Reports from Falmouth town staff have the Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners worried about the future of water consumption on the Cape as the population continues to increase and a drought is ongoing.
This comes after Falmouth Water Superintendent Matthew Lanan wrote a letter to the town planning board opposing two potential Town Meeting articles that would allow for more building, and therefore more water use.
Lanan was before the Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners this week explaining the issues he is seeing with Long Pond, which provides about 60% of Falmouth’s water supply.
“We haven't gotten the recharge in Long Pond that we should be seeing annually,” he said. “It's staying lower because our population is higher and we have a drought.”
But that doesn’t mean the town is running out of water, according to Michael Reghitto, chief operator of the town’s water treatment plant. The town can only draw as much water as its permit allows, he said, and the current infrastructure can only handle so much water.
“It's not that we don't have enough water. It's just, the summer demand is way too high,” he said. “There's no way we could keep up with it if we just continually increase the amount of service connections that we have without doing something to bring the consumption down in the peak time of summer.”
Reghitto said some of that increased consumption is from the seasonal increase in population, but some of it is from irrigation.
The town has a series of water storage tanks that are supposed to refill completely every night to prepare for the morning when demand for water is highest, Reghitto said. But lately in the summers, the tanks haven’t been refilling all the way. That isn’t a problem yet, but it could become one. Water pressure is best when the tanks are full, and fire hydrants rely on water pressure for fire suppression.
“We don't have a problem meeting the demand for a whole day,” Reghitto said. “It's really the morning demand, which is primarily due to irrigation, but we do meet it.”
Even though there is an irrigation ban in place due to the drought, it’s not logistically possible for the town to enforce, Lanan said. There isn’t enough staff to track down everyone who is violating the irrigation plan, and even if there were, there isn’t a solid enforcement mechanism in place. Lanan said he plans to work with the town select board to come up with a fair and legal fine policy. He’ll be before the select board August 31, he said.
Director of the public works department Peter McConarty said the town is working with the state to get permission to draw more water, but that will be a long process.
Falmouth select board member Douglas Brown was also at the meeting and said the board might consider not allowing any new development until the water issue is figured out.
Brown also noted that the planning board had voted to indefinitely postpone the two proposed Town Meeting articles that Lanen opposed in his letter.
