Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [4]
While some water activists are concerned with truck traffic in their rural towns, and others focus on the morality of selling water for large profits, Dearborn’s “big bitch,” as he puts it, is that Nestlé is “ruining the lake” by pumping from the springs that feed it.
“The lake is dead now!” Dearborn says to me, in a tone that implies this is obvious. “The water stays in it too long because it’s not being flushed by Wards Brook. It’s warmer and there’s increased growth of weeds on the bottom, which has lowered property values.” Houses have been taken off the market because they didn’t sell, Dearborn says. He worries that soon the pond will resemble Brownfield Bog—a low area that forms the southern end of Lovewell.
The heart of the two-thousand-acre Wards Brook drainage basin is the Wards Brook aquifer, made up of hundred-foot layers of permeable sands and gravel. It drains an area south of town, flowing north and then east into Lovewell Pond. Since 1955, the investor-owned Fryeburg Water Company has pumped water from the aquifer and piped it to nearly eight hundred customers in town, plus roughly seventy over the state line in East Conway, New Hampshire. Then in 1997, Hugh Hastings, president of the water company, paid a visit to Howard Dearborn.
“He stood on my deck,” Dearborn says as he gestures over an array of bird feeders fattening the squirrels, “and he told me the town was growing and that he needed more water.” Hastings had pointed out to Dearborn the tracts of forest the Hastings family owned: across the lake, to the northeast, was Mount Tom, which Hastings had recently sold to the Nature Conservancy; and around to the south was Pleasant Mountain, of which he and his family, which includes a state senator, own half. (“The Hastingses are like the Magnificent Ambersons,” a conservation worker from the region tells me.) Eventually, Hastings got to the point of his visit: he asked Dearborn for a right-of-way through his property so that he could drill a second well, near his first, in the Wards Brook aquifer.
“And like a dumb ass I let him cut a road through my property,” Dearborn says, shaking his head. “I even helped him out with my bulldozer.”
Years passed, and then, in 2004, Dearborn read something in the local paper about Poland Spring attempting to build a bottling plant in Fryeburg. He and others began to ask themselves, “Is there that much water here?” Few had been paying much attention to the tanker trucks rumbling through town. Now, a citizens group from Hiram, through which trucks passed en route to the bottling plant in Hollis, counted ninety-two trucks in twenty-four hours. It happened seven days a week. In 2005, the company took more than 168 million gallons of water out of Fryeburg.
Where was that water coming from? The well near Dearborn’s property, it turned out. “I thought Hugh wanted that water for the town of Fryeburg, not for Poland Spring,” Dearborn says today, furious at the memory. Curiously, the Fryeburg Water Company doesn’t sell the water to Poland Spring: that would be legal but it wouldn’t be profitable. Maine’s public utility commission forbids the water company from selling water at a price higher than it charges its town customers. Instead, the water is pumped by the water company and sold to a recently formed entity called Pure Mountain Springs for less than a penny a gallon. Pure Mountain Springs, now once removed from the PUC’s price cap, turns around and sells the water to Poland Spring for four cents a gallon more. Who is Pure Mountain Springs, this ingenious middleman? It is Eric Carlson, a hydrogeologist who lives downstate, and John Hastings, the water company’s superintendent and a son of Hugh.
Across the United States, surface water—the ocean, ponds, and rivers—are held in common as part of the public trust. But groundwater falls under different rules, depending on the state. Maine operates with a rule called absolute dominion,