he was driving on a bridge over the Quinnipiac River.
“That was the body of water that was wide open. It was ridiculously wide open,” Card said.
The coaches worked out a deal with the Quinnipiac River Marina for access to the river for the first three weeks of March.
“It’s been awesome. Seeing them out there has been invigorating,” said Marina owner Lisa Fitch said.
Practicing on the Quinnipiac has returned Yale Crew to its roots. Prior to moving its facilities to Derby a century ago, the team rowed out of boathouses on the Quinnipiac River. Rowing on a tidal body of water with currents has been a learning experience for the teams.
“We’ve had to follow the tides and learn the river, learn the bridges,” said Card. “It’s been a whole new adventure.”
The Quinnipiac River Watershed Based Plan identifies priority issues for the watershed and provides recommendations to address them.
Although advances and upgrades in wastewater treatment have improved water quality over the past several decades, the water quality of much of the Quinnipiac River and its tributaries remains poor as a result of elevated levels of bacteria and impairments to aquatic life.
A Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) (i.e., a “pollution budget”) developed for the Quinnipiac River and its major tributaries by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CTDEEP) in 2008 indicates that bacteria loads must be reduced by over 90% for the impaired segments to meet water quality standards and once again support contact recreation.
The plan recommendations include watershed-wide recommendations that can be implemented throughout the Quinnipiac River watershed, targeted recommendations that are tailored to issues within specific subwatersheds or areas, and site-specific recommendations to address issues at selected sites that were identified during the watershed field inventories. Recommendations are classified according to their timeframe and overall implementation priority.
Funding support for this plan was provided by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection through a U.S. EPA Clean Water Act Section 319 grant and by the Quinnipiac River Fund.
If you have any questions on this process to improve water quality in your watershed, please contact Chris Malik, DEEP at 860-424-3347 or the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association office at 203-237-2237. Your participation in this process in is welcome.
In the 1970s, the Keep America Beautiful advertisements with the “Crying Indian” turned into one of the most iconic anti-pollution images of all time. Four decades later, The Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice (CCEJ) is taking inspiration from this classic campaign to educate the next generation about the importance of caring for the Quinnipiac River.
“We want people to understand that there are a lot of issues that cause pollution that are our responsibility as individuals,” said CCEJ Executive Director Sharon Lewis. “We talk about industry. But we as individuals also have to be accountable.”
Starting with a history of the Quinnipiac River and its original inhabitants, the Quinnipiac tribe, CCEJ’s education program teaches how the river was once a focal point of oyster harvesting and commerce. CCEJ members are bringing the program to schools, senior centers, places of worship, and community centers, located on and around the Quinnipiac River watershed.
Lewis said that in running the program, she was amazed to discover how little people knew about the river and its history.
“A lot of people don’t even have a clue about the tribe or its culture, or anything about the Quinnipiac River. We wanted to bring people all the way back and feel a bond with nature.”
About 1,000 people have attended the education programs so far, and Jones said she hopes that the history of the river will be included in the curriculums of area schools. In addition to the history, the program teaches about the impacts of pollution on the environment and ecosystem.
“We go from the good to the bad, how the Quinnipiac River became one of the most infamous rivers because if its pollution,” Lewis said. “Everybody is complicit. Boaters, people fishing, people on edge of water. It’s all about appreciating water. Clean water saves lives.”
The coalition has also reached out to people they find fishing in areas known to be polluted.
“People were shocked to find out that these waterways are poisonous.”
A vast number of products used and relied on everyday are made possible because of modern chemistry — from television sets and mobile phones, to plastic bottles, detergents, weed killers, hospital equipment, and just about everything in the typical American medicine cabinet. Qualities such as hardness for mobile phone covers and flexibility for intravenous tubes are achieved with materials created out of chemical compounds formed in a laboratory. The use and production of these synthetics has grown exponentially since World War II and brought undeniable benefits. But many of the chemical building blocks used to make these materials are potentially harmful to humans and wildlife in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.
In Greater New Haven, research scientists from area universities are conducting an array of studies to determine the extent of chemical pollutants in the Quinnipiac River watershed. Supported with grants from the Quinnipiac River Fund, some are working to identify point sources, typically the discharges of factories and water treatment facilities. Other teams are trapping specific animal species that live in and around the Quinnipiac River to determine whether the chemicals exist in high enough concentrations to affect biological systems that are shared with humans.
