A powerful thirst | Maine's abundance of water supports everything from heavy industry to small breweries. Could growing demand drain the state dry?

Maine businesses may have plenty to complain about, whether high taxes or tough regulations. What about the steady exodus of the state's manufacturing sector? Bad news, for sure. Well, at least Maine's got water ˆ— good, clean water, and plenty of it. It's under our feet in big pockets, flowing through tens of thousands of miles of streams and rivers, and sitting prettily in thousands of lakes and ponds.

Sure, Maine has water. But so what? Though it's probably small solace to folks who like to harp about taxes and jobs, water is a big deal. It plays a crucial role in Maine's economy, supporting old-line industries like pulp and paper mills, cutting-edge ventures like semiconductor manufacturing, agriculture operations like blueberry growers and small ventures like Maine's craft brewers. The fact is, some industries in Maine would be sunk without that easy and cheap access to water. Take, for example, the dozen or so ski areas around the state that depend on big volumes of water to make enough snow to compensate for Mother Nature's sometimes woeful output.

But while Maine is awash in water, a growing chorus, ranging from state officials to environmentalists, is warning that the state must tread carefully if it wants to maintain the resource. As more users jockey to draw from Maine's water supply, some are concerned that, gone unchecked, increased water use will irreparably alter that vaunted supply.
"Water quantity and quality are just going to be growing issues in Maine," says Kevin Boyle, a former University of Maine professor who heads the agriculture and applied economics department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va. "As far as Maine's policy in dealing with water goes, it's really in its infancy."

For the most part, Maine's water policy has targeted quality rather than quantity. Measures such as pollution control limits for industrial mills and new rules for companies' disposal of wastewater have helped many of Maine's more-polluted waterways return to good (if not pristine) condition. But quantity is a growing topic of conversation about water use in Maine. Will Maine still have enough water 20 or 50 years down the road?

After eight or so years of research and planning, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection is beginning to weigh in on this discussion in a big way. In mid-June, DEP officials proposed new rules to regulate water levels in lakes, streams and other surface water sources in Maine. According to the DEP, there already are conflicts brewing about water use, and the new rules will help codify existing regulations and help avoid damage to Maine's water sources. "If you go back 10 or 20 years, we had this enormous wastewater issue we were dealing with," says David Courtemanch, director of environmental assessment at Maine DEP. "Now, it's a whole shift that's happening in the state. We only have a handful of wastewater problems, but irrigation has grown tremendously, and development and the demand on public water supplies has grown tremendously. There are different pressure points."

Filling the tank, draining the tank
Any discussion of water quantity regulation has to start with the key question: Is Maine really floating in H20-suspended bliss? "It's kind of true and kind of not true," says Bob Lent, director of the U.S. Geological Survey's Maine Water Science Center in Augusta. "We have a whole lot of water at any given time in the state of Maine, but we don't store a lot of water. We fill up aquifers every year and drain them every year."

That's a different scenario than what's happening out west, where states typically draw water from vast sources like the Ogallala aquifer, a 174,000-square-mile underground vault of water hundreds of thousands of years old that stretches from South Dakota to Texas. Year by year, the aquifer is being sucked dry, drained more quickly than water from the Rocky Mountains can replenish it.

Maine's geology causes its own problems, however, as Maine's water supply depends on yearly rainfall. A statewide drought in 2001 caused a number of rivers from the St. John to the Piscataqua to drop to record-low levels. Several municipal water suppliers were significantly impacted by the drought, 17,000 private wells in Maine went dry, according to the USGS, and some downeast blueberry producers lost entire crops in 2001 and 2002. "The drought highlighted to some people that we can have problems here," says John Peckenham, director of the University of Maine's Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research.

Fortunately, the drought was followed by wet years. Maine receives an average of 42 inches of rain a year, or about 24 trillion gallons of water to replenish its water supplies. Last year, Maine had 60.8 inches of rain. This year, the state is positively swimming, with 30.5 inches recorded in Portland through mid-June. In a given year, Maine's municipal water suppliers provide between eight and 10 billion gallons of water to commercial and residential users ˆ— a minute amount compared to what is dumped into Maine's water sources after a typical year of rainfall.

Even after a few years of above-average rainfall, though, not every part of Maine is flush. Take Maine's coastal areas, says Al Curran, CEO of Woodard & Curran, an environmental consulting firm in Portland. Coastal municipalities have to contend with heavy development pressures and a yearly influx of millions of tourists. Even though the drought of a few years ago didn't hit coastal Maine very hard, high demand and relatively low supplies of water meant that most of the public water systems affected by the drought were located in coastal areas. "Water is an interesting thing to try and generalize. It's such a local resource issue," says Curran.

The problem is particularly acute in downeast Maine, which grew the lion's share of last year's $35 million blueberry crop. But growing those blueberries means lots of irrigation: The Maine DEP estimates agricultural water use in Washington County topped 558 million gallons last year ˆ— nearly 27% more than Maine's entire bottled water industry drew from its water sources. That heavy water use has caused some environmentalists to cry foul, claiming that blueberry irrigation habits draw down local streams and rivers to low levels that affect Atlantic salmon habitats.

Seeking quality and quantity
But different industries use water in different ways. The largest industrial users of water in Maine are paper mills, which in 2005 withdrew an estimated 63 billion gallons of surface and ground water, according to the DEP. That water is the primary ingredient in the pulping process and also is used as a cooling and cleaning agent. Katahdin Paper Co., for example, runs two mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket and pumps roughly 26 million gallons of water a day out of Ferguson Pond and the West Branch of the Penobscot River.

