UV is Not the Answer for Kings Beach

 Kings Beach 2026: Rinse and Repeat 

Following the conclusion of the 2026 beach season, it is anticipated that state and city leadership will again characterize King's Beach as the 'dirtiest in the state' to press for a permanent ultraviolet (UV) treatment facility. This approach represents a costly, flawed 'end-of-pipe' solution yielding marginal environmental benefits.  By 2023 estimates, the construction of this facility would cost an initial capital investment of at least $23 million, alongside $170,000 annual operating and maintenance cost over a projected 20-year lifespan. These monetary expenses fail to account for the devastating aesthetic and practical impacts of locating a treatment plant directly within a surrounding beachfront community.

Last fall, the City of Lynn and its consultant, Kleinfelder, declared the 2025 UV pilot study "effective and successful." However, an independent analysis by a local scientist and engineer reached a much different conclusion. Their review found that the UV system failed to significantly improve water quality, noting a 43% statistical probability that any recorded difference was due entirely to chance.   Crucially, the Kleinfelder report omitted critical flow data and failed to disclose that the study was cut short due to design and multiple operational and technical missteps. Furthermore, a public records request failed to produce any evidence of calibration logs, training records, or third-party test sample validation, despite a MassDEP requirement.

In response to these failures, the independent scientists who critiqued the 2025 pilot submitted a rigorous testing plan for January 2026. The methodology was designed to measure the "daily dose" of enterococcal bacteria by collecting high-resolution flow data with daily sampling of the two culverts that empty onto the beach.

Kleinfelder Consulting adopted the substance of the methodology for the 2026 season, and the Mayor of Lynn signed a $195,000 work order on April 1, 2026. However, Swampscott stakeholders were  excluded from the decision-making process. The contract was signed without review from Swampscott’s Water and Sewer Infrastructure Advisory Committee or the scientists who originally designed the methodology. It took aggressive follow-up and repeated requests to obtain the project documents. Perhaps most damaging is the misalignment of the project's core goals:

• Swampscott is seeking to quantify the effectiveness of its extensive and ongoing IDDE efforts to discuss a potential lifting of the EPA consent decree.

• The City of Lynn’s agenda is purely focused on sizing a permanent UV facility. Lynn’s municipal website confirms this: “the data may help refine sizing assumptions for a future UV system. Wet weather testing will help specify and detail windows during which the UV system would or would not be effective due to turbidity and flow”

According to a MassDEP official, a UV facility fails to meet the requirements dictated by the 2021 consent decree, meaning this $23 million project would do nothing to lift the federal mandate.

Review of the Summer 2026 Testing Data

Daily monitoring at Kings Beach during the 2026 season reinforces the well-documented relationship between rainfall and water-quality exceedances—issues a UV plant cannot adequately solve.

• May 18 to June 18: Out of 96 samples taken across 32 days, there were 5 exceedances, resulting in 5 beach closure days.

• June 19 to July 10: Beach closures spiked to 11 days, driven directly by 4.59 inches of rainfall during this 22-day period. Further compounding this, a 20-minute Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) discharge at Stacy Brook on June 30 released approximately 500,000 gallons of untreated or partially treated sewage onto Kings Beach.

• August Data Anomalies: On August 5, 12, and 17, testing reported 2 orders of magnitude higher with exceedances of 24,200 cfu. However, these spikes were directly contradicted by adjacent test site data, as well as culvert data independently gathered by MassDEP and Kleinfelder. These highly suspect readings artificially inflated the Geomean(a second statistical criteria used to decide beach closures) above the 34 cfu limit, This triggers up to 5 days of  closures following each occurrence.

•  For the beach season through August 31, the Geomean calculation was responsible for 16 days of beach closure even when testing at the 3 sites along Kings beach tested within acceptable limits.

The persistent push for a permanent UV facility relies on flawed testing, misaligned priorities, and a fundamental misinterpretation of the pollution at Kings Beach. The data from the past two years clearly demonstrate that a $23 million end-of-pipe treatment plant will not mitigate the severe impacts of heavy rainfall, prevent combined sewer overflows, or satisfy the requirements of the 2021 federal consent decree.

Swampscott has rightly recognized that actual environmental restoration requires the demanding, methodical work of Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination (IDDE). The City of Lynn and state leadership must follow this example and redirect their focus and funding toward these source-elimination efforts. Building a facility to mask pollution at the outfall is the expedient choice; but locating and repairing illicit discharges at their source is the only responsible one. It is time for officials to abandon this costly distraction and commit to the repair of the region's underlying infrastructure.