With another foot of snow piled on snow banks across the city, state Sen. Jack Hart wants to temporarily lift the ban on dumping snow in Boston Harbor, as opposed to designated city snow farms.
Citing public safety issues, Hart will ask officials to lift the ban put in place in the 1990s to help clean up the harbor. Even Paul Levy, who helped form the MWRA, which played a crucial role in cleaning the harbor, supports lifting the ban.
“Instead of dumping this snow in the harbor, it gets trucked — using thousands of gallons of fuel which create all kinds of air emissions — to inland locations,” Levy wrote on his blog. “What happens there? It melts, and those same pollutants enter the ground water system. Or they go into city storm drains, where they end up where? Boston Harbor.”
The state late yesterday did give MassPort permission to dump snow at Logan Airport into the harbor.
