in Massachusetts as an industrial state is extreme development along the coast. For 
example, on Cape Cod, where people spend their summers because it's a beautiful place to 
be, within the last year or two, the number of acres of shellfish flats closed because of 
bacterial contamination is increasing from about 2,000 to close to about 5,000. The 
amount of housing being built on Cape Cod, and a whole host of problems brought on by 
increased use of Cape Cod, is one of the things that's happening in Massachusetts. And 
I'm not sure that it's happening elsewhere in the country or on the east coast. 
G. Gallagher: I would like to comment on how we set priorities. We don't 
know enough about Boston Harbor to really have a ranking of how it compares in terms of 
pollution levels to Elliot Bay and Puget Sound. One way we might consider ranking 
funding is trying to get to just a basic rudimentary understanding of the various systems. 
Puget Sound is fairly well understood, but could use a lot more research. For 
example, in the main basin of Elliot Bay, we know essentially what controls the 
phytoplankton bloom. It was modeled pretty well in the winters of the 1960s. 
Narragansett Bay had a good base of funding through NOAA-Sea Grant, so 
they were able to put together a fairly good model of the tides there. Jim Kramer and 
Scott Nixon put together a very nice simulation model to explain the blooms in 
Narragansett Bay. They have good data on the copepod populations so they know the 
relative effect of the zooplankton population. They had a good data base to work with 
before they even began considering pollution levels and how they affect the biological 
community. 
We don't have that in Boston Harbor. However, we have heavily polluted 
sediments, we have people fishing for winter flounder that tend to congregate around the 
plume outfalls. We have a heavily polluted system, but we don't have a good 
understanding at all of this system. We need funding from somewhere. I think a Federal 
source would be nice. Boston Harbor is not unique. Fred Nichols started working in San 
Francisco Bay in the 1970s at a point similar to where we are now with Boston Harbor. A 
good review of what's known about the biological communities in San Francisco Bay up 
until the early 1970s, such as the knowledge about San Francisco Bay until the mid-1970s 
was as woeful as it is about Boston Harbor right now. They have made a fairly heavy 
effort in the last 10 years in San Francisco Bay and have a pretty good understanding of 
the situation. We don't have that in Boston Harbor/Massachusetts Bay. So rather than try 
to rank it, I think maybe getting a basic knowledge of the processes would help an awful 
lot. And that, unfortunately, takes some pretty hefty funding. 
P. Boehm: Well, I'm going to be bolder. I admit that we have to know more 
about the processes to make the management decisions. We have discussed processes, 
fluxes, and circulation. In terms of ranking criteria if we're talking about fish disease and 
pollutant concentrations, granted, we don't have as large a data base as other estuaries. I 
would rank the Boston Harbor area as bad or probably much worse than most estuaries 
outside of the superfund, New Bedford Harbor, maybe Commencement Bay area. 
Although Commencement Bay has some comparable levels. 
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