Bruce Park & Greenwich Point Park 7/10/05

Greewich Time, Greenwich, CT. Pond cleanup on commission's agenda. The Conservation Commission is investigating what it can do to clean out two dirty and foul-smelling ponds in Bruce Park and Greenwich Point Park, officials said. The goal will be to improve water quality at those water bodies, but the benefits will include a cleaner-looking and more neutral-smelling environment, officials said. "I'm just concerned about the quality of the water in the parks," said Bruce Spaman, superintendent of parks and trees. "It's looking kind of messy."

One particularly bad smelling pond is at Greenwich Point near the Chimes Building. "When you walk there, you can smell it," said Conservation Director Denise Savageau, who led the commission on a site visit of two ponds this week. "You can really smell those anaerobic conditions." The short-term fix will be to clear out a blocked pipe that connects the pond to Long Island Sound. The blockage has caused the water in that pond to become stagnant.

But officials also are considering long-term solutions, such as a way to reintroduce tidal waters to the pond so that the water is periodically flushed out into Long Island Sound. At some point, the pond may have been exposed to tidal waters but that connection was probably replaced by a pipe when a nearby road was constructed, officials said. A longer term solution may be to replace the pipe with a larger one, Savageau said.

In Bruce Park, although recent rainfall has helped disguise the problem, one pond has problems with algae growth, officials said. "Even the boys with the kayaks were having problems navigating the pond with algae," Savageau said, referring to summer employees who are using border collies aboard kayaks to help chase out the geese from the park and its ponds. That particular water body in Bruce Park is the last in a series of ponds that drains to Long Island Sound. Typically tidal water from the sound gets circulated through all the ponds but somehow it isn't making it to the last pond, officials said. "The next step is to dig out the old engineering plans and see what the potential problem is," Savageau said.