Taking a Closer Look at Connecticut's Drinking Water
Plant Science Day 2000: The Samuel W. Johnson Memorial Lecture
Claire C. Bennitt
Chair, South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority
Good Morning.
I feel honored to have been invited by Dr. Anderson to deliver the Samuel W. Johnson Lecture at the Experiment Station’s Plant Science Day. I know two previous speakers well- John Lyman and Susan Faulkner - and consider myself to be far less qualified than they.
So I have to say first, thank you Dr. Anderson for the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite topics - Connecticut’s drinking water supply and its vulnerable superior quality: It is not imported from China, not manufactured in Mexico, nor raised in California – It’s home grown.
The second thing I must say is that I am not a scientist, as will be readily apparent to those of you who are. However, I have learned the language and mastered more facts than just two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen produce water.
Let me share some of the water quality and resource facts:
Fact: Connecticut receives between 40 to 50 inches of rain every year, providing us with more than adequate water supplies.
Fact: Connecticut is one of two states in the country that does not allow drinking water to be taken from bodies of water that receive treated sanitary sewage effluent.
Fact: Connecticut has recognized that land use and water quality are inextricably linked.
Fact: The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s policy of a multi-barrier approach to protecting drinking water quality identified source protection and water treatment as both necessary to safe drinking water and the same can be said about Connecticut’s policy for providing safe drinking water.
Fact: Connecticut has adopted water quality standards more strict than those required by EPA and those standards have required water treatment filtration plants to be built on every surface water supply.
Fact: Twenty years ago, testing for compounds in the water were reported in parts per million; today parts per billion and parts per trillion are routinely analyzed.
However, with all these facts, the biggest challenge confronting our water industry is water supply. It is not a scientific challenge but instead a political one.
For example, let us review how the water utility serving this area was formed. It came about because of political concerns: about one city owning the water utility that serves this south central region, about the possibility of water company land sales that could have changed the growth and financial patterns of its suburbs - some of whom had no water customers, and about the financial capability of the water utility to build filtration plants necessary to comply with the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
The issue of city ownership went away when compromises were made to establish the South Central Connecticut Regional Water District. However, the issues of land sales along with sophisticated and expensive water treatment processes – issues that we faced twenty years ago -- are still concerns.
Even with relatively clean water at the source, the EPA requires extremely expensive treatment techniques and will most likely mandate more in the future.
Before addressing the EPA regulatory situation, let’s examine another hot political issue affecting our industry. The issue of land sales. All three of the Connecticut’s regulatory agencies that oversee water companies are involved in the land sales issue.
The Department of Health must approve changes of use or dispositions of Class I and II land, classifications established by the legislature in recognition of the relationship of land use and water quality. The Commissioner can deny applications for sales or can approve them, based on regulations adopted through the public process.
The Department of Public Utility Control decides how the proceeds of land sales are distributed, that is whether to the shareholder or the ratepayers or a combination of both. Since most investor owned utilities have viewed their lands as financial assets, sales have gone forward both to enrich shareholders and to provide capital for improvements, particularly expensive water treatment facilities.
The Department of Environmental Protection has most recently come into the picture because it now has available sizeable a amount of funds to help in the purchase of lands for open space protection and public water supply protection by municipalities, water utilities and conservation organizations.
There are about 130,000 acres of water utility lands in Connecticut, a highly significant portion of the state’s undeveloped land. Residents, municipalities and the state always have considered water utility lands to be open space forever and when land sales by water utilities have been proposed, it has been in a highly charged emotional atmosphere. Typically a water company gets an offer from a developer before offering land to the town in which it is located or to the state, as the law requires. The selling price is then far beyond available money for open space protection.
Presently one of the large investor owned utilities is in discussions with DEP about how to preserve its lands. While new legislation requires conservation easements on Class II land before sales, failure by the parties involved to reach a satisfactory agreement may contribute to an attempt for the public to acquire the investor owned utility by the means of eminent domain.
Sales of Class III lands, properties not on a drinking water supply watershed held by utilities, do go on, and recently have been funded for open space protection with the new
grants from the State’s Open Space & Watershed Land Acquisition Grant Program. The state maintains permanent conservation easements on the lands purchased with this fund.
Not all water utilities view public drinking water supply watershed lands both as financial instruments and as a means of providing clean water. At the Regional Water Authority, source water protection is given very high priority. We own over twenty four thousand acres of land, almost all of which is drinking water supply watershed land. We sell very little land. But, when we do, we turn to a municipality or nonprofit for help in protecting the land. Working with these various groups proves that land conservation can yield multiple benefits. In many cases it protects water resources while in other cases fulfills a community’s open space, park and recreational needs. Our policy is to take the proceeds from the land sales to purchase more watershed land. During the recent past, we have sold 230 acres to the Town of Orange and 16.8 acres to the New Haven Land Trust for open space preservation. Through partnerships and outright land purchases for water supply protection, we are also protecting more than 750 acres in the Towns of Haddam, Durham, Bethany, Woodbridge, North Branford, Guilford, Madison, Killingworth and East Haven.
We do allow passive recreation, but we are extremely careful about allowing any use on the water supply lands that would be detrimental to water quality. As I stated, we have been in an active land acquisition mode for the past few years, buying watershed land threatened by inappropriate development. We even established a non-profit organization, the Watershed Fund, to help in our efforts and seeded it with enough money to provide environmental education for future consumers and decision makers, as well as to buy critical watershed lands.