The compounds being studied are known as endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. The more well known of these compounds include dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, the pesticide that was banned for most uses in 1972, and Bisphenol A, or BPA, which has been used in baby bottles and the lining of cans of food.
The chemicals get their name because they can interfere with the normal functioning of the endocrine system. A network of glands and organs throughout the body, the endocrine system is responsible for many aspects of a person’s overall health. It produces the hormones necessary for normal sexual development and fertility, balanced energy levels and metabolism, childhood immunity, bone growth, and other vital functions.
Research sponsored by the National Institute of Health is investigating links between EDCs and illnesses including various cancers, diabetes, low fertility, immune disorders, and neurological defects. The NIH states that endocrine disruptors may pose the greatest risk to the developing organs during prenatal development and infancy.
Along multiple points of the Quinnipiac River, a research team lead by Quinnipiac University Professor of Chemistry Harry Pylypiw has tested the water to identify the point sources several endocrine disruptors known as phthalates. The team paid particular attention to the presence of Diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), a plasticizer manufactured by the Wallingford company Cytec Industries for use in medical devices, syringes, IV bags, glo sticks, hydraulic fluid, and other products.
While the river was found clean at Hall Avenue, above the Walllace Dam, lower down at Toelles Road, near a discharge site for Cytec, testing found DEHP as well as Dibutyl phthalate (DHP), a chemical used in detergents, cosmetics, aerosol fragrances, and toothbrushes. What surprised Pylypiw was his discovery of phthalate compounds further down river, far from any known discharge points.
“What disturbed us was what we found in the tidal marshes,” said Pylypiw. “There is no dumping there, so it has to be migrating.”
Household waste, seepage from underground septic systems, and other non-point sources are equally significant contributors of EDCs in the environment. In freshwater ponds in suburban areas around the Quinnipiac River, Yale research biologists are measuring how the chemicals are affecting local frog populations. Previous studies have found some of the highest EDC concentrations near suburban homes reliant upon septic systems.
“There is a halo of chemicals around everywhere we live,” said David Skelly, Ph.D.Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “Wastewater treatment is not equipped to deal with these 21st-century EDCs.”
Skelly’s team has found evidence of endocrine disruption in local frog populations. One in five frogs sampled by the researchers had eggs in their testes. In an ongoing project, the team is studying mussel populations in Long Island Sound, the first such examination of endocrine disruption in this body of water.
On the Quinnipiac River, John Kelly, a research biologist with the University of New Haven, is leading a study that seeks to determine if endocrine disruption is happening to fish and the patterns for where EDCs are more or less concentrated. For his testing, Kelly’s team is examining the mummichog, a small, silvery fish that lives in brackish water. The presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the fish will turn on cellular machinery to produce certain proteins in the liver that can be measured. By detecting these proteins in the fish livers, Kelly can establish that endocrine disruption is occurring.
Kelly’s study is ongoing and is anticipated to have results in the spring of 2015. 
MERIDEN — Monarch butterflies are hard to find during summer and are becoming more rare at a local butterfly and bee habitat, despite efforts to boost the population.
The Quinnipiac River Watershed Association’s Butterfly and Bee Habitat opened in 2010. During it’s first full summer in 2011, visitors saw a large number of the distinct orange and black-winged butterflies, said Becky Martorelli, who manages the habitat.
“The monarch butterfly population has declined rapidly,” she said. Read more
New Haven Land Trust battles invasives by planting new native trees
photos by Ian Christmann
“You can never declare victory,” said John Cox, a longtime New Haven Land Trust volunteer, speaking about the battle against invasive plant species that have overrun Quinnipiac Meadows and New Haven’s other five preserves. “You constantly have to be diligent in the process of removing invasives and replacing natives.”
On Saturday October 18, a dozen volunteers demonstrated this diligence, joining Cox and New Haven Land Trust staff to plant native trees and shrubs at the Quinnipiac Meadows Preserve. Scheduled on United Way’s Day of Caring, the planting drew regulars like John, fellow preserve committee member Steve Wilcox and his daughter, as well as new faces, many of them from Yale University.
Armed with pickaxes, shovels and mulch, the group sowed 29 plants, including numerous serviceberry bushes and three species of oak trees. The work concluded with the construction of temporary fencing to protect the fledgling plants from deer.
