Whether you know it as the Tanyard Reservoir or the State Street Reservoir, chances are the body of water located at the bend on State Street between Wood Street and Metacom Avenue has been an overgrown, unsightly mess for as long as you recall.

The 1.5 acre, litter-choked plot of wetland, its murky waters barely visible from the sidewalk, is surrounded by a tall, chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Given that there’s no reason why a person would want to go in there, the intimidating security leaves passers-by wondering if the fence is actually designed to keep something in.

All that is changing this year. The area has already been dramatically cleaned up and cut back, and until work was stopped during the coldest months of the winter, a construction crew did a great deal of work — low-visibility but tremendously important — that will allow this area to do the job that it’s intended to do, as a stormwater reservoir and the headwaters of Tanyard Brook.

The improvements were outlined in a recent tour of the site with Ed Tanner, Bristol’s Principal Planner and Zoning Officer.

“The reservoir was originally part of the U.S. Rubber mill, intake water that they used either for fire suppression or manufacturing,” he said. The fence was a later addition, quite likely a reaction to a drowning accident many years ago. A quick search of the archives of the Bristol Phoenix found a story in the January 2, 1931 issue of two young brothers, August (11) and Manuel (14) Cabral, who drowned after falling through thin ice over about 12 feet of water, which may well have been the tragedy that inspired the original erection of the fence.

“There's a lot going on here,” said Tanner. “This reservoir is the headwaters of the Tanyard Brook, and we’ve been working on that project for a decade now — it's in its third and hopefully final phase.”

All the stormwater from the top of Bayview Avenue, Metacom Avenue past Franklin Street, and all the side streets from all the properties in that area drains into the reservoir via large discharge pipes that are under the sidewalk but not visible from the street. It’s a large area and a lot of water, but even more so due to the fact that heavy development and impermeable surfaces prevent much of that from percolating into the ground.

“There's not enough ground to absorb all that water,” said Tanner. “So it comes here, and it carries with it everything that's on the street — all the salt and sand and cigarette butts and and oil and antifreeze and grease and rubber from your tires. Everything comes into here.”

At the point where the water in the reservoir continues on its journey to the harbor, there is a small dam with a gate that can be opened and closed to let water out of the reservoir. “In theory, you should be able to lower the water before a big storm and then have some flood storage capacity, but there's not a lot of storage capacity here,” said Tanner. “So what we're trying to do is improve the flood storage capacity so that when we get these heavy rains and snow melts, and the water has somewhere to settle out, it will be cleaner.”

A century of runoff has choked the reservoir with accumulated sediment, road sand, silt and mud.

“When you dig in here, you find a lot of evidence of trash,” Tanner said. “So it didn't really have a chance to settle down and let all the pollutants settle out. We’re trying to let nature filter this water a little bit and get some of the water to soak into the ground, not rush down into the neighborhoods and flood them.”

The bottom line is less water will surge uncontrolled through Tanyard Brook, and the water that does pass along that route before entering Bristol Harbor just south of The Lobster Pot, will be a lot cleaner.

Wildlife habitat to be improved as well
The roughly $400,000 project was partly funded by a $199,000 federal grant that passed through the Rhode Island DEM. It required permits from both the Army Corps of Engineers and the DEM wetlands division, so there are some restrictions on both the when and where work can be performed on the site. That is why you will continue to see some overgrowth between the two retaining pools.

“There’s wildlife nesting in the water, it’s a rookery for black-crowned night herons and there are times where I've been here and I've counted nine or 10 of them,” said Tanner. “They're big, like a great blue heron, but they're a little lower and they have a different kind of head. And there are also a lot of frogs…So we're going to be improving the habitat, planting trees and native shrubs that will act as a water filter.”

“Most of the structure of this project, you won’t really see,” said Town Administrator Steven Contente. “But we are going to set up an educational area showing the native plans that we’ll be using, in the area adjacent to the DPW.” That’s the open field just west of the DPW headquarters on Mt. Hope Avenue. “I’m really looking forward to it, and further downstream, the work we’ve done on Tanyard Brook is working well.”

Construction crews will return in Mid-March, and Tanner estimates they have about five or six weeks of work remaining, mostly fine grading and planting. The barbed wire is coming down, but the fence will stay.

“We don’t want anyone going ice skating in there,” said Contente, zeroing in on the reason why the fence was likely erected in the first place, whether he realized it or not.

“It’s a nice little spot,” said Tanner. “If you come back here in the spring when when all the planting is done, and the grass starts to grow, it will be quite an improvement.”