“Why are people talking about conserving water? I thought Manchester had plenty of water.”
Just a couple years ago, I would have agreed without a second thought. I never heard about serious water shortages in our town, unlike Hamilton and other less-fortunate towns which seem to restrict watering like clockwork every year. Of course, there were restrictions in drought years, which many (most?) of us followed, but nobody ever said Manchester was really short of drinking water.
I knew about a Town well near the high school and golf course. Occasionally, I’d driven past some reservoir (or two?) in the woods past the dump. But overall I thought maybe the talk about conserving water was just another episode of “save the planet,” “hug a tree,” or “big-green-lawns-are-a-sign-of-moral-failure.”
Then I worked for 18 months on the Town’s Water Resources Task Force. More than two dozen of us did deep dives into water sources, water usage, contaminants, conservation, etc. From that work I now know differently—Manchester no longer has plenty of clean, safe drinking water. That’s a fact not a perception or a political position—ask any of the two dozen people who worked on that Task Force or the five experts we worked with. There’s a dangerous contaminant in our drinking water which we are not yet treating but should be—and shortly will have no choice but to treat. That fact changes things dramatically—Manchester no longer has “all you can drink (or sprinkle).” Instead, the Town and each of us need to ask, “How much do we have to conserve so that we can afford to keep our drinking water safe.”
Confused by that question?
You’re right if you think it’s pretty complicated, so let me try to break it down. The immediate problem is PFAS, a highly toxic family of thousands of man-made chemicals that show up everywhere from our clothing to fast food packaging and sunblock. We’ve been exposing our families to this stuff for over 50 years, but EPA is only recently defining the threat to health and calling for urgent action.
Ours isn’t the only public water supply facing the urgent need to filter out PFAS compounds. Probably half the towns and cities in Massachusetts have similar PFAS contamination, mostly in their primary or sole source of drinking water. But Manchester has a different problem since we have two sources producing our drinking water—a primary source (Gravelly Pond Reservoir) and secondary source (Lincoln Street Well). This gives Manchester an enviable redundancy but could also give us more options than most towns for remediating PFAS, and a more complicated decision to make.
Lincoln Street Well (LSW) has much higher levels of PFAS than Gravelly Pond, according to the regular testing by Chuck Dam’s DPW. LSW also has much less treatment in place today than Gravelly Pond with its adjacent large-scale Water Treatment Plant. Therefore it’s going to cost much more to filter PFAS out of LSW water, whether it’s done in a new building we’ll have to build near the well or by laying new pipes to take LSW water up to the Water Treatment Plant for filtering and then send it back to the well site. If we didn’t need the 30-40% of drinking water that LSW provides us annually, we could avoid that huge investment.
That’s why we’re talking about water conservation! It’s not because we don’t have a lot of water but because we don’t have a lot of clean, safe drinking water. (This isn’t widely understood, even among our Town leadership.)
Let’s get into the details. Manchester is outstanding (and not in a good way) for using more drinking water per capita and much more in summer vs. winter than almost any other town in Massachusetts. This is entirely because we use so much drinking water outdoors in the warm months, mostly for irrigating our lawns. (Compare our total usage in January, February and March, which averages 46 gallons per resident per day vs. 116 in July, August and September.) On average over the past 10 years, we use 35% of our drinking water for outdoor irrigation, or 55-60 million gallons per year.
In comparison, LSW provides on average 80-90 million gallons of drinking water per year. Gravelly Pond can replace a good fraction of that, having more capacity than what it’s provided on average over the past 10 years (according to groundwater research and “safe yield” analysis earlier this year by geohydrologist Scott Horsley and his colleagues.)
Here is the connection between conservation and the cost of remediating PFAS: if we as households can conserve about 30 million gallons annually, we’ll have the option of retiring LSW instead of remediating it at huge expense. Thirty (30) million gallons is less than half of our current enormous outdoor irrigation usage. If we conserve that much water, our average usage would drop below the State-mandated guideline of 65 gallons per person per day, making Manchester less egregious in the eyes of State regulators. (Remember the years Manchester spent under a Consent Order limiting our sewage hookups while we brought our Inflow & Infiltration rate into line with State guidelines?) What will it take to reduce our annual usage by 30 million gallons? Examples from across the country show that successful water conservation takes a host of carrots and sticks plus a bunch of patience. (Fixing the broken recycled water system at our sewage treatment plant would certainly help, too – that plant uses a ton of drinking water until then.) The Water Task Force has put on the table dozens of recommendations for conserving water and has proposed a detailed timetable and workplan for the Town to follow. As yet, the Select Board has devoted time over the past six months only to the proposed Conservation Water Rates, without having come to a decision.
The onus falls on us residential users, since the combined commercial, governmental and non-profit water usage is only about 10% of the total. Of the 2,000 residential water accounts, only one-third use substantially more in the summer than the winter. While the other 1,400 families can save some water by limiting indoor usage, reducing outdoor usage will provide most of the water savings.
A resident of Manchester, Steve Gang chairs the Conservation Commission and also chaired the Water Resources Protection Task Force, which over 18 months examined Manchester’s water usage and made recommendations on conservation and other measures to protect the future of municipal water in its July 2023 concluding report to the Manchester Select Board to support future regulation and water rates.
