The COVID-19 pandemic presents complications to an aging core of community volunteers in Marion, Mattapoisett, and Rochester, and each of the Tri-Town communities has a distinct model of its own in mind to maximize success in times of crisis.

            Mattapoisett is affiliated with Middleborough-area Medical Reserve Corps (MRC), a national collaboration of medical and non-medical volunteers who are organized locally.

            “In Mattapoisett at least, the system we have in place is our MRC volunteers know they would be contacted if needed. If our existing resources were exhausted, we maintain a database,” explained Amanda Stone, the part-time Mattapoisett health nurse.

            Some of Mattapoisett’s MRC volunteers transitioned for ease of management to the statewide Mass Responds management system, but Mattapoisett is not a member per se. “In Mattapoisett, we decided that’s run by the state, but we would keep our MRC locally. The bottom line is that … we all work together ultimately,” said Stone.

            People join Mattapoisett’s MRC by completing application forms including whatever licenses and skills that they may have, including non-medical volunteers like computer skills that could be useful. “We certainly don’t turn anybody away,” said Stone.

            For an emergency dispensing site – those must be approved by the Massachusetts Department of Health – the town needs 69 volunteers available on a 24-hour shift. In reality, people wear many hats because there are so fewer than 69 available at one time.

            The MRC conducts drills and walk-throughs. Old Rochester Regional High School is the state-designated emergency dispensing site for Mattapoisett’s MRC so plans are already in place should an emergency occur. “You may need two EDS’s up and running, you just don’t know. It’s a live program in Mattapoisett,” said Stone. “We have a nice balance in Mattapoisett in medical versus non-medical volunteers and a variety of ages.

            “In many communities, CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) and MRC work together if they need to. The goal for both organizations is to dispense emergency-response capabilities. We just have a very active MRC in Mattapoisett.”

            Stone is retiring from 16 years as the public health nurse at the end of February, but added eight months on a part-time basis. Emily Field is the new public-health nurse in Mattapoisett. “We’re sharing the workload,” said Stone.

            Stone saw the community through the H1N1 flu in 2009 and is now book-ending her tenure with COVID-19. “Every community is different,” she said, noting that Massachusetts is the only state in the union in which health is part of town government. “Massachusetts has 351 boards of health.”

            But even in the Tri-Town, there are distinct approaches meant to fit the profile of the individual community and address the needs of the residents. Marion is transitioning from what it considers an unsuccessful MRC affiliation to a CERT affiliation.

            “One of the primary roles for the MRC was the staffing and management of emergency shelters. The number of volunteers has declined in the last few years. There is a concern that the name ‘Medical Reserve Corp’ may be attributing to the reluctance of people to volunteer for the group if they don’t have some type of medical background,” stated Marion Chief of Police John B. Garcia in an email to The Wanderer. “A Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) has the potential to have a broader role in community emergency response. The main focus will still be on staffing and management of the shelters, but once the team is fully established, we may be able to expand the role and training to other areas such as search and rescue. We are hoping that we will have most of the current MRC volunteers transition to the CERT so that we don’t lose the expertise and experience they have accumulated over the years.”

            Dr. John Howard, who serves on the Marion Board of Health and is an active physician, traces the roots of CERT and MRC to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US. “Gradually, the funding has kind of drifted down so it’s pretty much voluntary now,” he said.

            The structure of each organization is regionally based now, so the Marion unit will be part of the Lakeville-area CERT chapter, and Mattapoisett’s team is affiliated with the Middleborough MRC.

            Howard remembers as many as 10 volunteers who participated in events like flu clinics, “but they never really got into an active training program or been mobilized. A lot of folks are older, retired, and older.”

            Some, said Howard, had some medical training. He wonders now if people with military experience or possibly Tabor Academy faculty could work with students. He would like to see students offered opportunities to connect to their community in a meaningful way. Through monthly training sessions, he suggests men and women alike can learn chain of command, the proper use of radios, and other aspects of emergency management.

            “CERT is clearly where we’re headed now and because of the relatively weak response to the MRC … people heard MRC and they heard ‘medical’ and they got nervous,” he said. “I’m not a nurse, I’m not an EMT … I probably can’t help out very much there. It’s a perception thing.”

            Garcia became a part-time police officer in 1983 at age 20. On January 3, 2021, he will hand over his title to Lieutenant Richard Nighelli and, along with it, the lead role in Marion’s emergency response. Before he does, he is looking to build some momentum for a CERT program.

