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EPA Awards $321,000 Grant to Ipswich for Water Quality Studies

Release Date: 01/30/2001
Contact Information: Mark Merchant, EPA Press Office (617-918-1013)

BOSTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced a $321,621 grant to the town of Ipswich for a project that will evaluate what impact growth and urban sprawl are having on the town's waterways. The project will include substantial water quality sampling in the Ipswich and Parker Rivers.

The program, which will be monitored by the town's conservation agent, will provide information to the public about swimming and boating conditions; monitor storm water pollution impacts on shellfish beds and seasonal impacts on inland marine fisheries; identify nutrient "hot spots" in lakes, wetlands and rivers and provide a report card on the condition and quality of the Parker and Ipswich watersheds.

Information from the program, which begins today with an organizational meeting, will be made available to the public in a timely and useful way: the World Wide Web. The town will post the information gathered as part of the study on a Website called I/PS-WATCH, short for the "Ipswich/Parker Suburban WATershed CHannel."

"Different groups and watershed associations have been monitoring some of these issues for a long time, so this grant will provide a central point for collecting, analyzing and publicizing the information," said Ira Leighton, acting regional administrator of EPA's New England office.

Groups taking part in the grant are the town of Ipswich, the Ipswich Watershed Association, the Parker River Clean Water Association, Eight Towns and the Bay, the University of New Hampshire and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.

Information from the Ipswich program may also be used in larger studies of the Gulf of Maine.

The grant, which will be managed by the town's conservation agent, is from the EPA's EMPACT (Environmental Monitoring for Public Access and Community Tracking) Program. EMPACT is a four-year-old initiative to provide communities with timely, understandable and useful information about local environmental conditions through state-of-the-art monitoring and information technology. The EPA has invested more than $5 million in 17 EMPACT projects throughout New England.