Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [76]
With the Denmark decision behind them, Dearborn and his cohort are now focusing their energy on the planning board, which will soon be reconsidering the tanker station permit. Is it, in fact, a low-impact business, compatible with other allowed uses in a rural residential district? The Poland Spring trucks on Portland Street are already so loud, say townsfolk, that you can’t talk in your living room with the windows open. “These are huge issues for a little town to deal with,” says Mike Dana, a filmmaker who moved here from New York to get away from truck traffic. “If you can put this in a rural residential district, it sets a precedent. You can put them all over Fryeburg, eighty percent of which is zoned rural residential.”
This time around, the water activists are hoping to keep Gene Bergoffen from voting. “He consults with the trucking industry,” Scott Gamwell says. “That’s a conflict of interest.” Nestlé’s lawyers disagree: “Not only is such knowledge not a basis for disqualification,” they write to the town’s attorney, “but should be welcomed.” Meanwhile, as a sort of insurance policy, 150 Fryeburg residents sign a petition calling for a moratorium on permits for “omitted uses” in rural residential zones—essentially, a halt to places where tanker trucks can fill up with water.
It turns out they don’t need it. When the planning board meets in early October, watched by three Nestlé representatives, plus a Nestlé stenographer, the board votes, three to one, to keep Bergoffen from voting on the trucking station. The chairman collects his papers, strides out, and within half an hour resigns his position. Following an emotional town meeting in November—at which the tanker site is compared to a missile-launch facility and Hugh Hastings threatens the town with higher water rates should Poland Spring pull out of town—three of the remaining four board members vote no on the tanker station.
The Nestlé opponents are pleased with their wins (passing the moratorium, then ousting Bergoffen, which led to the defeat of the tanker-station permit), but they know too much now to imagine Poland Spring will disappear. The company owns or leases quite a bit of land in the area, Fryeburg has copious good water, and the market for Poland Spring is only growing.
It’s hard to imagine Lovewell Pond or the Wards Brook aquifer drying up, like the Aral Sea when large-scale irrigation of the desert got under way, but that’s probably what they thought in Kazakhstan fifty years ago too. (And in Atlanta as recently as a year ago.) Aquifers that feed streams and lakes are invisible, and humans are generally oblivious to incremental changes in their environment—that’s why miners used to employ canaries. Crises, though, generally get our attention. The crack-up of the Exxon Valdez begot double-hulled tankers, the conflagration of the Cuyahoga River inspired the Clean Water Act, and the putrid state of the Mississippi in New Orleans spurred the Safe Drinking Water Act.
I visit the canary of Lovewell Pond. Dearborn looks thinner and paler than he did several months ago, but he’s as feisty as ever. I ask him about the buffer zone around the town’s wells, and before I know it the conversation devolves into a debate over the nation’s antipollution laws. I think they should be strengthened, but Dearborn, who ran a manufacturing plant for fifty years, interprets my position as antibusiness. He shouts at me, so I move on to what should be a neutral topic.
“How’s the lake level now?”
“The level between the lake and the river is almost zero,” he says sourly.
“How do you know that?” I’m impressed with his precision but want to know how he comes to it.
“I know within an inch,” he says,