Reclaiming the Merrimack: An Action Plan to Clean the River

Reclaiming the Merrimack is a call-to-action book that outlines the history of the beloved river and reveals that the time is now to make it cleaner. The Merrimack is the site of the start of the Industrial Revolution, but commercial garbage and municipal effluent have gone into the river for decades. Yet more than 600,000 residents still get their drinking water from this waterway, so it is imperative to reduce the pollution. Author-journalist Dyke Hendrickson provides a path to improvement. Billions of federal dollars are now available through the infrastructure plan by the Biden Administration to improve sewage-treatment plants and drinking-water facilities. “This is the best time to clean rivers and lakes since the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972,” says Hendrickson, an award-winning writer who is the author of seven other books. Readers will learn how local governments can access clean-up money—and how much better the river will be when it is fully clean.

Dyke Hendrickson is an author-journalist living in Newburyport, birthplace of the Coast Guard. He recently wrote Plum Island, A Vulnerable Gem (Fonthill Media, 2022). Hendrickson's book on the Merrimack is his eighth. The author is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College with a degree in history, and he did master's work at the University of Maine, Orono. He has been a writer and/or editor with the Portland Press Herald, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Boston Herald. Other publications he has written for include USA Today, the Boston Globe, and Tennis magazine. Most recently, he was the waterfront reporter for The Daily News in Newburyport. For several years he hosted a podcast titled “Life Along the Merrimack,” which aired on local cable TV. Hendrickson is a former adjunct professor of journalism at Northeastern University.