Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [29]
But no one knew quite how large Pure Mountain had become until January of 2004, when the borehole that serves town customers, number one, quit pumping. Hugh Hastings says it was a mechanical problem that left villagers dry for more than a day, and with low pressure that necessitated boiling water for four more. Meanwhile, the tanker trucks kept filling up with Fryeburg water and rolling out to Poland Spring bottling plants. When the town’s pump came back on, Pure Mountain Springs was suddenly taking water from Fryeburg’s original spring well, number one, and the town was drinking from a third well recently built by Eric Carlson and John Hastings, across the street and up Porter Road. (The town could also use well number two.) The whole thing seemed a bit off to me: public utility commissions generally must approve switches in source water, but no approval marked the swap from well one to well three, and the Fryeburg Water Company hadn’t alerted its customers to the change. Why was it so important for Pure Mountain to use well one? Because it had received all its operating permits based on the water quality of the original spring.
Months passed, and a citizens group announced the results of a twenty-four-hour truck count: nearly a hundred tankers, each capable of holding 8,440 gallons, were pulling out of Fryeburg every day. Was that a lot of water? Compared to what the town used—about 200,000 gallons per day in the summer, half that in winter—yes. Did the town have any say about it? No. As a regular customer of the Fryeburg Water Company, Pure Mountain Springs can buy all the water it wants—no cap or permit needed. The moment residents realized how much water was leaving town, and who was profiting, was the moment their faith in the Fryeburg Water Company—and in one of the town’s most prominent families—began to waver.
Trying to figure out who is taking water from where in Fryeburg confounds me, and plenty of others. “There’s no getting to the bottom of it,” Jim Wilfong, a former state legislator who started a group called H2O for ME to protect Maine aquifers, says. The Fryeburg Water Company doesn’t make a lot of money, but its assets—the springs and land—are thought to be worth tens of millions. Between 2003 and 2007, Pure Mountain Springs had revenue of roughly three million dollars, from which it paid the Fryeburg Water Company roughly eight hundred thousand dollars. To its credit, the town is currently trying to regulate future pumping in Wards Brook, but when the planning board holds “informational” meetings, residents leave as mystified as when they arrived. “I think the planning board chairman sidesteps questions,” Emily Fletcher, the town librarian, says. “People hear what he says, but they don’t know what he says.”
“It would be easy to understand if you could see it,” Wilfong says. “But this is all purposefully hidden. It’s easy to move around if people don’t know what’s cooking. It’s the same all around the world.” I think about the way New York City bullied landowners in the Catskill and Delaware watersheds into selling their property, how Los Angeles outwitted desperate valley farmers to appropriate the Owens River, how Chicago strongmen reversed the flow of the Chicago River to shunt their city’s sewage all the way to St. Louis. Sneaking water around might seem difficult, but it isn’t always: wells are dispersed, no one can see how much of it moves through pipes and into tankers, and no one knows for sure how much remains underground.
When I ask Hugh Hastings how much water Pure Mountain Springs and the water company itself pump from Wards Brook, he throws a lot of numbers at me, interchanging cubic feet and gallons, and gallons per day and gallons per year. He punches numbers into an adding machine as he talks, and I admit to him I have a hard time keeping Poland Spring and Pure Mountain Springs straight. He says genially, “I mix ’em up too!” Essentially, they are the same.
But Hastings sticks to his story: “All of this was done with good intentions, for the