History
In the 1980s, Massachusetts Bay, Wollaston Beach included, was one of the most polluted areas in the United States due to a waste-disposal system that discharged approximately 138 tons of waste each day into Boston Harbor, from the Nut Island plant at the end of Houghs Neck. The outfall pipe was known as the 'bubbler'. Officials permanently closed the beach to shell fishing and even swimmers. In 1982, the city of Quincy successfully sued the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for violating the Clean Water Act. The city of Quincy has been a leader in environmental cleanup around Massachusetts Bay and, in 1988, a program was established to help clean up Massachusetts Bay beaches, and testing along Wollaston Beach has demonstrated since 2006 that it is once again safe for swimming and recreation.
In 1990, Massachusetts Bay was selected by the Environmental Protection Agency as an Estuary of National Significance. Despite the environmental challenges, Wollaston Beach continues to be a well-known spot for walking along the boulevard and sun bathing.
Read more about this topic: Wollaston Beach
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)