Tim Sprinkle

Charles River Watchdog: Roger Frymire

Paddler magazine
July 2005
Boston's Charles River has come a long way since the dark, polluted days of the 19th century, but the river still has a secret; a dirty smelly, nasty secret. Sewage - seeping out of pipes, gathering in storm drains, and bubbling up from unseen depths - continues to be a problem along the Charles and its many tributaries. Fortunately for the city's padders, Roger Frymire is on the case.

A retired computer scientist who lives two blocks from the water's edge, Frymire has been monitoring sewage conditions on the Charles for nearly six years; sniffing out so-called "hot spots," taking bacterial samples, and reporting his findings to watershed officials. It's a dirty job, he admits through a heavy white beard, but somebody has to do it.

"I don't have an exceptional sense of smell," laughs the man known in EPA circles as 'the Mad Kayaker,' "it's just that sewage really stinks. If you go out kayaking often enough you just get sick of it. So, in the long run, I'm doing this all for myself, so I don't have to smell the stuff."

What began as an annoyance has grown into a full-on avocation for Frymire, who does all of his sampling on a volunteer basis in partnership with two local watershed groups. In exchange for free lab time from the Charles River Watershed Association and the EPA's New England office, he paddles out in his aging kayak twice a month to take water samples and scout for problems. It's a slow process, explains the soft-spoken Frymire, admitting that paddling speed has never been one of his talents, but the impact of his work has rippled across the state.

"I do my damnedest to work with the owners [of the offending pipes]," he says; "because I'm not trying to get people fined. I want people that have sewage in their pipes to spend their money fixing the problem, not paying fines."

But the work isn't easy. Following a 1998 survey of every pipe on the Charles, Frymire noted 16 spots that, as he termed it, hit the trifecta, with high bacteria counts, noticeable sewage odors, and various "objectionable floatables." As of this April, more than half of those are still dirty. Still, he says, as long as the sewage is out there, there's work to be done.

"Boston and the Boston area are old cities," he explains, "the infrastructure is old. There have been a couple of cases where things have gotten fixed and then broken again. It's going to be an ongoing problem for a long time. How long I can and will keep it up, or how long I'll keep getting free lab time is an open question. But it gives me an opportunity to tweak bureaucrats."

Recently, Frymire has turned his attention to the north side of his Cambridge neighborhood, contributing monthly samples to the Mystic River Watershed Association's (MRWA) Hot-Spot Monitoring Program.

"We have over 40 volunteer monitors, but Roger is by far the most dedicated," says Julie Horowitz, Director of the MRWA's Mystic Monitoring Network. "Really he's a scientist at heart; all of his work is done with complete precision."