            “We are hoping that the ‘rebranding’ will appeal to a wider range of people. It will be a challenge to draw in new volunteers. Reports indicate that volunteerism across the nation is down,” Garcia stated in the email.

            In an independent approach that neither asks for, nor genuflects to, the trend toward regionalization of assistance and services, Rochester Board of Selectmen Chairman Paul Ciaburri oversees a town-centered, town-supplied emergency response plan – for the town by the town. It’s as old-school as can be, but the results speak for themselves.

            “We’ve got a list of people, some young, some older, plus everybody on the Fire Department helps out. We’ve been very fortunate because our shelter is the Senior Center, which has worked out very well so far. We take it one storm at a time, we do the best we can. Sometimes we get a lot of volunteers, sometimes we get just enough,” said Ciaburri. “I’ve always looked at it as my first job is to take care of the people in Rochester. We’d take people from Marion and Mattapoisett if need be. The regional shelter stuff, it’s never worked very well.”

            Pragmatism rules in Rochester, where affiliation is counterproductive. Ciaburri said he didn’t get Rochester involved in CERT because of the many requirements, including potential deployment of volunteers to other locations.

            “We’ve done some shelter training when Mass Emergency Management has some classes so they have some ideas and rules. I did not want to put them in some position where they were going to be taken to the Plymouth shelter or the Mattapoisett shelter. I go to some of those meetings … but we’re not affiliated,” he said.

            Ciaburri said that on one occasion, Wareham closed its shelter and Rochester kept the person to the end of the week, then told its neighbor it’s their responsibility. “At that point, you have to put them in a hotel or motel … it can be a budget buster. If we didn’t have the people we have, it would be very expensive,” he said.

            Between comfortable beds against the height of cots in a school building or the simplest things like a nice meal or snack and a place to charge a cell phone when the power is out at home, Ciaburri says the Senior Center on Dexter Lane has been an excellent resource for the town. And it avoids the expenses that come with police detail and janitorial and cafeteria staff.

            “The seniors are very comfortable there. The last time we had a shelter, everything went well,” he said. Rochester served 290 meals over five days. “The one lucky thing we have here is people genuinely don’t like to leave their house unless it’s really bad, and that’s kind of worked in our favor.”

            Tree damage, downed wires, those things will send residents to the Senior Center, but it’s rare they need to stay over.

            At 67, Ciaburri figures it’s time the town started figuring out how to replace or evolve the role, which for him has been a volunteer position since he began as Rochester’s emergency manager in 1980. “I’ve enjoyed doing it. I always got the support from the Police, Fire, Board of Selectmen, office staff. I’ll be here a few more years yet,” he said.

By Mick Colageo

            It is believed that the mingling of river herring with ocean herring in the Atlantic resulted in an unintended commercial catch that, in large part, caused the massive drop in the amount of the small fish in the Mattapoisett River early in the 21st century.

            Where it concerns herring, the Tri-Town has never been the same.

            “We pretty much feel it was the offshore trawlers through a huge net. The river herring mingle with the ocean herring that they were trawling for. A lot of them, they don’t want them and they just dump them overboard. Then the other things are what Mother Nature throws at us,” said Art Benner, the president of Alewives Anonymous, Inc. who on October 2, sent his 2020 herring report to the Tri-Town and state officials. “We’ve had a few dry years and this is another dry year. Snipatuit (Pond), there hasn’t been a full pond at any time.”

            Due to an ultra-dry 2020, parts of the Mattapoisett River look like a gravel road with a puddle here and there.

            When electronic herring counts began in 1989, the annual count at the outlet of the Snipatuit Pond to the Mattapoisett River was 40,000. That number grew exponentially over the last decade of the 20th century, peaking at 130,000 in the year 2000. The sudden and spectacular drop down to crisis levels (i.e. 5,000 in 2004) led to a state-mandated ban on fishing herring in 2006.

            As is his spring custom, Benner, with help from Rochester Herring Inspector (and Alewives Anonymous, Inc. Vice President) David Watling, used electronic fish counters on the Mattapoisett River at Snipatuit Pond and the Sippican River at Leonard’s Pond to establish 2020 counts.

            The 2020 herring count in Mattapoisett River was 16,049, a decrease from 18,156 in 2019. Last year’s count marked the first increase since 2014 when the herring count recovered from a 2004 low of 5,000 to 55,429. Benner reported that the counting equipment functioned without errors last spring, making for ideal counting conditions.

