Adrienne Lennon 0:00

Pop quiz for you. This is second grade science.

Liz Canada 0:02

Oh god.

Adrienne Lennon 0:03

Are you ready?

Liz Canada 0:05

Yes.

Adrienne Lennon 0:06

What percentage of all water on earth is freshwater?

Liz Canada 0:10

Oh no. I'm already failing.

Adrienne Lennon 0:12

Guess.

Liz Canada 0:13

Uh I will say 30%.

Adrienne Lennon 0:16

Lower.

Liz Canada 0:17

Lower?

Adrienne Lennon 0:18

A lot lower.

Liz Canada 0:19

10%.

Adrienne Lennon 0:20

Lower. Lower? Two and a half to three percent. Is fresh water? Of all water on earth is freshwater. And of that, two and a half to three percent, 70 to 80% of it is locked up in ice and glaciers. The remainder.

Liz Canada 0:37

Oh my god, there's so much math you're giving me, Adrienne,

Adrienne Lennon 0:40

i s locked up in groundwater and soil moisture. And only 1.2 to 1.3% of all water on earth is surface water, which is the water that you find in lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands. It's all we got.

Liz Canada 0:57

You're having that second grade science. Yes. This is like that. It's like that show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Yeah. Not smarter than a second grader.

Adrienne Lennon 1:06

Did not surface that from deep memory, but you did learn it once, along with the water cycle. Maybe.

Liz Canada 1:11

That was Mrs. Davis's class. I I was kind of paying attention back then. That was also the year that she showed the Batman movie, the Jack Nicholson Batman movie in our second grade class. Because I think she didn't know what was happening in that film.

Adrienne Lennon 1:28

So funny.

Liz Canada 1:28

And my mom was so mad. I sat in the classroom and turned my chair around because I knew I wasn't allowed to watch that kind of movie. So I looked at the wall the whole time. That's good. Went home and said, Do you know what we did in school today? We watched the Batman movie. Snitched on Miss Davis right away. That's it.

Adrienne Lennon 1:42

You just narked her right out.

Liz Canada 1:44

I was like, I'm not taking the fall for this. So maybe on that same day when I was facing the wrong direction, I learned about fresh water. You're listening to New Hampshire Has Issues, and I am your host from the future, Liz Canada. I'm gonna do something a little bit different at the top of the show, because I need to do a flashback for a moment. And I have always wanted to do something like this. Uh, you may remember, longtime listeners, you may remember an episode with Nico Papa konstan tis, the chair of the Exeter Select Board. We talked about property taxes, we talked about deliberative sessions, and we talked about my favorite topic, to be honest, the street sweeper. So let me do my best voice here. Previously, on New Hampshire has issues.

Niko Papakonstantis 2:40

Last year's election, the street sweeper was the only warrant article that did not pass.

Liz Canada 2:45

The only warrant article that didn't pass.

Niko Papakonstantis 2:48

So I have against street sweepers.

Liz Canada 2:51

What did a street sweeper ever do to you?

Niko Papakonstantis 2:54

Exactly. But we're putting it back on because it's not really just to clean the streets.

Liz Canada 3:01

So I've said this on the show before. I serve on our town's budget recommendations committee, and I learned in the meeting in the summer, you know, the street sweeper had been voted down, we knew that, but then learned about how important it is for what goes through the stormwater and water treatment plant, right? Like it affects the nitrogen levels. And I was like, how do we even begin to explain this to the voters? Of like, it's not just, well, I I don't really care that our streets are not clean. It's like actually there are all of these long-term impacts on all of our other facilities.

Niko Papakonstantis 3:37

Right.

Liz Canada 3:37

I'm glad we could put in a quick plug. Thank you for that. Quick plug for the street sweeper. I'm not gonna bury the lead here, dear listener. I'm gonna tell you, 2025, the street sweeper warrant failed by about 15 votes. 2026, it was back on the ballot. You just heard Nico and I talking about it in a previous episode. It failed by five votes this year. I just can't emphasize enough, first of all, that voting matters. Please vote. Please make sure you're registered to vote. I laugh because otherwise I would cry. And I have been devastated about the street sweeper situation. So I'm really delighted to have this episode that is all about clean water. Or clean-ish water. Clean enough water. Uh, water in air quotes, as you'll hear, because maybe not all of it's actually water. Adrienne is my guest today, and she is an outstanding expert on all things related to water. I had wanted to talk to her about the Merrimack River, maybe you've heard of it. And we talk about that a tiny bit, but really she's giving some foundational information here about like what the heck is the Clean Water Act? And uh, how did New Hampshire contribute to it being enacted in the first place? If you would like to support the show, become a monthly subscriber. Patreon.com slash NH has issues. If you have an idea for an episode, send me an email. Newhampshire has Issues at gmail.com. More to come on water, I can assure you. And for now, grab your can of seltzer and join Adrian and me in this episode. Thank you for listening. So welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues, the podcast that dares to ask, should I have had any water today? Because all I've had is seltzer and coffee.

Adrienne Lennon 5:23

Coffee is just goth water. So yes.

Liz Canada 5:27

So I did it. Do you have a tagline for our episode?

Adrienne Lennon 5:31

Yeah. Well, we were saying what's the main message? And I think that main message is it's your responsibility. No one's coming to save us on this one. We all have to do it.