“These workdays not only improve our ecosystem, but bring people together to learn about the preserve and better appreciate our community,” said Justin Elicker, executive director of the Land Trust. “There is no better way to meet someone than planting a tree together.”
Saturday’s planting was part of a much larger process of re-establishing native species in the preserve. In the fall of 2013, volunteers cleared the 1.2-acre area. Due to rapid re-growth of the invasives, the land was re-cleared last Wednesday.
Even after the native plants establish themselves, the battle to keep the invasives at bay will continue. It’s good guys vs. bad guys when it comes to plant species, Cox explained. Invasives are non-native plants that are considered disruptive to the environment and human economy. Some can even be harmful to human health.
As their name indicates, invasives are naturally aggressive. They grow rapidly under a wide variety of conditions and spread easily. Some can sprout from the smallest fragment of a root, making their eradication difficult. Invasives also leaf out and flower early, shading out the native species. A lack of natural controls on growth – such as diseases, insects or wildlife predators – also contributes to their proliferation.
When invasives invade, native plants suffer. According to the National Wildlife Federation, invasive plant species are one of the leading threats to native wildlife, putting approximately 42% of the threatened or endangered species at risk of extinction. Likewise, invasive species can greatly impact human economy as many commercial, agricultural, and recreational activities depend on healthy native ecosystems.
Understanding the serious implications of invasive, the New Haven Land Trust and its volunteers will continue to take ground in Quinnipiac Meadows – protecting the native plants as they get established and expanding their efforts to additional acres.
The invasive removal and tree-planting project was partially funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Quinnipiac River Fund.
Nature and recreation go hand in hand, and when water is involved, the outdoors has an even greater allure. In New Haven County, the Quinnipiac River offers beautiful and convenient opportunities to soak in river scenery while taking a stroll, run, or bike ride.
Although access to much of the Quinnipiac’s 38 miles is difficult due to wetlands, dense woods and private development, more than five miles of pedestrian-friendly paved trails or roads flank the river, and plans have been proposed to create even more. Trail associations in the towns of Meriden, Wallingford and North Haven have a shared vision to develop a linear trail connecting the three towns, providing continuous pedestrian passage along the Quinnipiac for at least 15 miles.
Over the last decade, each town has made strides in making this vision a reality and in the process, created trails that can be enjoyed today.
Trail access:
Lakeside Park: Hall Ave. and River Rd.
Trail map:
http://www.scrcog.org/documents/trails/Trail%20Map-Wallingford_Quinnipia…
Despite its proximity to the Wilbur Cross Parkway, Wallingford’s Quinnipiac Linear Trail offers more than a mile of scenic serenity…and will soon have even more. A fully-funded trail extension, slated to begin by the spring of 2015, will add another 1.25 mile for pedestrian recreation and travel, as well as connect two areas of town separated by the parkway: Downtown Wallingford and Yalesville.
Wallingford’s current trail begins at Community Lake and runs north along the Quinnipiac River. Predominantly paved, the trail passes through cedar junipers and red maples, by one of the state’s largest red oaks, and ends after crossing under the parkway. Visitors can also visit a labyrinth nestled in manicured gardens or explore the unmarked trails of the Emerson Leonard Wildlife Area, which encompasses the land between the linear path and the river.
In September 2014, Wallingford’s trail committee received a $150,000 grant from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection – funding that will cover the final portion of the trail extension: a bridge from Fireworks Island to Wallingford’s Yalesville section. The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven is funding the informational sign for Fireworks Island.
Trail access:
Red Bridge at Lions Club Park: Oregon Road and Route 70
Trail map:
http://www.scrcog.org/documents/trails/TrailMap-Meriden_QuinnipiacGorge.pdf
Since opening in 2007, Meriden’s 1.3-mile Quinnipiac River Gorge Trail has grown in popularity and use. The paved walkway begins at the Red Bridge near Hanover Pond and travels north to the Cheshire/Meriden border, providing nearly uninterrupted river views, access to stocked fishing, letterboxing and informational kiosks that provide histories for the Red Bridge, Oregon Dam, Toboggan Bridge, Boy Scout Island, and the Meriden-Cromwell Connecticut River railroad bed (circa 1890), on which the trail is built.
