Nearly a decade after contamination was discovered in drinking water around the former Saint-Gobain manufacturing facility in Merrimack, many people in Londonderry are still drinking bottled water.
Wednesday night, residents gathered in the Londonderry High School cafeteria to learn about some potential solutions.
“Getting clean drinking water to all the residents of Londonderry is a priority for me,” said town council chair Ron Dunn. “The residents of Londonderry did not cause this problem. They did not ask for this problem. It was brought upon them by a third party. And they have to live with it every day.”
Dunn, who said his family drank bottled water for five years before they could get a filtration system installed, was referring to contamination of water in nearby communities with so-called “forever chemicals” by the former Saint-Gobain manufacturing facility in Merrimack.
While Saint-Gobain must pay for clean drinking water connections or in-home filtration systems for some residents, there is contamination well beyond the borders of the company’s legal responsibility.
Safe to Drink is a podcast about the water contamination story that keeps repeating in town after town — and about the people who fought for answers through a maze of chemistry, regulations, and illnesses.
Londonderry is the last place in the region that hasn’t finalized a large project to connect residents with contaminated wells to public water systems, said Mike Wimsatt with New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services.
But, he said, the state and Saint-Gobain are “very close” to reaching an agreement to proceed with waterline connections within an area defined in a consent decree.
For those outside the consent decree, Londonderry officials explained they are working on a multi-stage plan to expand public water, building off of the work Saint-Gobain must fund and allowing residents to connect to that water in a way that may be more affordable.
The plan is to create “special assessment districts,” where residents in particular neighborhoods could add the cost of connecting a home to public water onto their taxes for a period of up to 20 years.
“Water running down the middle of the street in a pipe is great, but it doesn’t do anybody good until it gets into the house,” said Kirsten Hildonen, Londonderry’s administrative services director.
Three warrant articles scheduled for town meeting in March will address the creation of the special assessment district plan, the creation of an infrastructure capital reserve fund, and the allocation of funds for infrastructure projects.
The cost of connecting to new waterlines in town could vary based on how far a home is from the road, Hildonen said. But town officials are hoping that between state and local programs, people in town will be able to get water to their homes.
For residents like Bob Ramsay, the need to deal with new water connections at all is frustrating.
“It just doesn't seem fair,” he said. “Why should I have to pay that much money for something that I had no responsibility for and no control over? And why should the town have to pay for it?”
His neighbor, Elizabeth Saich, said the past few years have been full of uncertainty as her family has tried to check the levels of contamination in their well and paid to put in their own treatment system.
“Looking at a financial price tag coming up, that’s frustrating,” she said.
New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services also has programs to help people on private wells outside of the Saint-Gobain boundary test and treat their water. And Londonderry officials said more information would go out to residents about their plans for expanding the water system in the coming days.
