Greenfield officials have a decision to make about what kind of public space the area around Eunice Williams Covered Bridge should be.
The bridge and pumping station area upstream along the Green River Road afford access to the river, for cooling off, letting one’s dogs take a dip, taking in the scenery, even having a picnic.
And unlike, say, the Greenfield Swimming and Recreation Area downstream, it doesn’t come with an admission cost, lifeguards and formal picnic grounds and sanitary facilities.
The informal covered bridge swimming hole may have once been something of a local secret, an out-of-the-way spot that residents, particularly young people, took advantage of on hot summer days. Now, however, the word has gotten out, and more and more people are showing up, some perhaps from outside Greenfield.
More people using the river at the dam or upstream means there are more chances for dangerous or disturbing behavior that produce unwanted consequences, like litter, graffiti and alcohol use — or injuries ranging from cuts on broken bottles to more serious harm from falls or jumps off the dam or bridge.
“I have had calls and emails about the unsafe activities at the Pumping Station covered bridge,” Greenfield Mayor William Martin said recently. “Primarily, (they) focused on children jumping off the dam, picnicking above the dam, parking near the water, littering and defacing property. Mostly, (from) neighborhood residents, concerned with the historical value and hard work to bring this bridge and roadway back to vehicular use.”
Those complaints have resulted in new signs and additional police patrols in the area. The signs look to prohibit people from jumping off the bridge into the pool of water below as well as keeping swimmers away from the area upstream of the dam, which is part of the town’s water supply. As Paul Zilinski, the town’s water facilities operation supervisor, pointed out in a recent Recorder story, swimming above the dam poses a risk of being drawn into the pipe — which creates an undercurrent — especially for children. The danger isn’t only with getting pulled into the pipe. The undercurrent could cause a swimmer to panic, leading to some kind of accident.
Adding patrols, too, at least would keep a watch on where the town doesn’t want people to be, on top of the bridge, picnicking above the dam.
But they can’t easily address other behaviors associated with people using the area for recreation, things like littering, alcohol use and parking in inappropriate areas. Nor does the current low-key approach take into consideration loss of potential revenue at the Swimming and Recreation Area.
Times have changed, and it seems with more use and larger crowds, the situation calls for a more clearly defined policy about the river’s use here. It may mean taking a chapter from Deerfield, where parking around Stillwater Bridge was curtailed by erecting guardrails closer to the road.
But it seems that town officials need to have a frank discussion about the area with the goal of developing a plan for its use that everyone will understand and be expected to abide by.