Many of us have an ocean, river or lake that holds a special place in our recollections of summers past. However, too often when we revisit these waters, they’re marred by pollution. This widespread problem should send a clarion call to decision-makers that it’s time to invest in clean water infrastructure.

For me, memories of spending time around water aligns with some of my favorite moments with loved ones. Whether it’s building with mud on the banks of the Fort River behind my house in Amherst, watching my youngest son sail through the air on a rope swing and drop into the waters of Tully Lake in Royalston, or exploring the nooks and crannies of Angel Falls in Ashfield with my nieces, access to clean water is a big part of what makes summer in New England great.

It’s not just in New England. Throughout the United States, millions of Americans flock to rivers, lakes and beaches to swim, surf, tube, paddleboard, kayak or fish. Water activities are a primary way we interact with nature. No wonder our country codified that all our waterways should be safe for swimming by passing the Clean Water Act more than 50 years ago.

Yet all too often, pollution plagues our waterways.

Locally, Jump Bridge, the popular swimming hole on the Fort River, has been marked with “no swimming” signs for the past two years because of persistently high levels of E. coli, a fecal indicator bacteria. Indicator bacteria are surrogates used to measure the potential presence of fecal material (yes, poop) and fecal pathogens in water. Yuck.

Beaches are vulnerable to contamination, too. Recently, Environment America Research & Policy Center released the 2023 Safe for Swimming? report, which examined beach testing data to see how often fecal indicator bacteria levels along the Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific and Great Lakes’ shores exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most protective “Beach Action Value.” (That threshold is associated with an estimated illness rate of 32 out of every 1,000 swimmers.) Half of the coastal and Great Lakes’ beaches reviewed in the report exceeded the Beach Action Value on at least one day last year. A map of Massachusetts beach results can be found with the report.

Sometimes high bacteria counts cause authorities to close beaches or to post advisories, such as the one at Jump Bridge. Other times, people just get sick. Scientists estimate that swimming in polluted U.S. waters causes 57 million cases of illness each year, with symptoms ranging from nausea and diarrhea to ear infections and rashes.

What’s putting clean water at risk?

We don’t yet definitively know the source of pollution in the Fort River. Volunteers with our local river advocate, the Fort River Watershed Association, plan to conduct strategic water testing next month to get to the bottom of it. You can support the Fort River Watershed Association’s efforts at https://fortriver.org/.

While the cause of the Fort River’s pollution is murky, it’s clear that a lot of water contamination comes from stormwater runoff and sewage overflows. For example, more than 6 millions of gallons of untreated or partially treated sewage flowed into local waterways when three towns’ sewer systems overflowed from the recent heavy rain.

Water has to go somewhere. When developers replace nature with impervious surfaces — such as parking lots, roads and larger homes — it increases the flow of polluted runoff into our waters. Massive influxes of stormwater can cause combined sewage systems to overflow. Even separated sewers leak or spill tens of thousands of times each year in the U.S.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Incorporating green infrastructure — such as rain gardens, trees and permeable pavement — can restore some of nature’s lost capacity to absorb stormwater. And we can fix our aging conventional sewage infrastructure to reduce leaks and overflows.

Preventing water pollution will cost money. The EPA puts the cost of needed wastewater system upgrades at $271 billion. In last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, Congress authorized a down payment of nearly $12 billion — a nice sum, but not nearly enough — to improve wastewater and stormwater management. Authorizing spending on clean water infrastructure was a critical first step, but now Congress needs to follow through and commit the full amount of funding to get the process of cleaning up our waterways funded.

You can email your members of Congress, asking them to to take action to fix outdated sewage systems and to prevent water pollution by investing in natural, green water infrastructure at this link: https://tinyurl.com/yc45ykbk.

Protecting the special waterways where some of our best memories are made is an investment worth making.

Johanna Neumann of Amherst has spent the past two decades working to protect our air, water and open spaces, defend consumers in the marketplace and advance a more sustainable economy and democratic society. She can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.

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