            Benner said low water in Leonard’s Pond posed a counting problem toward the end of the season. A counter was not installed last year on the Sippican River at Leonard’s Pond; this year’s Sippican River count was 813, a number that Benner suspects represents pond fish moving up and down the ladder through the counter multiple times.

            The electronic counter cannot distinguish one fish from another. Benner says sometimes a wooden stick is enough to vibrate the three metal rings on the 8 inch in diameter fiberglass tube and trip the counter. “They can tell the order … reading from the rings whether it’s going up or down,” Benner said. “You might count one fish several times; that’s what those odd counts can represent sometimes.”

            Pickerel, bass, and sunfish will go down the ladder into the river and come back, further skewing the count. Snipatuit Pond is populated with zooplankton and small fish.

            Benner also reported a 574 herring count for 2020 at Hathaway Pond Dam, according to a counter run by Buzzards Bay Coalition.

            Alewives Anonymous, Inc. aka “The Herring Helpers” came along in the mid-1980s, but in spirit at least was around a long time before that, according to Benner. “Just as a group of interested people concerned about the herring population and what they might do to improve it and extend it and that sort of thing,” is how he described his “more or less” springtime operation.

            The people spend a fair amount of time removing trees and brush so the herring get a passage up from Snipatuit Pond to spawn. There is also a small run of herring on the Sippican River to Leonard’s Pond; the larger run is on the Mattapoisett.

            “(The count) hasn’t been improved that much,” said Benner. “They’re food for a lot of predatory fish and there’s a lot of big fish in there. If we don’t get them out (to the ocean to mature), we’re not going to get them back (to lay eggs).”

            It takes experience and skill to adjust the dikes connecting the ponds to the rivers and setting optimum water levels for the seasonal transfer of herring. A major concern with a dry summer is that, while the adults spawn and leave the pond by May, their offspring are not ready to leave until July. Many never make it out of the pond.

            “I hope to let as much water out of Snipatuit Pond as I could from the middle of June … they can stay in Snipatuit a long time, but when the bogs are flooded they can get sucked up into the bogs,” said Watling. “If nature was fine (this would happen in) dribs and drabs … so (I try to) get them out as early as possible. If the little ones are in Snipatuit now and we don’t get a substantial rain … there’s a chance they’ll get stranded on a cranberry bog.

            “I think we’re on the right track. I don’t think the cranberry industry has changed that much in the last 10 to 15 years – they’re more environmentally conscious.”

            A herring harvest isn’t likely until there are 50,000 strong in Snipatuit Pond. “Mattapoisett was one of the better herring-population rivers in the state, but we’ve certainly slipped way back,” said Benner, comparing his counts to the nearly million spawned in the Nemasket River through Middleborough and Lakeville.

            Recreational fishing has posed no threat to the tri-towns, according to Benner. “I think people are really good about the herring. It’s not like going out for trout. Back in colonial days, it was a food source, smoke them and fry them,” he said.

            Benner says the days of catch herring at the herring-fishing station at River Road and Route 6 and selling their carcasses to lobstermen as bait, “that’s been over for quite a while.”

            The moratorium against taking or possession of herring from many Massachusetts rivers including both the Mattapoisett and Sippican remains in effect. Since the 2014 recovery from 6,000 to 55,000, there have been declined counts, and Benner said improvements in counts must continue in order to sustain a fishery plan and justify an opening. In order to resume fishing, a sustainable harvest plan would have to be achieved, filed with and approved by the state Division of Marine Fisheries.

            While there is flow in Rochester, water levels are lower than Watling has ever seen, and his father was the town’s herring inspector before he was. Given the conditions, reopening the fishing of herring seems a long way off.

            “That’s the goal of Alewives Anonymous, but it’s my opinion and I told the state … they’ve asked the commercial fishermen to stay offshore during the spring migration,” said Watling.

            Offshore to most people means beyond Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, outside the 6-mile limit. But the depth of the water also factors.

            In Mattapoisett along Route 6, some 16,000 fish spread out over a period from mid-March to mid-May. “You’ve got to be there at the right time to see a bunch of them,” said Benner. “Clearing brush, we didn’t see any of them. Memorial Day Boat Race organizers help out on this.

            “We’re in it for a long run, I hope. You don’t need many adults to get a million eggs.”

By Mick Colageo