Below the surface
For over a century, the Jones & Lamson machine tool shop led Springfield in the Industrial Revolution, putting the entire area on the map as "Precision Valley" as inventors & workers designed and produced the tools that made the machines of industry and war.
At the J&L site, work is being done to excavate and remediate a variety of contaminants, including PCBs. The EPA has been monitoring the groundwater in this area for decades, since the plant (and neighboring factories) closed their doors in the 1980s.
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One of the by-products of the machine tool industry was the leakage of various chemicals and waste products into the soil and groundwater -- sometimes solvents and other wastes were dumped directly into the river!
The goal of this project is to gather population data on the creatures that live in the "hyporheic zone" -- the microscopic spaces between soil particles -- where the groundwater seeps into the river. We buried colonization tubes (lower left photo) into the river bed at the toe of the bank where the abandoned J&L factory sits (lower right photo). We installed 2 tubes buried 100' upstream of the potentially contaminated area, and another 2 tubes buried 200' downstream of the contamination. Unfortunately, we discovered that the tubes were ineffective in enticing creatures to colonize, so we'll be attempting to pull out "pore water" with a special pump during the summer of 2016. Once we have a sense of what to expect to find living in the hyporheic zone, we can begin in 2017 to compare those results with findings at the contaminated area.
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Partners on this project include:
Jim Kellogg, State of VT
Corrina Parnapy, aquatic biologist
Patty Collins, Reading Elem School
Chris Fishel, Watershed Assessment Assoc
Kris Stepenuck, U of Vermont
Erica Smith, Society for Freshwater Sciences
Beckman Institute, U of Illinois
So. Windsor Co. Regional Planning Comm
Springfield Regional Development Corp
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copepod
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tardigrade
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