In 2013, Meriden added another .9 mile to its pedestrian trail system, with the construction of a paved path following Hanover Pond and Sodom Brook, which feeds the pond and river.
Trail access:
Quinnipiac River State Park: Toelles Road (north) Banton Street (south)
Trail map:
http://www.scrcog.org/documents/trails/TrailMap-NorthHaven_ChapmanSinowa…
In North Haven the Quinnipiac River transforms from a brook-like river to a marshland maze, but to enjoy the river by foot, you’ll need hiking boots. Currently trail access is limited to two footpaths. In the north, a four-mile section, formerly part of the Quinnipiac Blue Trail, runs through Quinnipiac State Park on the west side of the river, but being in the floodplain, the path can be difficult to navigate due to mud and rapid growth of weeds and thistles. A new bridge built by the Boy Scouts in 2013 has helped cross Pine Brook, and Wallingford and North Haven trail committees are planning a hike to consider restoring the blue trail.
In the south, a footpath behind Target extends nearly a mile south on the Quinnipiac’s eastern bank, offering panoramic views and bird-watching opportunities, and, if the North Haven Trail Association’s efforts succeed, it will become the first official section of North Haven’s Quinnipiac Linear Trail.
The Trail Association originally planned to start with a deep woods and meadow trail in the northern section of town near Valley Service Rd, but when setbacks delayed progress, they shifted focus to the south where they are currently seeking agreements to connect separated segments.
In New Haven, the most popular pedestrian route along the river has a different form altogether. A 1.5 mile loop, traversed on sidewalks and park paths, circles the nationally and locally recognized Quinnipiac River historic district, providing panoramic views of the river and its historic assets. Without requiring any street crossings, the route passes over two historic bridges, through the Quinnipiac River Park and besides rows of brightly colored historically-preserved homes.
Three rivers run through it.
New Haven might not be known as a river city, but in fact it boasts three – the West River, Mill River and Quinnipiac River. A natural buffer for urban dwellers, they offer scenic beauty and access to nature walks and boating. They provide critical habitats for birds, fish and other wildlife. Yet despite their importance and allure, these rivers have suffered substantially from industrialization and urban development – impacts not caused by New Haven alone. The rivers flow through a dozen other towns and municipalities before entering New Haven, including Bethany and Woodbridge to the west and Meriden and Wallingford to the northeast.
In recent decades, strides have been made to stem the tide of pollution. Stricter regulations and mandatory permitting has helped to protect rivers to some degree. But are permits really doing enough?
Taking this question to heart, the Mill River Watershed Association is creating an important new tool to help people understand and use the permit process to protect New Haven’s rivers. Empowered by a $20,000 grant from the Quinnipiac River Fund, the Urban Rivers Permit Project will provide a comprehensive catalog of permits and permit-related regulations for the entire length of each river that flows through New Haven. A single source of permit information will empower river advocates to identify areas of concern and speak out for stronger regulation. The catalogue will include specific discharge and diversion permits, the dates when these permits come up for renewal, and contact information for the associated regulatory agencies. The report will also include summaries of each municipality’s current land use regulations related to waterfront development.
“I don’t think anybody has ever pulled it all together before,” said Mary Mushinsky who is leading the research. “And now I know why.” The report quickly grew to more than 40 pages and includes listings for at least 6 industrial discharges, 6 public sewage treatment plants, 477 stormwater permits, 11 diversion permits, as well as pre-existing diversions in 10 different streams flowing to these rivers.
Industries that discharge or divert water are the most obvious potential sources of pollution. Harder to pinpoint and monitor are the more widespread and debilitating affects of land use development. Polluted runoff from parking lots, roads and other impervious surfaces ultimately flows into the rivers, raising bacteria counts and causing violations of various other water quality standards. The Urban Rivers Permit Project hopes to encourage towns with fewer regulations to adopt best practices that can protect and improve rivers. Even a small regulatory change, such as a requirement that subdivisions leave vegetated buffers near waterways, can make a big difference.
The volunteer-led Mill River Watershed Association was formed in 1999 when the Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant was first proposed. While they still champion the Mill River, their focus has broadened to include empowering effective advocacy for all of New Haven’s rivers – a fitting aim for the Association’s proposed new name: River Advocates of Greater New Haven.
Mill River Watershed Association’s president Cordalie Benoit