Living Systems Laboratory built in 2013 for progress and profits cleans 10,000 gallons of river water daily.
BY CATHERINE SENGEL, for ecoRI News
SOUTH GRAFTON, Mass.
The heads of a few dozen turtles bob up from the waters surrounding a floating island along a verdant stretch of the Blackstone River. Five years ago, this expanse beside the Blackstone Canal and below the Fisherville Pond Dam was a dead zone, devoid of aquatic life.
But thanks to an experimental Living Systems Laboratory built in 2013 on the former site of the historic Fisherville Mill, 10,000 gallons of water are cleaned daily of the contaminants that once choked all living matter. By reintroducing the biological diversity once part of the ecosystem, the operation is restoring vitality to the river at a pace a thousand times faster than nature.
In addition, owner and developer Gene Bernat hopes it will offer an unparalleled education on our relationship with our environment.
“All of the different biological kingdoms that we employ here provide natural solutions to more than 200 years of incremental problems,” Bernat said during a recent tour of this lab. “It’s a visual roadmap of how we get from an extractive economy to a sustainable economy, and the premier experience in ecological literacy that you can find in the Northeast.”
Part of a string of mill villages in the valleys below the river’s headwaters in Worcester, Fisherville was home to one of the largest mills on the Blackstone River, supplying wool to the world from the early 1700s. In the mid-19th Century, a network of 48 granite locks and steps channeled flow along the Blackstone Canal, allowing the visionaries of America’s Industrial Revolution to power their mills and move goods in and out between Worcester and Providence.
Over the centuries, the river went from supplying food and canoe transport between communities for Native Americans and early settlers to providing energy for manufacturing and finally a convenient disposal place for waste.
In 1999, the 300,000-square-foot Fisherville Mill burned, sending deposits of asbestos to coat yards as far away as Hopedale and adding to an already toxic legacy. When talk turned to cleaning up the remaining pile of mill rubble after eight years, Bernat’s Fisherville Redevelopment Co. teamed with the town of Grafton to apply lessons learned elsewhere about resource restoration combined with an economic incentive.
The land would be cleared for Mill Villages Park, a development of 240 residential units with 60,000 square feet of commercial space. Site remediation was just finishing when the market collapse put a halt to building, but work on the Living Systems Laboratory moved forward.
Bernat, from three generations of textile makers, grew up dividing his summers between work in the Bernat yarn mill in Uxbridge and the woods of the family farm in Grafton. His time in forestry had sparked an interest in natural systems and resource management. To his reasoning, there was no question that the property would be a long-term durable asset for the Blackstone Valley and the community, with or without housing and shops.
Situated within the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, the Fisherville Mill site is on one of largest existing water areas on the Blackstone Canal, with remnants of historic locks, a 200-foot-wide step dam and a continuous perennial waterfall from days of industrial development. Fisherville Pond is one of the last mill ponds on the river, and a premier migratory waterfowl nesting site.
In addition to large expanses of mostly untouched floodplain, the surrounding area includes still-intact mill villages, including mill housing. Two other yarn mills within a quarter mile, in Saundersville and Farnumsville, put Mill Villages Park and Pavilion at their center.
Rather than dwell on impediments to park progress, Bernat began to consider the entire area as a living, teaching landscape.
A consortium of area universities, including Brown, Clark, Tufts and Worcester Polytechnical Institute, along with the Blackstone Headwaters Coalition, Blackstone Heritage Corridor Coalition and Mass Audubon, joined Bernat to launch the Living Systems Laboratory. John Todd Ecological Design (JTED), a global pioneer in the use of natural systems to remove contaminants from water, was enlisted to help customize operations to the challenge at hand.
On the premise that one organism’s waste is another organism’s food source, JTED used a combination of tanks and aquatic cells in its bioremediation to mimic natural processes.