NIANTIC -- At 85 years old, Fred Grimsey is still working hard. He grew up in New York City, but was no city boy.
As he puts it, "Within the sights of NYC, I had a Huck Finn existence, I had a raft, we caught crabs."
He parlayed that into a lot of boat working through college, buying a boat yard, and during that time, back in the 1950s, he’d get sick a lot.
"I only found out later that it was polluted runoff that was fouling the waters of Jamaica Bay,” he said.
It became his calling, and it’s how he ended up on the waters of the Niantic River. Dr Jamie Vaudrey is taking clean up efforts one step further. As part of the United Water Study this summer, she and other conservationists will take water samples along the shore, looking at oxygen, temperature, how salty the water is, how much plant matter, and how much sediment is in the water.
Called Save The Sound, they’ll collect data now and look for hot spots so clean up zones can be identified, otherwise, the losses could become staggering.
According to Yaudrey, "We’d see more algae, more jellyfish, and we’d lose things from the Niantic River that people enjoy.”