About
Flagging Website
Of the many services that the CRWA provides to the greater Boston community, one of those is monitoring whether it is safe to swim and/or boat in the Charles River. The CRWA Flagging Program uses a system of color-coded flags to indicate whether or not the river's water quality is safe for boating at various boating locations between Watertown and Boston. Flag colors are based on E. coli and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) levels; blue flags indicate suitable boating conditions and red flags indicate potential health risks.
See the website's about page for more about the website functionality and how it relates to the flagging program's objectives.
See the development resources overview for more information on how this project started and how we came to make the design decisions that you see here today.
Code for Boston
Code for Boston is the group that built the CRWA's flagging website. You can find a list of individual contributors here
Code for Boston is a volunteer Civic Technology meetup. We are part of the Code for America Brigade network, and are made up of developers, designers, data geeks, citizen activists, and many others who use creative technology to solve civic and social problems.
Charles River
The Charles River flows 80 miles from Hopkinton, Mass. to Boston Harbor. The Charles River is the most prominent urban river in New England. It is a major source of recreation and a readily-available connection to the natural world for residents of the Boston metropolitan area. The entire Charles River drains rain and melted snow from a watershed area of 310 square miles.
Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA)
The Charles River Watershed Association ("CRWA") was formed in 1965, the same year that Dirty Water peaked at #11 on the Billboard singles chart. Via the CRWA's website:
CRWA is one of the country’s oldest watershed organizations and has figured prominently in major cleanup and protection efforts. Since our earliest days of advocacy, we have worked with government officials and citizen groups from 35 Massachusetts watershed towns from Hopkinton to Boston.
The EPA also relies on sample data collected by the CRWA to construct its report card.