To the editor:

Open letter to the Little Compton Town Council concerning water quality in Sakonnet Harbor …

My husband and I are retired from DEM Marine Fisheries and US EPA Atlantic Ecology Division.  Our oaths to protect the environment and human health do not stop with our retirements.

Several years ago, a DEM colleague related a story of Little Compton shellfishing to us. Apparently a visitor to one of our coastal ponds discovered a large oyster population there and decided to make some money harvesting and selling them. This pond has been closed to shellfishing for decades due to the human and bird contamination there. Significant bags of oysters were harvested and sold to a dealer nearby.  The diggers misrepresented the harvesting location on the bag tags, which were subsequently shipped to the New York market. The US Food and Drug Administration does routine testing on shellfish at the NY market, and tests on these RI oysters came back contaminated with Norovirus. That began a rigorous investigation to locate the diggers and the actual location — which ended at the illegal harvest in the closed coastal pond.

I am told Sakonnet Harbor area was jammed with Canada geese last winter, and that there were many dead birds. Filter feeding clams and oysters close up in extreme temperatures and can harbor viruses and bacteria for months. Migratory shore birds are the reservoirs and vectors of many human viral and bacterial pathogens. The DEM has found fecal coliform bacteria in Sakonnet Harbor waters year around, with higher numbers in the winter, which could be from the geese. DEM has therefore closed Sakonnet Harbor to shellfishing year 'round for several years. With orders of magnitude less birds in the harbor area in the summer, it is hard not to suspect some human contamination, but without a DNA test on the bacteria, it is impossible to tell animal/bird fecal coliforms from human waste bacteria. Fecal coliform bacteria are an indicator for many disease pathogens like Norovirus as well as Vibrio enteritis, hepatitis A, and paralytic shellfish poison.

This is why we are so upset with a certain councilor's behavior in bragging to us about not stopping a clam digger in the harbor on Saturday (8/29/15), while he was swimming there, and why we are upset with the pervasive negative attitude in Little Compton toward regulatory agencies that could help to mitigate or solve these problems if asked. Signs prohibiting shellfishing disappear shortly after being posted.  This is the first year in the 57 I've summered in Little Compton that I haven't been able to see the harbor bottom from a dock or our mooring through the disturbingly algae filled water. In my opinion, Sakonnet Harbor is in desperate need of some biological stewards.

If, in fact, the town wants to recover the full use SA rating in the harbor, as it states in the revised HMP, it should be willing to invite help from these regulators before the town is subjected to enforcement actions or lawsuits as a result of human illness from harbor shellfish or waters. Past Little Compton HMPs prohibited swimming in the harbor. The new wording opening the harbor and barrier beach to public swimming in the 2011 HMP revision, which is still before the CRMC for approval, seems to trigger the necessity to routinely monitor the harbor water quality throughout the recreational season. This could be done by the Little Compton Beach Commission. Perhaps if this is done and the data shared, the authorities will be able to locate and correct the sources of  the summer bacterial contamination and algal blooms and return the harbor water quality to its historic rating.

Mimi Karlsson

Little Compton