Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [5]
But the Fryeburg Water Company and Pure Mountain Springs aren’t the only companies sticking straws into the Wards Brook aquifer. Across the street and upstream from the Fryeburg Water Company’s wells, Rick Eastman owns a large plot of land on which he runs a plant nursery. In 2004, he and a local cabinetmaker named Jeff Walker dug a well on Eastman’s property, formed the WE Corporation, and began selling water to a bottler they won’t name (it isn’t Poland Spring). By 2006, around eight hundred thousand gallons a day were flowing out of the Wards Brook aquifer into tankers and into town pipes. Meanwhile, Howard Dearborn’s well, in the woods behind his house, was intermittently sucking air, for which he blames overzealous commercial pumping. More and more Fryeburg residents are concerned not only with the future quantity and quality of their drinking water, but also with the impact of pumping on the environment. What’s happening to the aquatic organisms, the plants, and the other creatures that depend on flow from these springs? Others are asking if the desires of a multinational corporation should trump the wishes of the local community.
These frustrated citizens are doing all they can think of to stop the water juggernaut. A small group accused the town’s planning board of being in Nestlé’s pocket; they tried (but failed) to decommission its members. A former state legislator is lobbying to impose a tax on large commercial groundwater withdrawals in Maine. Poland Spring, after failing to buy significant tracts of land over the Wards Brook aquifer, bought land in the adjacent town of Denmark, where it hopes to pump 105 million gallons of water a year, send it through a pipeline to East Fryeburg, and load it into tanker trucks bound for the plant in Hollis. The multistage plan hit a wrinkle, however, when the town’s board of appeals retracted its approval for the truck-loading station. Nestlé, which had been playing nice with Fryeburg so far, donating money to a local school and the recreation department, spun around and took the town to court. Now neighbors aren’t talking to one another; some residents are boycotting the library, because it’s headed by a staunch Nestlé opponent; legal fees are piling up; and more than a hundred thousand dollars has been spent on independent water reports. “You can’t shake a stick without hitting a hydrogeologist in this town,” the town manager tells me when I ask for one of these reports.
Fryeburg is tied up in fits. Its abundance of fine water has cast its unwitting residents into the middle of a social, economic, and environmental drama. The characters I meet begin to take on a Shakespearean aspect: there are seers and clowns, learned counselors and crooked leaders, scientists, scapegoats, and mercenaries. The stage is grand: vast swathes of rich farmland encircled by a sinuous river, mossy-banked springs linked to fathomless underground pools. Incomplete knowledge drives the town’s water narrative: no one can say for sure how much water lies beneath Fryeburg or what removing it will do. No one can say for sure which of the town wells supplies Poland Spring, versus the town, at any given time. No one knows for sure the relationship between town gatekeepers and Nestlé Waters. And so bad feelings spread like a miasma.