The Connecticut River still “America’s best landscaped sewer” in Massachusetts Copyright © 2021 by Karl Meyer

Citizens standing against relicensing the river-killing Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station in Massachusetts on October 9, 2021. Photo Copyright © 2021 by Karl Meyer

Something is deeply wrong on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. That something is secrecy, obfuscation, and public agencies pointedly ignoring the forest for the trees. For 49 years the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station has been the number # 1 ecosystem disruptor and fish predator in the 4-state river system comprising today’s S.O. Conte Connecticut River US Fish and Wildlife Refuge.

So grim is this machine’s daily impact that it literally obliterates 100s of millions of fish and aquatic animals annually–consuming the river’s aquatic life via giant turbines that actually pull the river backward for miles and flush all that river life uphill into Northfield’s 4 billion gallon Death-Sewer each day. It’s an energy-squandering electricity resale scheme that is today netting Canadian venture capital firm PSP Investment wads of tax-sheltered cash via limited liability registration in the State of Delaware.

Thus, despite what’s been grandly touted in massive yearly hype for EXACTLY 25 INDIVIDUAL SATURDAYS since 1996, proclaiming a “cleaned-up river”–the Connecticut remains the grim, stilled, reversed and deadly, daily flush-sink it has been in Massachusetts for ALL of the NEARLY 18,000 DAYS of it’s operation since 1972.

Photo Copyright © 2021 by Karl Meyer

The grand irony of this massive ecosystem crime is that MA Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs and Holyoke-based ISO-New England whole-heartedly support the continued use of this FirstLight-branded, net-power loss, ecosystem killer in a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing scheme that will last for decades. Meanwhile the Bay State has been home to the Connecticut River Watershed Council since 1952–as well as its quarter century of cleanup hype, while the US Fish & Wildlife’s Northeast Regional Headquarters (just 25 miles from Northfield in Hadley), has done nothing to shut the giant sucking mouth of Northfield Mountain’s death trap across their River’s quarter century as a US FISH & Wildlife Refuge…

So in case you were wondering why these out-standing people are situated above the deadened Connecticut River and look content and happy to be doing something about it–these are the folks making a stand for a living ecosystem for the generations to follow. They are the people who never swallowed the Kool-Aid.

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