All may not be well with water supply
Published 4:00 pm Monday, February 26, 2007
When Jim Martine moved to Seabold 30 years ago, he wasn’t one of the lucky few to snag a waterfront view. But these days, Puget Sound seems so close he can taste it.
“It’s everywhere – the salty water’s in the shower, the dishwasher, the appliances,” the Harvey Road resident said. “Everywhere you get a white, crusty build-up of salt. You can’t wash the windows. When you wash the car, it leaves a crusty film.”
Saltwater has, over the last two years, seeped into the well Martine shares with seven of his neighbors. Increased pumping from “more straws in the same glass,” Martine said, is sucking out the freshwater and drawing in Puget Sound.
Martine is one of many islanders concerned that the underground aquifers that supply all the island’s water needs may soon fail to quench the island’s growing thirst.
For Martine, what may become the island’s “biggest issue” is today hinted at by his garden hose, which fires sea spray over an increasingly unhappy lawn and killed his dahlias.
He offers to pour a tall, briny glass from his tap, but declines any such offer himself.
“You can’t drink that,” Martine said. “It’s unhealthy.”
Martine is adapting. His family buys bottled water by the gallon and keep their mouths shut tight while showering. He’s talking with other neighbors about sharing wells, or an expensive well retrofit that may bypass and insulate the salty aquifer.
Rep. Sherry Appleton has a bigger fix in mind. The Poulsbo Democrat introduced legislation in Olympia that would allow Bainbridge Island to restrict growth based on the available supply of groundwater.
“The bill stemmed from the concern that Bainbridge Island could not support the new growth it is mandated to take as a fully incorporated island city,” Appleton said of House Bill 1134, which passed the House unanimously Friday morning, and is now headed to the Senate. “This bill helps the island determine where they want residential growth, keeping in mind that Bainbridge has water resource problems now.”
How big that problem is – or whether there’s a problem at all – is the subterranean puzzle city water resources specialist Jalyn Cummings is trying to solve.
Cummings recently embarked on a two-year ground water monitoring program in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey. The program, estimated to cost the city about $500,000, will test up to 80 wells and establish a broad baseline of data on underground water levels, saltwater intrusion areas and the rates at which rainfall recharges island aquifers. Cummings will then use this data to craft a model to help predict how increased use will affect groundwater.
“This will help us answer the questions everybody’s asking me,” she said. “Right now, I can’t answer – that’s why this work needs to be done.”
The answer, said City Councilman Bill Knobloch, could “turn Bainbridge into a different community overnight.”
“We’re starting to see the red flags – saltwater intrusion, levels dropping,” he said. “We could be reaching our limit. This may mean some real changes in our management policies.”
Councilman Chris Snow, who traveled to Olympia last week to testify in favor of Appleton’s bill, said the city may need to rein in growth if water proves in short supply.
“This bill will help our island grow in a sustainable way,” Snow said in testimony to a House committee.
The city’s lead long-range planner Libby Hudson also expressed support for the bill.
“This will create another tool to manage both our aquifers and our land use and the relationship between the two,” she said.
For Martine, the relationship is crystal clear.
“Thirty years ago, Harvey was a dead end road of four homes, two of which were original homesteaders,” he said. “Now we’ve got 26 typical Bainbridge family houses – all of which have poked their straws in and are drawing water. Now we have a problem.”
The average Washington household uses about 300 gallons of water per day, according to the state Department of Ecology. With 22,000 people in nearly 8,000 households, Bainbridge homes draw a daily 2.4 million gallons of water from aquifers at various depths.
The Fletcher Bay aquifer, the island’s largest and most used, has seen a “substantial and unrecovered drop in water levels,” according to a December 2006 report prepared for the city by Aspect Consulting.
“We’ve seen a 10 to 15 foot drop there since 1994,” Cummings said. “That’s substantial.”
The Meadowmeer area has also exhibited anecdotal evidence of ground water declines, according to Aspect’s report.
While the city’s last water resources assessment reported that testing in 1985 and 1988 showed no saltwater contamination, Aspect’s 2006 report listed intrusion in Seabold, Agate Point, Port Madison and Eagle Harbor area wells.
The movement of saline water into freshwater aquifers is usually caused by ground water pumping from coastal wells, according to the USGS. In extreme cases, saltwater contamination has led to the abandonment of supply wells.
Despite the growing evidence of island groundwater depletion and contamination, Cummings stressed that now is the “time to plan, not to panic.”
“I’ve seen nothing that worries me, except in Seabold, where it’s getting salty,” she said.
Appleton’s bill, combined with the city’s monitoring program, will provide the necessary tools to avoid water scarcities, Cummings said.
In the meantime, Councilman Nezam Tooloee cautioned against tainting island water with politics. While Tooloee, a neighbor of Martine’s, has had his own problems with saltwater intrusion, spurring him to dig deep – over 1,000 feet deep – to find a new source of fresh water, he hopes islanders will wait until the murkiness surrounding the aquifer issue clears.
“People make wild claims about water as a political tool to push their agendas,” Tooloee said. “Whether you’re for pulling up the drawbridge and not allowing one more person, or you want to remove all land use controls and do whatever you want, politicizing water borders on the indecent for me. Water is the life-giving resource. Not telling the truth about water is not OK.”
That’s why Tooloee is asking the anti- and pro-growth factions to ease up until the monitoring is complete.
“That project is the gold standard for us to understand our aquifers” and help the council “make good policy,” he said.
The program’s results could also spark controversy, as was the case when the city released its last water resources assessment.
“It was from one line, in paragraph two in the summary,” Cummings said of the assessment prepared by Kato & Warren consultants in 2000. “It was a bold statement and it was met with some resistance.”
The line read: “….natural groundwater recharge on the Island is sufficient to meet the Island’s needs at full development under current zoning.”
At the same time, the assessment noted problems with recharging the supply, including retention pond overflows during moderate rains, excessive wetness due to poor drainage, as well as inadequate or unmaintained culverts and drainage corridors.
For many, the 2000 assessment sparked more questions and the need for harder data.
“That’s what we’re after,” said City Engineer Bob Earl. “How much water is there? What’s the rate at which it recharges? How do we plan for the future?”
Either way, Bainbridge will not become the desert wasteland some predict, Earl said.
“I think some people associate water with oil reserves,” he said. “Oil doesn’t replenish itself. Water does.”
In a “worst case scenario,” the island still has options, albeit expensive and complicated ones, he said.
The island could pipe in water from wells across Agate Passage or build desalinization plants. The infrastructure to pipe in water could range up to $10 million, according to Earl.
Whether there’s a nearby source large enough to fill the island’s water shortfalls is a big unknown, he added.
Turning saltwater into drinking water is an even more unlikely scenario.
“If you want to spend a lot of money, desalinization is the way to do it,” Earl said. “Lots of places with lots of cash and no water do it, like Saudi Arabia.
Here, where we don’t have much sun to help with the huge evaporation beds, we’d have to use a lot of electricity – thousands of kilowatt hours a day even for a small plant.”
For Knobloch, the only option on the table is to deal with the water under his feet.
“Who would give us water?” he asked. “And what would they charge us? It would be an extraordinary cost. No, we’ve got water right here. Let’s deal with it and use some common sense.”
