At a fateful town meeting May 6 Eastham will decide whether it is necessary to spend 115 million dollars on a townwide public water system. That’s around 850 dollars per year per household, year after year, not including the thousands to hook up to the system for those who want to.
The old commonsense of “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is still good advice. The question is, is Eastham’s current water system broke? Given the letters to papers and questions on the town website, a lot of citizens are not at all sure about that
From the tone of some advocates’ letters it would seem as though sheer prejudice in favor of big system is a real factor in the push for townwide water. It’s as if the traditional, rural system is inherently substandard, tantamount to third- world negligence.
But as has been repeatedly pointed out, there is no clear evidence for what is being presented as a crisis—an alarming recent downward trajectory in water quality. The great majority of houses test out at 2 ppm nitrates or better, the level considered “natural” and well below the state level of 10 ppm.
As one letter quoted a selectman, there is no evidence that anyone has ever been harmed or is being harmed from the well system.
Neighboring Wellfleet is being given credit by Easthamites for having had the initiative and foresight they criticize their town for lacking. “Twenty years ago, while other towns took proactive measures to solve a critical and inevitable issue, Eastham town leaders decided that drinking water wasn’t a priority” went one letter. How soon we forget.
In fact Wellfleet (which drinks from the same aquifer as Eastham) had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the era of public water and it’s a good guess that there are many in town who still maintain it wasn’t necessary.
In a well-attended planning board hearing in the late 1990s on the advisability of public water or sewer, both ideas were very unpopular. While bottled water was being used in the suburbs in favor of the chlorinated version coming from faucets, most Wellfleetians were used to bragging about our well water.
In was only when the state declared our town water a problem that we acted, and then with considerable heel-dragging. For as long as readings had been taken, there had, not surprisingly, been high nitrate readings in a few downtown addresses and near the transfer station. In 2000 the state decided that those readings constituted a problem that required a public water solution. The relatively small system we finally installed to address the few troubled addresses (at a tiny fraction of the cost of the proposed Eastham system) was motivated not for the most part by complaints from citizens, but by the need to satisfy the state.
In 2009, the state still pressuring us, we enlarged the system modestly to include about a quarter of the town’s housing stock. At this point about a third of those addresses have applied to hook up, whether because of poor well water or simple preference for a public system is not clear. (If you build it they will come.)
The possibility of individual filtration systems for the few addresses with high nitrate readings was, I believe, never seriously looked into, in part because the state made it clear it was interested only in the big system.
Because most of us continue to be quite satisfied with the quality of water from our wells, we are motivated to fight NStar’s plans to spray herbicides.
We’re slowly getting used to the most prominent monument in town, not a traditional church steeple but a water tank in the shape of a huge teed-up golf ball. The public water gets chlorinated from time to time, as deemed necessary by those running the system.
If Eastham’s traditional system is broke, it’s broke, and that’s for Eastham to decide. But it seems to me that it would be a shame for our neighbor to spend all that money out of prejudice in favor of the big system and kneejerk notions of what constitutes progress.
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