Cleanup Rescuing Boston Harbor, Albatross of ’88 Race : Ecology: George Bush pointed to the waterway to embarrass Gov. Dukakis. This year, federal funds for cleaning up the ‘nation’s dirtiest waters’ were slashed.

Standing on a knoll on Deer Island gives one a spectacular view of Boston’s skyline. The glass-walled towers glisten in the morning sunlight.

Across this 2-mile expanse is the harbor that George Bush called the dirtiest body of water in America during the 1988 presidential campaign. It is so dirty, he said, that the tea Colonial tax protesters dumped there more than 200 years ago would disintegrate immediately today.

Although the water does not look polluted from a distance, 500 million gallons of poorly treated waste water is piped into the harbor every day from the 21-year-old Deer Island sewage-treatment plant. In addition, 500,000 gallons of sludge, or sewage solids, is partially treated and dumped into the harbor daily. Other pollutants are industrial wastes, including PCBs, chemicals known to cause cancer.

Some fish survive these waters because they have adapted to the poisonous conditions, but workers on Deer Island said that no one would eat them.

“I’ve seen them pulled out with all kinds of sores on their bodies,” said Keith McCoy, legislative assistant for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, the quasi-state agency responsible for water and sewage services.

Under a 1986 federal court order to clean up the harbor by 2000, the water authority is in the midst of a $6-billion public works project.

Agency officials say they have made a lot of headway on the cleanup since Bush used the problem to embarrass his Democratic opponent, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, during the presidential campaign.

“It just boggles the mind when you think about the magnitude of this project,” said Paul DiNatale of the 5-year-old water and sewer agency. “Just for the cost of the treatment plant alone, we could send a man to the moon.”

The project received little notice until $20 million earmarked for the Boston Harbor cleanup was deleted from President Bush’s budget for fiscal 1990-91. The cut set off yet another verbal duel between the former rivals.

Congress has appropriated $100 million for the Boston Harbor cleanup, of which $60 million has been disbursed. The water resources agency said that it hopes Congress will restore the $20 million cut out of the budget.

Paul Levy, the water authority’s executive director, said it was sad that the people of Massachusetts will be the ones to suffer if the $20 million is not restored.

Meanwhile, agency officials said, work will proceed on what will be one of the largest sewage-treatment plants in the world. It will be able to handle more than a billion gallons of sewage a day.

Also in the works are new primary and secondary sewage treatment plants and two effluent tunnels, one of which will be 24 feet in diameter and stretch 9 miles out to sea from Deer Island. The largest tunnel of its kind in the world, it will be bored through solid rock 400 feet below sea level.

In the primary treatment process, about 40% of the contaminants, mostly solids, are removed. In the secondary process, the sewage emerges 90% clean and the rest is cleansed naturally in the ocean.

Already, $120 million worth of construction has been completed or started and the authority recently borrowed $800 million for more work, including repairs on sewer lines in the 43 cities and towns the water resources agency serves in eastern Massachusetts.

The new plant will be built on 200-acre Deer Island. A medium-security state prison and an archaic sewage-treatment plant there will be torn down.

The old primary treatment plant has had regular pump failures and several serious leaks. A major leak flooded the plant three years ago, and two frogmen spent several days diving in raw sewage to seal the pipe.

DiNatale said that a $27-million pier on the island is almost completed, so that 2,000 workers and millions of tons of construction equipment and materials can be ferried to the island from a staging area in the suburb of Quincy, Mass.

DiNatale said that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can back up Bush’s statement that Boston Harbor is the dirtiest in the nation. The water authority concedes that in its project brochures, and DiNatale keeps a bottle of murky harbor water on his desk as a reminder of the challenge the agency faces.

Julie Belaga, a former Connecticut legislator who heads the EPA’s New England office, said she is convinced that the water authority’s cleanup program “is moving along in a very timely fashion.”

She added, however: “I firmly believe that the reason they are is because there is a judge standing there, saying it will happen.”

A federal judge ordered that a schedule be produced for the cleanup after Quincy, the Conservation Law Foundation of New England and the EPA filed a lawsuit against Massachusetts.

Last year, the water authority complied with the first order: removal of surface scum. Beginning by the end of next year, the agency is to remove sludge from the harbor bottom through an interim program until a new primary sewage-treatment plant is completed in 1995. By 2000, a secondary treatment plant must be in operation.