Gary Mercer is a man whose work is driven by numbers. His laptop is filled with data files about the Merrimack.
(51:15) G: I could show you spreadsheet after spreadsheet of numbers
Gary is a water engineer with the firm of Camp, Dresser and McGee. Some of his numbers capture movement inside the river.
CUT the velocities at which the river flows at. How deep it is.
Some record levels of nitrogen, oxygen and microorganisms
CUT bacteria. How does that come out of these discharge points. How does it die off and decay in the stream itself.
He has data on releases from wastewater treatment plants and data on water that’s pumped from the river. He has all these numbers because inside his laptop, he’s building a mathematical model of the river.
CUT When you do these types of things, from a water quality point of view, you have to look at everything.
Gary’s clients are the state, a number of local governments and the Army Corps of Engineers.
He’s been doing this for several years. He works in phases. He started with the southern part of the river, now he’s tackling the northern stretch. Overall, his assessment is pretty positive.
CUT: Much of the northern part of the river is undeveloped. So that provides a good background condition for the areas downstream. So overall, the Merrimack River is in very good shape.
But Gary’s numbers also suggest that the state is entering a new era. When it comes to water, New Hampshire is just beginning to deal with something that is old hat for people on the West Coast and in the south.
CUT: We are definitely reaching the point now where there is a lot more interconnection between development and how that will affect wastewater or water supply issues.
Gary is no alarmist. In places like Georgia, they’re building expensive desalination plants. In the west, they sue each other over water. Gary is reassuring. He says New Hampshire is a long way from stepping into that way of life. But the days of easy water, when you never had to think about it, are coming to an end. This will definitely affect the Merrimack.
This world doesn’t live just inside Gary’s laptop. You can find signs of it right off of I-93.
CUT: Part of the exploration that we’re doing here is looking at different ways of extracting water from the river.
David Paris is in charge of drinking water for Manchester. He stands in some woods along the Merrimack, in front of a concrete block with a metal cap on top . It’s a test well that draws water directly from the river. For over a hundred years, the city could get all the water it needed from Lake Massabesic . Paris says the city needs to start planning now for the day when demand outstrips that supply.
CUT: that looks like a window of 5-10 years for us.
This well is unusual in that it uses the sandy river bottom itself as the first step in filtering the water. The water system in Budapest, Hungary has been using this method on the Danube for a hundred years. David Paris is looking at building pumping capacity in gulps of 5 million gallons a day, each costing in the ballpark of 20 million dollars.
About 300 thousand people in New Hampshire and Massachusetts already rely on the river for drinking water. If Manchester follows through, that number will increase by more than thirty percent. In the coming decades, Concord is also expected to join the club.
Human dependency on the Merrimack will rise, and with it, our impact on the river. There’s a related ripple effect. As population increases, so does the amount of waste it kicks off. One vital if unsung service that the river provides is carrying off our treated wastewater. There are communities today that are bumping up against the limits of their ability, which is to say the river’s ability, to handle more waste.
Just ask Bruce Kudrick.
B: Cabellas was going to build on this site. , Restaurants, hotels, involved.
Kudrick directs wastewater treatment for the Town of Hooksett. We’re standing just off of I-93, actually at the former base of operations for the construction company that built this interstate. The location seems ideal. A single oversized equipment storage building is all that remains. You couldn’t ask for better access to the highway for a major retail complex. The project hit several bumps; one of them was that Hooksett’s wastewater treatment plant is maxed out.
(3:05) As of today we have NO gallonage. If they were to come in today; we don’t’have the gallonage to support you. Somone would have to help us upgrade the plant so it could happen.
Expanding a wastewater plant isn’t necessarily a brick wall in the path of development; you just have to be willing to pay the price. The kicker is, that price is higher now than its ever been because the river itself has reached a certain limit. There are places where the level of dissolved oxygen is too low; reduced oxygen puts the fish and the rest of the river ecosystem at risk. To bring the oxygen to where it should be, federal and state officials have put a hard cap on the dissolved pollutants cities and towns can release.
(15:00) The state has said they don’t want any more loading. They convert the solids into pounds and you have to keep that the same.
Translation? You want to dump twice as much wastewater?, it has to be twice as clean. That will cost you.
As the bill for water services of all sorts rise, some people see that playing a larger role in where development takes place. Just as the 19th century textile mills sprang up along the river for the sake of power, developers might find it more desirable to build within the existing network of municipal pipes.
David Preece is Executive Director of the Southern New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission.
CUT: We can’t be sure that public water can be provided to the outlying areas. The costs of extending water lines is great.
The final point where thinking about the river intersects with development is not just where but how we choose to build.
SFX – parking lot
The parking lot is the ubiquitous sidekick to development. It also is the most obvious sign of a larger problem known as nonpoint source pollution. Tom Burack, the state’s commissioner of Environmental Services, puts this threat to the Merrimack ahead of all others.
CUT: the challenges to water quality are coming more and more from stormwater (NPS) parking lots, wherever else, these sources collect a great deal of contaminants and that is causing some significant impairments of waters across the state.
Increasingly, Burack says, we will be building in ways that allow water to pass through these surfaces and be filtered by the ground below. It could affect the sort of buildings we put up. We might need to pave with different materials or change our notions of what constitutes a well-manicured lawn.
Burack believes the interplay of all the activities that impinge on the Merrimack will need more attention than in the past.
CUT: The challenge is to be sure that we’re managing our affairs so that the river can provide us with water that we need to drink, the ability to assimilate waste waters, and provide us with recreation.
Burack emphasizes, it is not simply a question of what we need. The river is the starting point. He says the state has moved through different phases in its relations with the Merrimack. Beginning in the late 1800’s the river was a dumping ground. In recent decades, it was cleaner but easily ignored. Today, Burack says we enter a new phase.
1014 The river is going to shape us, but it will shape us because we now have a better understanding than we ever did of what it takes to keep the river healthy, if we keep it healthy it can keep us healthy.
For NHPR News, I’m Jon Greenberg
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