What makes Fox Point, Fox Point?
The answer is -- its rivers. The ones you see and the ones you don’t.
Fox Point’s past is defined by its two rivers.
You know them, the Providence and the Seekonk nourished the Narragansetts for thousands of years and later drew generations of traders, docks workers, sailors and rum makers.
Likewise, the future of the city’s oldest neighborhood could be shaped by two rivers — but these two are man-made, running for 5.2 miles underground through Rhode Island granite.
The longest runs for 3 miles from near the State House to the Fields Point treatment facility. Since opening in 2008, this tunnel, 26-feet in diameter, has collected 1.6 billion gallons of sewage and storm water that would have flushed into Narragansett Bay.
The second, 30-feet diameter, runs along the Seekonk for 2.2 miles to the Bucklin Point treatment plant in East Providence. It’s due to go online in 2028.
The goal, at a cost of nearly $2 billion, is to undo the damage done by 300 years of population growth and industrialization — a sad legacy that closed the upper bay to shellfishing and swimming and scattered syringes on East Bay beaches.
In June 12, Jamie Salmon, public affairs manager for the Narragansett Bay Commission, took Brown sociologist Scott Frickel and I down 300 feet for a tour.
It was a dry day in the tunnel. The giant wastewater pumps were quiet. No need for earplugs. Waste water, Salmon said, was perhaps ankle deep.
It was a different story May 23. Torrential rains swept across Rhode Island. On Brook Street at Campus Fine Wines, the owners piled sand bags in front of their doors to hold back the rush of stormwater. Three hundred feet below the tunnel would soon be full with 65 million gallons of sewage and storm water.
To protect the plant and the tunnel, operators closed dozens of emergency gates in the Narragansett watershed. Sewage and stormwater flushed out into the bay — just as it had for generations.
Then the weather cleared, and the operators, masters of flow control, started pumping the sewage out of the tunnel up to the treatment plant to be cleaned and disinfected.
The system is not perfect, there are still bad days like May 23, but Narragansett Bay Commission officials are proud of the results. The commission says it has cut discharges by 60 percent and the state now allows 110 more days of shellfishing a year.
Proof came the next day when Gov. Dan McKee announced that Crescent Park Beach in East Providence would be opened for swimming in 2026. Alex Kuffner, writing in The Providence Journal, called the news “one of the clearest signs yet of the water quality improvements in Narragansett Bay.”
Farther north in India Point Park, a sign reminds fishermen of the catch limits for scup and summer flounder. In his Crescent Park story, Kuffner explained that bacteria levels had been cut by half.
And what about a beach at India Point? The city is currently seeking bids for major improvements in the park. “I think there’s good reason to be optimistic,” Salmon said.
