The Lake Cochituate Watershed in Massachusetts, USA

THE LAKE COCHITUATE WATERSHED
18004 visits since 970926; last updated 071025.

Calendar of Events for Lake Cochituate, the Cochituate Rail Trail and related events.

Extending Helicopter Use by Lake Cochituate

The next (NOT final?) session of this Helipad Public Hearing is on
November 14th, 2007 (at 8:45 PM)
in the Selectmen's Meeting Room, 2nd floor front in Natick Town Hall.

Public Hearing: Boston Scientific Corp. was scheduled for a Special Permit hearing before the Natick Planning Board on May 7th, 2007. Several hours before the hearing, we again discovered that we hadn't been informed. We protested, and happily the hearing was postponed to April 11th. That hearing was continued to May 23rd, to July 11th, and (after several postponements) to September 26th and October 24th at 8:00PM, all in the same location.

BSC seeks to extend its large and noisy helicopter use adjacent to Lake Cochituate, claimed there were no complaints. Neighbors rallied in Spring 2007, and again can speak out!

More information is online at:
http://www.millermicro.com/helipad.html
Contact: A. Richard "Dick" Miller (1-508/653-6136; TheMillers@millermicro.com)

Orthomapping of Lake Cochituate and CRT (Spring 2001; "Take Me To" is approximate.)
Mass. DEM's Snake Brook Section 319 NPS Project (see page 38; 01-01/319, 2001)
MAPC's 604(b) Lake Cochituate Watershed Study (March 2001)
U.S. Army Natick Labs (SSCOM) and Godzilla ("Godzilla Attacks" by Barry S. Goldman)
U.S. Army SSCOM Superfund Site (M.Kaltofen, re U.S. Army Natick Laboratories on L.C. in Natick)
U.S. Army SSCOM Superfund Site (official version by US EPA)
USGS (2001): Pond-Aquifer Interaction at South Pond of Lake Cochituate, Natick, Massachusetts
Stakeholder's Guide to the Clean-Up of Federal Facilities (by CPEO)
Do Cancer Statistics Correlate with Groundwater Contamination? ("Natick lab eyed over hike in cancer", Boston Globe, February 20, 1997; F.O.I. Act releases Natick Cancer Study data.)
Eels Threatened by Contaminated Groundwater (U.S. Army Natick Laboratories, on L.C. in Natick)
Moss Animals Invade Lake Cochituate (enter the bryozoan, Pectinatella magnifica)
The Meaning of "Cochituate"
Eurasian Water-Milfoil Invades Lake Cochituate
Cochituate State Park and Lake Cochituate
Giant Cockroaches Attack Natick Town Dump (U.S. Army Natick Laboratories, on L.C. in Natick)
Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches (info from New England Science Center in Worcester, MA)
The Quality of Our Nation's Water: 1992 (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
EPA's Watershed Academy (US EPA Water Office: Distance Learning Modules on Key Watershed Management Topics)

This Web page is a personal creation of A. Richard (Dick) Miller. Dick has amassed a lot of information on the lake and its history, the workings of government agencies on all levels, and on many effective methods of harnessing citizen volunteer capabilities to make a difference in lake quality and lake recreational management. Dick was a founding member of the Cochituate State Park Advisory Committee in 1988, has served as its Vice Chairman, and continues as a member and its historian. Through these functions and his other interests, Dick has amassed much information on the lake and its history, and a vision for the future.

A watershed is a drainage basin, that land which catches rainwater and drains it downhill into a certain body of standing or running water. It's the way to see a water system, and to understand which towns and land-use practices are affecting the water quality and quantity.

The Lake Cochituate Watershed -- which in turn is part of the Sudbury River Watershed, the SuAsCo (Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers) Watershed (a strange renaming of the Concord River Watershed), and the much larger, Merrimack River Watershed in New Hampshire and Massachusetts -- is 17 square miles in five Middlesex-County, Massachusetts towns. These towns are Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Sherborn and Wayland.

The surface area of Lake Cochituate is 625 acres in size, divided into three main ponds and two connector ponds. Fisk Pond (a major contributor of wanted water and unwanted nutrient) to its immediate south is physically connected but boats cannot travel through the Route 135 culvert. Dug Pond (with no direct surface connection) immediately south of that, and Dudley Pond to the immediate north of North Pond, are linked through groundwater; they once had reservoir connections underground, which later were sealed off.

The "eels" link above includes a map showing Lake Cochituate, but that map has major distortions. It shows a long, contorted lake and fails to identify the chain of separated ponds (a before, during and after demo of water pollution) which made Lake Cochituate (then Long Pond) the first American study area for limnology.

The same report also cites Dick's name incorrectly, as "A.D. Miller", obviously mistaking the nickname Dick for the proper Richard. It's difficult to notify the author, as no authorship is attributed to the report!

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