For decades, the pulp and paper companies were industrial polluters of the highest order. But in recent years mills like Katahdin Paper have spent millions to overhaul their wastewater systems in order to put back water that's as clean ˆ— or almost as clean ˆ— as it was when the mill took it out of the river. Carl Akeley, Katahdin's environmental engineer, says the company spends "hundreds of thousands of dollars a year" on wastewater treatment, with primary and secondary treatment facilities at its two mills. "On any given day, you have five employees doing nothing but wastewater treatment," he says.

And as Maine's economy moves away from the textile mills and manufacturing industries that favored quantity over quality in its water usage, many of Maine's water-dependent businesses these days rely on stocks of clean water. D.L. Geary Brewing Co. has brewed beer in Portland for two decades, and founder David Geary says the water he uses is like a special ingredient in the beer. To brew roughly four million gallons of beer a year, the brewery uses between 20 million-25 million gallons of water, which it pulls directly from Sebago Lake via the Portland Water District. (For more on the PWD, see "Sebago by the gallon," page 16.)

While a portion of that water is used for cleaning and rinsing, much of it ends up in brown bottles wrapped with the Geary's label. "The Scots would call it whiskey water. There's no color, no odor and it's very low in carbonates. It's very low in anything," says Geary. "From a brewing point of view, it's truly wonderful to work with."

But for every company like D.L. Geary, which depends on water as a core ingredient in its product, there are still companies for which water is part of the production process. Like the papermaking industry, which treats and discharges roughly 95% of the water it uses, Maine's ski industry doesn't so much use water as borrow it. Sugarloaf/ USA in Carrabassett Valley pulls more than 150 million gallons a year out of the Carrabassett River to make snow. "When the snowmaking gets going, it's really moving some water," says Bill Swain, Sugarloaf's communications manager. "But we aren't a heavy water userˆ… we put it all back in the spring."

Changing the rules
In the agriculture industry, only a small percentage of irrigation water finds its way back from where it came. "Water gets drawn up through plants and the rest evaporates," says Maine State Geologist Bob Marvinney. "Irrigation is as much as a consumptive use as putting water into bottles."

Marvinney has been working with the DEP on the new rules for flow and surface water withdrawals that would encourage heavy water users ˆ— like public water suppliers and the agriculture industry ˆ— to develop alternate water sources for times when water levels drop. For a blueberry grower, that might mean drilling into a groundwater source rather than relying on rivers and streams for irrigation water. (In fact, many blueberry growers have done just that, says Courtemanch.) Golf courses that irrigate putting greens in the dead of summer could have to pull water from a man-made pond rather than a slow-running summer creek. "It becomes your insurance policy for the drought," Courtemanch says.

The DEP in mid-June presented the rules for public comment. After that's been gathered, Courtemanch says the Board of Environmental Protection will convene in November to review the final rules and pass them on to the Legislature in January.

The current proposals, says Marvinney, were sparked by a combination of drought conditions as well as increased water usage by certain industries ˆ— including the bottled water industry. "There are legitimate concerns about whether the resource is being used in a responsible way," he says.

One group is targeting water usage by such outfits, the biggest of which is Poland Spring, a subsidiary of Greenwich, Conn.-based Nestlé Waters North America. Maine's Water Dividend Trust initiative was launched in 2004 by Jim Wilfong, a former state lawmaker, and Dick Dyer, founder of Dyer Associates, a communications firm in Winthrop. The group launched its H20 for ME campaign that year by calling for a $0.20-a-gallon tax on the state's larger bottled water companies. The per-gallon tax immediately rankled those in the state's bottled water industry. Poland Spring ˆ— which, among other plans, has proposed building a multimillion-dollar pumping station and bottling plant in Kingfield ˆ— reacted by temporarily tabling its expansion.

The group has reworked its proposal after failing to garner enough signatures to get its measure on the November ballot, and Dyer still hopes to put the issue before voters this fall ˆ— with the tax conspicuously absent. "[The tax] seemed like that was such a stickler for people. But it was never really what we were about anyway," says Dyer.

Instead, Dyer wants to change the way water ownership is laid out in Maine law. Bill Taylor, an attorney specializing in water and wetland law at Portland law firm Pierce Atwood, says Maine's laws are at odds with many other states' water regulations. In Maine, owning land gives you relatively unrestricted access to the groundwater beneath that land ˆ— even if that groundwater also extends below your neighbor's property. As a result, the law favors those who get to the water first.

Taylor says the Legislature has chipped away at what he calls Maine's "Old English rule of absolute dominion," bringing the state closer to other states that instead regulate water ownership based on reasonable use that prioritizes drinking water for personal use. For example, if a farmer is irrigating his crops and drying up his neighbor's well, then it's a problem.

But while Dyer and his group believe the bottled water industry poses a threat to Maine's water supply, others don't see it that way. The Mitchell Center's John Peckenham likens the bottled water industry to Maine's logging industry in the sense that renewable resources are being sent out of state and supporting Maine's economy in the process. And Andy Tolman, an education and technical coordinator at the Maine Bureau of Health's Maine Drinking Water Program, says the state is in a good position to export bottled water ˆ— as long as it's done in a sustainable way. "There's a lot of paranoia about us sending our patrimony out of the state too cheaply," he says. "It's something we need to keep an eye on, but it's not something we need to be panicky about."

That call for calm is what one often hears when discussing water in Maine. It's said in different ways, depending on the speaker's point of view, but the meaning is essentially the same: Don't worry; Maine's water isn't going anywhere anytime soon ˆ— at least not if people are paying attention. And that's the key, according to water watchers in Maine: keeping vigilant watch over the state's ample water resources before it's too late, especially as more straws are put into the ground. "I expect there will be more things that will happen with Maine in the future," says Boyle, formerly of UMaine, "and it will force the state to look at water issues more closely."