STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT DE SANTO, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY AT CONNECTICUT COLLEGE

Dr. DE SANTO. First of all, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for this opportunity to testify before your committee.

My name is Robert S. De Santo. I live in East Lyme, Conn. I am an assistant professor of zoology at Connecticut College in New London and I am also director of the college's summer marine sciences program.

I received a bachelor of sciences degree from Tufts University and a Ph. D. degree in marine biology from Columbia University.

As a marine ecologist and a teacher, I am particularly interested in demonstrating, to my students as well as to the public, the importance of preserving and protecting our natural environment. And Long Island Sound, since I work and live beside it and since it so dominates this area, commands much of my personal and professional attention. The sound is seriously threatened by pollution and carelessness.

AN UNPLEASANT POSSIBILITY

It is entirely possible that we will bequeath to future generations a Long Island Sound that is without the balance of life as we know ita Long Island Sound famous not for its beauty but for its stench and fouled waters.

However, I share your belief, Mr. Chairman, that no one person, region, industry, or institution is to blame for this threat. Rather, we are all to blame. All of us who use the sound must share the responsibility.

Long Island Sound is many things to many living things.

It is home for millions of fish and plant life.

It is a source of recreation and relaxation for millions of people. The sound is an important and vital avenue for shipping, trade, commerce and industrial production.

REALITIES WE MUST ACCEPT

In turn, the sound has become a convenient and practical dumping site for city sewage and drainage systems and industrial refuse of all kinds.

It is naive and unrealistic to set as our goal a Long Island Sound isolated from the world of commerce and industry and urban needs. The economic growth-indeed, the simple economic_survival-of this area rests in large measure on the premise that Long Island Sound will continue to be a great waterway of commerce as well as a site for industrial expansion.

In turn, the sound is surrounded by millions of people who must. have electrical power, who must have jobs, who can look forward to economic security and whose local governments must provide for them efficient and modern sewage and drainage systems.

These are the realities we must accept if we are to achieve our goal, a Long Island Sound that is clean and unpolluted, pure enough to support its natural ecology and yet sufficiently strong to absorb, dilute, and cleanse large amounts of pollutants.

S. 2472 IS FAVORED

I am greatly encouraged by your legislation, S. 2472, to authorize a 3-year study of the Long Island Sound and your decision to bring these hearings to the areas most affected by your bill. With these hearings, I believe we will be able to focus needed attention on the problems of the sound and, at the same time, move a step farward in the legislative process that will result in the passage of S. 2472.

The emphasis that your legislation places on the need for a "comprehensive" study of the sound is a significant one and very much in tune with the challenges we face.

A comprehensive study is needed because we must be well organized in our efforts to combat pollution. For the forces of pollution, however accidentally they may have fallen into formation, could not themselves be better organized had they been programed by the most advanced computer.

Pollutants attacking the sound individually will not destroy it. But, taken together the oil, the untreated waste, the municipal drainage, the land-fill and dredging projects-all of these in unison assume powerful proportions and can wreak deathly results.

POLLUTION EXAMPLES

Let me give these examples.

The inadequately treated sewage of a town dumped into the waters of the sound is a wounding shot into a living body. It does not kill. It weakens.

Now we add another ingredient. It is the oil pumped from the bilges of a giant tanker as it passes unnoticed in the night. Again, an action not lethal by itself-a wounding shot into a living body.

Next an industrial plant, remiss in its treatment facilities, pours a chemical refuse, harmful to plant and fish life, into the sound. Another wounding shot.

More damage is inflicted when a contractor, acting with insufficient information concerning the ecological impact, is allowed to dredge or carry out land-fill operations in waters too sensitive to absorb these activities without permanent change.

Then a wide variety of pollutants are dumped into the sound— heated water from electricity-generating plants, insecticides, detergents, wastepaper, fly ash, radioactive wastes from nuclear powerplants, wornout auto parts and garbage in all manner of forms.

Neither the auto parts nor the untreated sewage by themselvesnor any of the other pollutants separately-seriously threaten the ecology of Long Island Sound. Taken separately, all of these pollution and erosion-causing action could be digested by natural processes.

However, taken together, as they now are, this legion of pollutants will mercilessly change-perhaps even destroy-life as we know it in this sea we call the sound.

That is why it is so essential that we undertake a comprehensive study of the sound, of its ecological processes and of the impact the many pollutants have upon the sound's ecology.

Only when we view the sound as one large and complicated and delicate organism-a living body-can we begin to measure its strengths and weaknesses and understand it well enough to save it.

We must, for the first time, view Long Island Sound as a system much bigger and a thousand times more vulnerable than the sum of all its parts.

We must begin to realize that when we chip away at one feature of the sound perhaps only a small, desolate stretch of marshland— we chip away at and undermine the natural working of the entire sound.

In part because of the renewed concern that I think will be generated by these hearings and your legislation, I am optimistic about the future of Long Island Sound.

It is clear to me that nowhere else in the world is there potentially such academic and industrial strength as there is about the shores of the sound.

There are ample resources-from government at all levels, from business and industry and from colleges and universities to combat the pollution that threatens us. But we must mobilize these resources. Unfortunately, we are not now making effective use of them. I will cite illustrations along this line I witness all too frequently.

ILLUSTRATION CITED

Let us say, for example, a firm wishes to conduct a project in the sound's waters—a dredging project, perhaps, or a land-fill operation. The firm turns to an ecologist to perform a survey to determine if the proposed project will have a bad impact on the sound.