We perform watershed inspections on the portions of the watershed that we do not own, looking for occurrences such as oil and chemical spills and failing septic systems. We also cooperate with constituent communities by reviewing site plans for prospective development, pointing out the need for best management practices to control storm water run off and minimize land use impacts. Other examples: we worked with the town of Cheshire to develop aquifer protection overlays to zoning regulations in spite of significant opposition from interested parties and have urged the state to implement statutes by drafting regulations to protect the state’s drinking water aquifers.
Even with this attention to source water protection, surface water treatment plants are required and in some well fields, special groundwater treatment facilities are needed. The Regional Water Authority has three surface water filtration plants operating at the present time and one being designed to replace our oldest plant mothballed about ten years ago. In the north and south Cheshire well fields, aeration towers were installed at a cost of several million of dollars in the 1980s to remove contaminants that have seeped into ground water. All of these facilities represented state of the art filtration techniques when designed and all of our treated drinking water meets EPA’s and Connecticut’s standards.
While scientific research goes on in every water utility, risk assessment is the prerogative of the government. Regulated compounds and microbes are identified in
Washington which is based on information collected nationwide. Waterborne pathogens – like viruses, giardia and cryptosporidium, and a variety of chemical contaminants used in industry, agriculture and our homes are now, or are expected to be regulated before the end of the decade. Standards are or will be established and all water utilities required not to exceed them. The greater the risk assigned to the substance, the stricter the standard to be applied. Connecticut has a history of adopting the most stringent standards.
The Safe Drinking Water Act requirements implemented by EPA are continuing to evolve and are focusing very hard on disinfection and disinfection by products. In addition, the Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule will likely require cryptosporidium inactivation or removal. New coliform bacteria regulations are also being considered. Lead and copper that can leach from household plumbing is now regulated at the consumer’s tap. Today, many consumers equate the taste and odor of their drinking water with its safety. Thus, many utilities are beginning to address objectionable tastes and odors caused by algae and chlorine as they update or construct their treatment facilities.
My reason for stressing these potential new requirements is simple. It was the fatal 1993 outbreak of cryptosporidium that challenged America’s reliance on technology. Before Milwaukee’s crisis was over – the disease hit over 400,000 residents. Over 100 people died.
Cryptosporidium a tiny parasite, like giardia, has only recently been isolated and identified as a human pathogen. It is carried by cattle, beavers and sheep and other wild and domestic animals, and of course humans. It can be introduced into a water supply through sewage or from watersheds on which the animals live. In the case of Milwaukee, the source water intake for the drinking water treatment plant is less than a half-mile from the sewage treatment plant outfall. The outbreak occurred because the water treatment plant failed to adjust the treatment process to account for impaired source water quality brought about by early spring runoff. Had the drinking water plant been working perfectly, the incident would have been avoided. Unfortunately, there was a breakdown in the drinking water treatment process and contaminated water entered the distribution system. Correcting this mistake was expensive – not only in terms of loss of public trust, but financially. Milwaukee spent over $50 million to re-build the drinking water treatment system.
Because of incidents like what happened in Milwaukee, the federal government has been taking active measures to ensure safe drinking water for US citizens. Utilities like ours issue water quality reports that explain in plain language what is in the drinking water, where it comes from and whether it meets federal standards. It is likely that additional safety requirements will be established in the latter part of this decade. They will introduce most of us to new language - dissolved air flotation, ozonation, and ultraviolet disinfection. New filtration schemes will likely use membrane technology or biologically active carbon filters to retrofit existing or construct new treatment plants.
While safe water is something we all agree on, we recognize that there will be huge costs associated with complying with these regulations. Surveys conducted by the Regional Water Authority show that customers appear willing to pay more for drinking water. Water quality is of the highest priority for most. Currently, water is relatively cheap in Connecticut as compared to costs across the country. As water rates rise, the willingness of water customers to pay higher rates is likely to change and the financial value of water conservation will come into play.
It interests me that although we often times view ourselves as frugal Yankees, there is really not much of a conservation ethic in Connecticut - at least as far as conserving water is concerned. If we were to pay for water according to its value to our social and economic structure, there would be a significant cry for saving our resource - instead of a ho-hum attitude about water saving faucets and toilets.
This brings me to my final point. Connecticut is blessed with an abundant supply of fresh water and none have done more to put it to productive use than the citizens of the state have. Still, we have problems – we have disputes over water because Connecticut has a confusing policy on water allocation.
There are competing interests for water sources. Water is allocated through a polyglot of unrelated regulations that affect some water users and not others. As an example, someone on one side of the street can use his private residential well to water his tomato plants in the garden while someone else on the other side of the street who is connected to the public water supply may not have that choice. Current regulations affect some people but not others. We need to work together with diverse groups in cooperation to protect this vital resource. Two things – public health and the environment -- must never be seen in conflict. For when they are – we pay a terrible price. The first to suffer is public health and the second is the environment.
Our state General Assembly, during the last session, considered establishing a task force to look into water allocation issues. While the initiative was defeated, there still is a need to resolve these issues. We need a plan so there is enough water available for people, for the farms and the natural environment. Shocking, as it may seem, until we have effective public policy, the courts will be making decisions that rightfully belong to the residents of the State.
To ensure that our legacy of abundant water resources continues into the future, we need to build strong coalitions in order to achieve a balanced approach to the issues before us. Think about it. It is how the Regional Water Authority was formed, how we have been successful in the preservation of open space in so many communities of our region and successful in starting initiatives to protect the quality of the region’s water resources.
Defining appropriate uses of the state’s water resources that equitably address the concerns of everyone involved remains a challenge which can only be addressed by a coalition which is able to balance all of the issues that I have discussed.
I encourage you to think about the issues. Think about where your water was last night and where it will come from tomorrow. And become involved in your communities water issues.