Last December, two Massachusetts companies were the first to be penalized under the new initiative.

New England Concrete (NEC) of Amesbury received a $100,000 fine for filling nearly an acre of wetland, heaping concrete rubble, tires, and machinery on a wetland buffer zone and causing damage to a wetland by allowing silt-laden storm water to discharge into it. DEP will forgive half of the fine if NEC restores the wetland and develops environmental remediation plans for the site.

These aerial views of New England Concrete Products Inc. show encroachment on wetlands with before (left) and after (right) shots. Images courtesy of Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection

DEP also imposed an $180,000 fine on Holland Used Auto Parts in Billerica when aerial photos showed that the company filled and de-vegetated two acres of wetland over the course of several years. DEP also accused the company of building a concrete wall over 1,000 feet of wetland, buffer zone and floodplain, constructing a building on filled wetlands and discharging contaminated storm water into a wetland.

To nab violators like these in the past, the state had to rely on tips from company employees, citizens and conservation commissions or from state inspections of construction sites. These methods were spotty, however, and (as the new surveillance program has revealed) left a significant amount of illegal wetland destruction beyond the purview of regulators.

Today, DEP can find areas of encroachment onto wetlands right in the computer laboratory, said director of DEP’s Wetlands Mapping Program Charles Costello.

“It for the first time brings us into areas that we couldn’t see from the road in the past,” he said.

“This is a huge success story and one that we are going to build on,” said DEP Commissioner Robert W. Golledge, Jr. “The cases that we announced are the start, not the end.”

By this spring, DEP expects to have the entire eastern part of Massachusetts to the Connecticut River mapped. Eventually, the whole state will be mapped.

Illegal encroachment is recognized as a widespread problem at agencies charged with protecting wetlands in other states in the Gulf of Maine region, as well.

Jon Kachmar, who works on coastal wetlands with the Maine Coastal Program, has seen regular encroachment in his state ranging from the filling of wetlands by abutting landowners to the dumping of leaf litter, yard debris, garbage and old cars.
Maine’s freshwater wetlands suffer even more encroachment than the coastal, according to Elizabeth Hertz of the Maine Coastal Program, who works on inland and coastal wetlands.

“There’s still a perception that especially some of our smaller wetlands don’t afford much in the way of value to the landscape,” she said. “So, people do look at them…as places to dump stuff.”

The State of Maine does not intend to implement an aerial surveillance program.

In New Hampshire, enforcing wetlands violations is a significant part of the annual budget for the Department of Environmental Services, according to Wetland Bureau Administrator Collis Adams. While the state does use flyovers to document encroachment cases, it is not actively considering doing routine aerial surveillance.

Running an aerial surveillance program like the one in Massachusetts may be difficult for states that do not already have the historical mapping data that Massachusetts’ DEP began collecting twelve years ago. To thoroughly map a state is also an expensive undertaking, according to the DEP officials. However, other states could do a “more quick and dirty analysis” using digital maps prepared by federal agencies, DEP Assistant Commissioner Giles said.