Mystic River gets D rating from EPA

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The Mystic River receives its first official cleanliness report card today.
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The grade is nothing to brag about: The Environmental Protection Agency rates it D, as in very dirty.
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More than 500,000 people live within the watershed, whose tributaries include Mill Brook, Alewife Brook, and the Malden River. A substantial percentage of these inhabitants are poor, which may be part of the reason that the river has received less attention than the Charles, say activists with the watershed association.
"This is an old New England industrial river flowing past communities heavily populated by minorities and people who don't speak English," said Caroline Broderick, executive director of the association.
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"Sewage is the focus," she said. "But there is also bad stuff that washes in from storm water systems. There is oil and grease from highway drain pipes and parking lots. And there's dog poop that some people think magically disappears if it goes down the street drain."

The problems of the Mystic have not been utterly ignored, Moraff stressed.
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According to federal environmental estimates, roughly 485 million gallons of sewage and storm water runoff were fouling the Mystic River in 1988, when full monitoring started. By 2005, the last year for which full measures are available, the amount of sewage effluent and storm runoff had dropped to 84 million gallons per year.
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/17/mystic_river_gets_d_rating_from_epa/