It is important to remember here that the ecology of this area can be in many occasions a very sensitive thing to measure as it is, and it becomes doubly difficult to gage when one attempts to make projections into the future.

But the business wishes to have a report back in, say, 6 weeks or even 6 months, and, unfortunately, that length of time may not allow for the kind of serious and long-ranging survey that is required.

The result is, tragically, that projects are begun on a hopeful noteon a lick and a promise, so to speak-and nobody really knows what will happen to the sound because of them.

There ought to be a board of ecological impact-or some such body with oversight function-to make sure that proper study is carried out on major projects that could have harmful effects. I hope that the Commission created by your bill will recommend in favor of creating such a Government agency.

Let me cite another problem that all too often occurs.

The illusive nature of the solution of pollution problems lies to some degree with certain interpersonal attitudes-attitudes that are held by the very people who are best equipped to solve the problems. By that I simply mean that academicians mistrust industrialists and men of commerce mistrust Government officials, and so on and so on.

For too many of us in the academic world, for instance, power utilities are by their very nature evil and not to be dealt with except as targets of criticism. Frequently, industry spokesmen are even less willing to work with people from universities. Finally, both sides view Government officials with suspicion.

THREE CAMPS OF ECOLOGISTS

To complicate matters further, there are three camps of ecologists in the academic community: those who work for industry, those who work against industry, and those who try to offer a liaison with the other two camps. Not surprisingly, the liaison group of which I consider myself a member-is often seen as a sellout by the one camp and a spy by the other.

This mistrust obviously hinders true and useful communication and slows the solutions to the pressing problems that ought to bring us together.

Perhaps S. 2472, the legislation before this committee, will become law and provide the unifying force and organization needed to overcome the mistrust and mobilize our resources so that all of us who live and work along the sound can together successfully deal with. the problems that await us.

These problems, I believe, break down into four major categories. I will list them here in decreasing order of importance. I base this order of importance on what I believe are irreversible ecological changes caused by these activities in Long Island Sound.

FILLING OPERATIONS

I would place filling operations at the head of this list because the destruction of tidal flats, salt marshes, coves, and estuaries cannot be reversed. Once they are filled they cannot then be returned to their original and naturally stable condition which has evolved over thousands of years.

Man cannot yet imitate this natural development successfully, nor can he compress time. The nutrients and breeding ground once provided by these coastal areas can no longer fertilize and stock the sea. They will no longer support those other ecological functions and balances which helped stabilize and support the overall natural system. Over the past several months I have seen the potential for this problem at close range. Apparently as a result of Connecticut Public Act No. 695, an act concerning the preservation of wetlands and tidal marsh and estuarine systems, there appears to be an increase in filling operations.

These operations have been stimulated by the knowledge that filling will be prohibited once the existing protected areas are charted. In any event, the result is that a modern and dangerous land rush is underway in Connecticut.

On this point, 3 months ago in Groton at a town zoning board meeting I testified against the proposed construction of a marina on disturbed and/or filled marsh on the Poquonock estuary.

If the marina were permitted, it would have necessitated changing the sanitary classification of the estuary because of sewage from the increased numbers of boats. Dredging would undoubtedly follow and could lead to circulation and salinity changes in the water. The presence of outboard motors would mean surface film oil pollution as well.

All these factors would contribute to ecological pressures tending to change the estuary. Fortunately, the proposal was rejected.

Another case in which I am interested presents a variation of this theme. The Niantic estuary has been changing over the past several decades.

I feel this change has been primarily due to constriction at the mouth of the estuary resulting from the building of a railroad bed about 100 years ago.

Such a major constriction would undoubtedly change certain circulation patterns, and it is my belief that this has led to a filling and silting pattern of natural materials in the water.

My surveys of the estuary suggest to me that the nature of the bottom has changed to such an extent as to have resulted in the disappearance of a once-lucrative scallop fishery.

Moreover, if my conclusions are correct, these changes have been underway, unnoticed and undetected, for at least 100 years.

SEWAGE AND INDUSTRIAL WASTE DISPOSAL

Sewage and industrial waste disposal is a growing problem which at worst threatens to chemically poison and overfertilize the waters of Long Island Sound.

If unchecked, this form of pollution will-and in some cases already has lead to the removal of various marine species such as shellfish and other forms of fish life.

The Thames River is a tragic example of this sort of insidious problem. We are today paying the price for more than 100 years of ecological mismanagement of this once-proud river.

For instance, for about 4 weeks last summer a greenish-blue tint appeared in the waters of the Thames.

The tint developed to a peak and then declined in the river. At times it extended over a distance of about 4 miles from Allyn Point to the mouth of the river.

The color was caused by the phenomenal growth of a microscopic plant, a blue-green alga. I believe such "blooms," as they are called, are indicative of conditions in which the water is overfertilized by sewage and industrial wastes.

The presence of these fertilized waters-particularly at summer temperatures can support the wild and uncontrolled growth of certain algae.

In high concentration, certain species may secrete poisons, waste products that kill fish life in the same waters.

In turn, at night such algae blooms may deplete the water of oxygen to such an extent that fish and other living organisms die.

Complicating matters further, after the algae bloom has run its course, it is decomposed by bacteria at the river bottom.

The bacterial action uses up oxygen from the water. If the amount of decomposing algae is sufficiently great, the bacteria will remove so much oxygen that fish and other forms of life will suffocate and die, causing the spectacular fish kills often seen in rivers and lakes following an algae bloom.

OIL POLLUTION

Oil pollution is a growing threat to Long Island Sound-particularly because of the prospects of port expansions without concurrent development of effective methods of pollution control.