Cape Cod Trip Cranberry Bog

doing is these are uh cranberry bogs that are being flooded for harvest and so um this is just a uh a pond he uses to have a volume of water to be able to pump out and he's pumping it with the tractor right here that's a pump and he's flooding the bogs and and what they do is they get the water above the plants and we'll go a little further down and you'll see what they look like when they're not flooded the flagging indicates where the ditches are so when they come out with their machinery to get the berries they don't fall in the ditches that are now underwater okay all right so so um and what they'll do is they come out with these machines that have beaters it almost looks like a paddle wheel on a boat and they'll drive them back and forth on here and it shakes the berry the bushes up and the berries all float to the surface then they use booms and they bring them all to one place and they suck them into a truck so here's cranberries i i wouldn't um like any fruit you might want to wash it before you ate it plus a raw cranberry is a thing to remember like we always say have a few cranberries with your sugar it's a little bit like rhubarb you know it's like incredibly bitter very high in vitamin c so uh the way the cranberry production works is usually they try to find low spots where they have access to a lot of water the word bog is a misnomer you'll see it a little bit later the plants actually don't like wet soil they like moist soil but they don't like wet soil and so um they like to be really close to the water this is quite a crowd coming in today and um what they do is they uh they they have the plants they're they're a plant that um you know it's monoculture like any other agriculture and they grow they grow the berries they irrigate them like you would any other crop and then they either harvest them with what they call a dry harvest which is machines that actually can rake up the berries you know or they use wet harvest like this and this is sort of the traditional method that these bars were put in the 1800s all right it was a valley you can see the valley continues up across the road it's just a wetland up there they came into these wetland areas and they manipulated the land surface and made agricultural fuels out of them and they can control the water levels to cause uh flooding to to harvest the berries the other interesting thing is you notice there's always sand piles all around cranberry bogs and you wonder what that's for well cranberries like any other berry plant how many of you've ever grown strawberries you know that after a while you're going to put in new plants because their productivity drops dramatically cranberries are the same way so what they do is cranberries evolves in the dunes they like to be buried by sand it gives them a competitive advantage so what they do is they they'll come out every three or four years and lay a layer of sand on the bogs so you don't see any plants and then new shoots come up and now you have good berries for a while so one of the parts of the of the culture of cranberries is to bury them with sand periodically so this combination of availability of water and then having sand around is is critical to cranberry production right now we're at the very southern end of the ashuman valley plume which is the plume that starts up at the sewage treatment plant and the fire training area i don't know how many of you bothered to bring a handout out let me just take a quick look if you look at page 18 that's a larger scale map of the whole area here's the pond where we did all of our we were before here's the schumit valley plume that's defined on the basis of volatile organic compounds the military doesn't care that much about the nitrate that's out here or anything else except for the phosphorus and the lake they're more worried about the volatile organic compounds the vocs and they they've known for many years that elevated levels of tce and pce are present in this area underneath the valley and we've always predicted that the groundwater discharge would take place up into here at some point well it turns out they're beginning to see the volatiles now show up in the surface waters in this this bog system and in the shallow ground waters so um they asked the usgs to get involved in this this summer for a number of reasons and so we came out here uh in june and july and we sampled extensively the surface waters in these bogs when we get down a little further it'll make a little bit more sense to you we'll probably have we don't really have time we'll we'll we'll cut across the bogs on one of the on the drive and you can look on both sides and see the bogs when they're not flooded we sample the surface waters and what we discovered is from top to bottom solvents at low concentrations in the surface waters and that's the plume discharging up into the river right so the berries clearly were being exposed to the solvents and then there's irrigation wells there's one over there there's another one down the road a bit they were also pumping the plume as well so he was irrigating the bogs with the solvents on page 14 you actually see the whole bog system and the concentrations that we were seeing in the surface waters below drinking water standards but still detectable um so then we went out with a little drill rig and um at a bunch of locations that you see on page 20 if you have your hand out this triangle see the little triangles on this map there uh there's several sections of three of them across the box and then a number of others one of those sites is right actually right in the middle of this berm right here we actually went out with a little drill rig and did profiles with depth to try to find the plume under the bogs okay looking for where this plume is that's discharging into the bogs and um if you look at the last page in your handout that shows you the profiles we got at one of the sections it's really kind of classic classic hydrogeology okay on the it isn't at this location because i can't take you down there unfortunately but it's right next to that pump house over there on the left side of the bog right on the edge of the ditches so right about where that tractor is but on that side of the bog and on the right side of the bogs are the two profiles on the left and the right what we found was 40 or 50 feet of clean water right up to the edge of the bogs and then the plume at depth and that matches where we see it in the uplands when we drilled right in we took a little rig right in the middle of the bog so i'm gonna i'm gonna go right in here am i right in the middle of the bogs we found the plume top to bottom see the profile here we have solvents top to bottom you see that okay just imagine uh what's going on here what you hold that uh the contaminant plume is coming from the north and it's overlaying by clean water remember how i showed you how but now it's had miles to have that water accumulate on it so there's 50 60 feet of water that's clean above it and then you have this zone at depth that contains the solvents and we in fact map that at about the same elevation everywhere we look to the east and west here right as this approaches the the beginning of the bog system it's flooded right now it's too bad but there's actually there's a channel right here it's quite deep it's actually the river this is the beginning of the headwaters of the bacchus river it's a the mighty bacchus okay flowing right here and it picks up water as it goes down the bogs because it's groundwater discharge so this groundwater is coming at the bogs from the north and there's a there's essentially a drain at the top and the water is going to leave through the drain so the groundwater begins to flow up and discharge into this drain does that make sense so it begins to scavenge that clean water off the top first and then gradually flow up into the drain and when you go a little bit further downstream and drill right in the middle of the bogs all the clean water off the top has been taken off and you're actually drilling through these flow lines that are turning upwards that's why we see solvents top to bottom in the middle of the bogs on the edges it's not and the edges are you know we don't see that but so the plum shape is actually like this does that make sense to you guys beautiful red tail hawk yeah so these guys follow you around okay so does that make sense to you guys i know it's kind of quick and dirty but does that make sense what's going all on so what we're going to do is we're going to leave here and we're going to go back up and we're going to cross over the box and when we cross over hopefully they won't be flooded you'll see what the bogs really look like and you'll slow down when you go over the main channel you'll see the river coming through and that river ultimately dumps into the ocean into one of the harbors uh just to let you know the reason why these other guys are here this truck just pulled up that's ch2m hill big consulting company they're the main contractors to the base um i was at a meeting a week and a half ago and the agreement is they've sampled the berries just before they started the harvest and they're going to sample and measure them for volatile organics they're going to sample them today and probably over the next week during the harvest they're going to sample at ocean spray when they arrive at the plant and then they're going to determine whether or not the ocean spray will accept the berries from this bog for use or not or they're going to dispose of them