Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [20]
But what’s in tap water, really? I’m eager to find out, since I drink it day and night, but first I have an appointment back in Maine, to check out the “infamous” Fryeburg situation.
Chapter 3
MYSTERIES OF THE DEEP
ON A WARM October morning, I meet Miles Waite on Howard Dearborn’s sandy beach. Lovewell Pond looks like black glass, and it’s ringed with beeches, paper birch, and red maples, whose brilliant yellow and orange canopies reflect jaggedly along its shore. We load some equipment aboard a skiff, which Dearborn himself built, and shove off. This is Waite’s fourth visit to the pond, and the hydrogeologist, who is based in Burlington, Vermont, is here to collect yet another round of samples and readings. Dearborn is certain the lake’s flora and fauna have changed since Poland Spring came to town, and that the “aquafire”—as he pronounces it—is depleted. He hired Waite to produce the evidence to prove it.
At the first sample station, which he locates with a GPS, Waite measures the elevation of the lake bottom and its temperature, then starts filling an assortment of bottles with water. Lab technicians will analyze them for chlorophyll a, orthophosphorus, total phosphorus, Kjeldahl nitrogen, and E. coli. At the second sample station, Waite takes a deep sample with a Van Dorn bottle. He shows me a capsule the size of a small fire extinguisher on a wire tether. Both ends are open; when the bottle hits the lake bottom, Waite releases a lead weight that slides down the wire and smacks into a release button, which traps a water sample inside. Next comes a reading with a pressure-sensitive thermometer. “Fifty-five point seven degrees at thirty-eight point eight feet,” Waite drones, logging the numbers on a form. Except when Waite walks from bow to stern, the boat is motionless. “Last time we were out here it was all whitecaps,” he says.
The summer before, Waite and his team had collected sediment with an Ekman grab sampler, another spring-loaded gizmo that trapped a handful of lake-bottom sediment. A lab analyzed its total phosphorus and total organic carbon, and it ran a grain-size analysis. The choices were gravel, sand, silt, or clay. “And what was it?” I ask.
“It was sand, with some silt. This tells you the potential for plant growth; plants don’t do well in coarse sand.” A colleague of Waite’s was studying the lake’s vegetation; Waite also had data on turbidity, or the amount of suspended sediment in the lake, gleaned from a machine called a nephelometer, which beams light through water and measures how much of it reflects off suspended particles onto a light detector. In previous Lovewell Pond studies, researchers collected data on water transparency using a Secchi disk—a black-and-white plastic circle lowered on a measured string. It works like this: from the shady side of the boat, lower the disk. When you can’t see the disk anymore, write down the corresponding number on the string, indicating depth. Voilà.
A few months ago, Dearborn had photographed rafts of submerged plant fronds and sent them to Tom Brennan, basically blaming the pond’s excessive plant growth on his company’s appetite for groundwater. Brennan thanked Dearborn for the pictures and wrote, “You may have milfoil.” Milfoil is an invasive plant introduced into Maine lakes by careless boaters. Dearborn wrote back, “I am sorry that you seem to be having an eye problem! . . . Maybe your Optometrist can cure your ‘seeing things that are not there’ problem.” Dearborn believes the plants are native, and they bolted because of excess nutrients in the lake.
Gene Bergoffen, who lives on the lake about a mile and a half down from Dearborn, is the president of the Lovewell Pond Association, and the chairman of the town’s planning board. He sees things differently. “I know of no specific environmental