The water quality monitoring results for last month (April 2024) are on the website.
The flow in the river at the Bridgewater USGS gauge was very high 1690 cubic feet per second (cfs) on the day we sampled, this is 3.6 times the April flow last year when we sampled which was already a typical high spring flow.
Because of the high flow and cold river temperatures we didn’t see many water quality standards violations. We measured a high nitrate value at the small Chuckamuckett Brook in Berkley likely from farm runoff and an elevated level in the Matfield River likely because Brockton hasn’t started full nitrogen removal yet (required in May by their Clean Water Act discharge permit). We saw three bacteria violations typically caused by stormwater runoff but not the extremely high values we measured in June to October last year. We also saw five pH values below 4.0 which may have been from low pH rainfall. We will be watching again this year to see if bacteria violations due to stormwater runoff increase dramatically like last year during the summer from June through October.
We want to thank our dedicated sampling program volunteers and our partners at Veolia Taunton Wastewater Treatment Plant for a smooth start to the sampling season.