MUDDY RIVER
An ongoing restoration project.
An urbanized sub-watershed.
Flowing through Olmsted’s iconic Emerald Necklace, the 3.5-mile-long Muddy River is one of the most celebrated urban tributaries of the Charles River. However, centuries of development and urbanization along its banks in Boston and Brookline have severely degraded its water quality and habitat space. Though a major Army Corps project alleviated the Muddy River’s problems with flooding, water quality is still extremely poor. CRWA is now leading a community-driven visioning process to identify nature-based solutions to improve water quality and climate resilience in the Muddy River sub-watershed.
Give this podcast a listen! Created in collaboration with the Consensus Building Institute, it brings together people with diverse connections to the Muddy River to discuss its current state and explore what the river means to the surrounding world.
Muddy River grades have fluctuated from F to B+ with no improving trends from 2002-2023.
MUDDY RIVER RESTORATION PROJECT
Since 2014, the U.S. Army Corps Muddy River Restoration Project has transformed the river corridor through extensive riverbank restoration, landscaping, and dredging to address long-standing concerns about flooding, ecosystem degradation, and historic preservation.
CRWA has played a leading role in the Maintenance & Management Oversight Committee (MMOC) throughout the project’s duration, providing a critical voice for the water quality and greater efforts to fully restore the Muddy. The MMOC is a permanent, government-funded citizen-led independent oversight committee established by the Commonwealth that oversees ongoing construction activities, landscape maintenance work, water quality improvement efforts, best management practices implementation, and historic resource preservation. The committee works in partnership with public agencies to ensure compliance with environmental permits and progress toward project goals.
WATER QUALITY
The Muddy River has severely degraded water quality and fails to meet State Water Quality Standards for both habitat and recreational uses. The Muddy River receives an annual grade based on bacteria levels, cyanobacteria bloom presence, and Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) discharges. Since 2002, grades have fluctuated between B and F, with no improving trend. The Muddy remains the most polluted above-ground tributary in the Charles River watershed.
CONTAMINATION SOURCES
In urban rivers, water quality often degrades after rainstorms because rain running along impervious surfaces (like roads & roofs) brings debris, sewage, and chemicals into the river—called stormwater runoff. Data shows that bacteria levels in the Muddy spike during wet weather events, indicating stormwater pollution is a major source of contamination.
However, bacteria levels are also higher than State Water Quality Standards during dry weather, indicating another source of pollution, called illicit discharge, is present. This may be from old leaky sewer pipes underground and/or illegal connections of a building’s sewer pipes to the stormwater pipe system. In an effort to improve the Muddy’s water quality, steps must be taken to eliminate illicit discharges.
A vision for the future.
In the fall of 2023 and the spring of 2024, we hosted visioning meetings for stakeholders to kick off the community-led visioning process for a cleaner, more resilient Muddy River. Through this process, we aim to identify actions that the community can take to restore the water quality of the Muddy River by looking at its full watershed.
This fall, in collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy (ENC) and the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), we hosted two public webinars, “Muddy River: The Heart of Fenway,” on the history of the Muddy River, current and future restoration projects, and how the river is expected to be affected by climate change.
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