(Photo: John Leach at the Rotary meeting)
Bans on outdoor water use in South Berwick are going to be more common in the years ahead. This was the message given by John Leach, superintendent of the South Berwick Water District in a talk at the local Rotary Club recently.
Water is becoming scarcer while usage has been going up, Leach told roughly a dozen members of the South Berwick-Eliot Rotary Club, who meet weekly for breakfast at Berwick Academy. As land becomes more valuable and harder to come by and water sources are depleted, the need to conserve water is growing.
“We’ve been spoiled in the US. Everyone wants green grass,” said Leach, who was the invited guest speaker for the week. “People have underground systems,” he noted, and they run every day, rain or shine, as “no one wants to manage what they have.”
One of the main projects now in the works involves tying the South Berwick system together with the North Berwick system. When this is completed, North Berwick will be able to get water from South Berwick in the event of a problem in that town’s system. The opposite will also be true but only after South Berwick builds a pump station.
Eventually, the town could also tie in with Sanford, which has a surplus of water, and like South Berwick and North Berwick, uses groundwater for its supply.
South Berwick has 34 miles of water mains and 172 hydrants Leach said in summarizing the infrastructure of South Berwick’s system, which is run by the quasi-governmental district. It pumps about 82 million gallons per year. The most it has pumped in a day was 397,000 on demand, which occurred on June 3 when the weather was hot. Most of it was for irrigation.
The water extends now to Hooper Sands Road and to Meadow Pond Road and serves about half the households in town. The rest have wells.
The town has four sources that pump water up to the top of Powderhouse Hill to two million-gallon storage tanks that sit side by side. The tanks were last cleaned in 2012 when a diver went down to hose off and skim the bottom of the tank, mostly clearing it of iron and manganese..
Asked about road salts impact on town drinking water, Leach said, “Road salt has an effect on everything and in the long term it’s something everyone has to keep an eye on.”
District employees keep tabs on the town’s water infrastructure 24-7, Leach said. They can see water levels and which of the stations – Agamenticus, Blackwell in Berwick, Junction Road or Willow Road – are pumping from a computer screen.
Because of new federal regulations regarding acceptable levels of lead and PFAS, known as forever chemicals, the district is taking an inventory of the town’s entire water system.
During the last two summers, the district has imposed one voluntary ban on water use outside and one mandatory ban, Leach said. “Even when we had rain people were asking, ‘when are they going to lift the water conservation ban?’ but this will happen more and more.”
