By Maureen Doyle
If I made a fantastic meal, you’d want the whole thing, right? A fragmented meal isn’t as satisfying or fulfilling. Similarly, a fragmented landscape is missing elements that make it satisfying to its animal, insect, and plant inhabitants.
The construction of the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) proposed for Oakham, Mass. will fragment the wetlands there, and therefore has the potential to threaten the entire watershed that provides essential water for millions of Massachusetts residents, and essential habitat for animals and plants.
AND you wouldn’t want that delicious meal poisoned or spoiled, right? The danger of such a facility catching fire carries the potential to turn that key environmental asset into a poison.
ACORNS, Advocates for Conservation of Oakham’s Rural Nature and Safety, has a three-part series speaking to the importance of the wetland that could be destroyed by the proposal to build a BESS in its place.
What is a wetland?
Imagine cattail marshes and open water ponds as well as rivers, streams (that flow all year or intermittently), low lying floodplains and vernal pools. Wetlands provide free filtration services as well as flood control and pollution prevention for groundwater runoff. (Source: Webster, MA Wetland Resource Protection brochure, 2020) Wetlands, in general, cover 1% of the Earth yet sequester (or store) 20% of the “organic ecosystem carbon.”
What is at stake on Coldbrook Road
Part One of the ACORNS series illustrates the importance of how one wetland links to nearby wetlands and vernal pools. This allows the water to flow and the insects and birds to fly naturally, and the plants, ferns, and mosses to flourish with the supply of nutrients and moisture they need.
The wetland at 358 Coldbrook Rd. in Oakham, Mass., was rated in the top 2% statewide for its connectivity. This is important, as the wetland flows right into the Ware River Watershed, an important water source that continues into either the Quabbin Reservoir or the Wachusett Reservoir, providing drinking water to 2.7 million people in Massachusetts. The wetland provides natural filtration of the water flow — no plastic filter to change every three months!
ACORNS illustrated in the second part of their blog how the wetland is NOT a good spot for the proposed BESS and why it is more valuable left alone. Beginning with a graphic of the “Importance of Wetland Conservation and Habitat Access,” it illustrates how many species, like salamanders, butterflies, dragonflies, frogs, and turtles begin their lives there, in the protection of the wetland. They may be eaten by other species there (birds, snakes, larger frogs). That is the biodiversity of the area. Letting the wetland remain allows it to “restore, maintain, and enhance nature’s contribution,” meeting Target 11 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Part 3 of the Acorns series calls us to be cognizant of how long the wetlands on Coldbrook Road took to evolve. The groundwater recharge and protection, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and climate resilience would be destroyed quickly if the BESS facility proposed for this site were to fail, leak, catch fire, or undergo other forms of damage. Wetlands are also an important carbon sink, helping to maintain our climate evenly. A carbon sink stores carbon safely while a carbon source releases the greenhouse gas. A wetland is a sink, and a BESS is a source.
