Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [26]
The forest here is young, mostly white cedar and hemlock, spruce and birch. The air is alive with the peeping of chickadees and the skronk of blue jays. Fortin leads me toward a pool of water and directs my gaze toward a boil of bark chips at its bottom, about five inches down. “That’s spring number one,” he says, unexcited. The water looks dark, the edges of the small pool are steep and mossy, and frozen deer tracks are all over the place. Automatically my mind flashes on the Poland Spring ads of yore, with animated Bambis prancing around a woodland pool. I quote the ad—“from deep in the woods of Maine”—but Fortin, who’s even older than I am, has no idea what I’m talking about. (Either that or it’s a touchy subject. The slogan, which perhaps unconsciously channeled Thoreau’s Maine Woods, seems to have been dropped after Nestlé settled the suit that claimed Poland Spring water came not from deep in the woods but from boreholes along highways. Still, the company loves to show its springs to the media, perhaps because they’re such a strong visual antidote to the industrial facilities that bottle their output.)
On this day, Fortin and two colleagues are collecting data at monitoring wells and at springheads—pipes driven directly into the springs. “The level inside will be higher than the pool itself,” Fortin explains. “This gives us an idea of the hydraulic push behind the water.” He moves downstream to a brook and measures the water’s temperature and depth in the middle of a flume—an hourglass-shaped half-pipe placed in the streambed. When it’s running full, Fortin knows, this brook is producing 156 gallons per minute, or 224,640 gallons a day.
The identification of six springs on the Howe Farm, back in 2004, set in motion a massive (and massively expensive) effort to quantify how much underground water is available for pumping and how much of that can be taken without harm—a procedure that smaller companies don’t follow. Nestlé brought in hydrogeologists to survey soil and conduct seismic experiments. Along transects, they repeatedly laid down five hundred feet of cable, set off the four to six dynamite charges that ran its length, and measured the resulting sound waves, which gave them a picture of soil horizons: coarse, medium, fine, bedrock. Next, they laid down cables with electrical probes that sent shocks 120 feet into the earth. The resulting sound waves, when graphed, would indicate the soil’s conductivity—that is, how rapidly water would move horizontally and vertically through the sand and gravel layers.
After mapping the solid features of the underworld, technicians drilled monitoring wells and began calculating the elevation of the water table. Researchers studied land-use maps from fifty years ago and interviewed elderly town residents and foresters. “You want to know everything you can about the land’s history,” Brennan says. No springwater company wants to discover its property was once a chemical dump. Lab technicians compared water samples from each spring and its borehole. Flipping through a thick binder of graphs and reports, Fortin shows me a series of Piper diagrams, which are shaped like triangles and diamonds. He says their plotted points reveal an excellent geochemical match between the water that sprang from the earth and the water that Nestlé had pumped. To label borehole water springwater, says the FDA, the two must be “substantially similar.”
All this was in preparation for the big event: a seven-day