Liz Canada 5:43

The podcast that dares to ask, is anyone coming to save us? The answer is no. No. No one's coming. No way. Okay, well, great. I'm glad we're just jumping right in. Perfect. So my guest today is the managing environmental scientist and planner at Par Corporation, Adrian Lennon. Adrian, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a delight to be here. I'm so glad that you're here. So you know all about water. I do not know as much as a second grader, let alone what I should know. Right? So I'm so thankful for you being on this episode with me. Shall we start with a simple question? Yeah. Let's go. When I turn on my faucet, water comes out. That's good, right? It means everything's fine with water in New Hampshire? Most of the time. Yes. Most of the time.

Adrienne Lennon 6:29

Most of the time.

Liz Canada 6:30

When is it not okay in New Hampshire?

Adrienne Lennon 6:33

Yeah, that's a great question. So we were talking about clean water and the construct of clean water, right? What does that mean? And that's a little bit different from safe water and the construct of safe water. Safe water is the water we're talking about coming out of your tap. And safe water is regulated by the Safe Water Drinking Act, and it ensures that water is safe chemically and bacterially to drink. So it's really safe enough.

Liz Canada 7:04

Oh God. Oh boy. Okay. So I turn on my faucet. It's safe water. But you're telling me that it might it's it's safe enough water. You know what? Good thing I don't drink any water. Listen. Well, we can talk about that seltzer water after. Perfect. The seltzer I'm drinking live on the air. So then what is clean water?

Adrienne Lennon 7:27

Yeah. Well, so safe water is defined by World Health Organization as water that is free from fecal contamination and priority chemical contamination. So safe enough to drink. And clean water is something that you know we've constructed nationally, which is focused more on surface water. So that's the water in the rivers and lakes and streams, which ensures it's clean enough to support aquatic life and recreation and has a restoration focus to maintain that chemical, physical, and biological integrity of water, specifically the nation's waters. And we'll talk more about that a little bit later.

Liz Canada 8:07

Clean water is about uh some of the things that I heard you say is about the organisms and creatures in there being able to live and thrive, as well as some other components, and then the safe water is it's safe enough to be able to drink that it's not going to actively harm me with contaminants. That's correct. Okay. So I assume there is some issue to water in New Hampshire because I've heard some murmurings of some river stuff issues that might be in that way. So for someone like me who knows very little, where should we begin, Adrian?

Adrienne Lennon 8:49

Well, let's start in the middle of the last century. We're hopping in the time machine to the mid-1900s. Up until mid-century 1960s America, which would have been about 200 years worth of industrial revolution and development in our part of the world, wetlands and waterways were essentially treated as dumping grounds for all types of waste. So industrial waste, sewerage, any kind of chemicals or hazardous, any byproduct from materials or factory work and development of any kind would just be discharged and released into the waters. So we like to say that disposed-of tires are an obligate wetland species. We know we're in a wetland if we have found some good trash. And that's true everywhere and is a long-standing problem, but especially true in moving waterways and waterways that provide drinking water to people. So mid-1900s, we were topping it out.

Liz Canada 9:55

We're lighting oil on fire and rivers. They were parting it up in the 60s. Yes.

Adrienne Lennon 10:00

Yeah, doing whatever they wanted to. Yep. There were no rules. So very famously, the Nashua River, which is a tributary of the Merrimack River, with many dams and mills all the way up from the Merrimack River, all the way up to its headwaters, like in Lunenburg or Fitchburg, Massachusetts, or something like that. There were paper mills. And the Nashua River would flow a different color every day. That can be good. That seems bad. Not a good thing. And so the pollution became so bad in the Nashua River that actually no biodiversity could survive. Only, you know, pond scums, some sludge, certain forms of bacterial and algal organisms were able to tolerate. It was a completely septic environment in that waterway. And that actually was one of the precipitating factors of our foundational United States law, the Clean Water Act. So it's that close to home.

Liz Canada 11:00

The river is a different color every day. We're totally destroying the whole ecosystem. The whole ecosystem we are destroyed. Poisoning it, yep. Okay. The Clean Water Act, federal law, sounds like. Yes, yes. What is it? What does it do? Have we fixed everything with this law? Oh, great questions. Did we do it?

Adrienne Lennon 11:23

Is it all done? Great questions. Okay. So Clean Water Act is an act, a United States law that expanded on the protections of an earlier law called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, which was enacted in 1948. So from 1948 to 1972, there was some limited protection for pollution control. And then the Clean Water Act really changed the lens and the view of it.

Liz Canada 11:50

We knew enough in the 40s to be like water can be polluted. Yes. And then still put things in water from factories and all sorts of chemicals.

Adrienne Lennon 12:01

Get ready.

Liz Canada 12:03

Okay. Oh no. I thought it would be like in the 1960s, nobody knew. We just, oh, how does it clean itself? It's just cleansing. Better living through chemistry, right?

Adrienne Lennon 12:13

Yeah. No. Oh no. Okay. So we knew water could be polluted. So before 1972, rivers would routinely carry untreated sewerage, industrial waste, all other types of contaminants. And there was a federal law, this pollution control act, although no enforcement. And also funding for restoration after these impacts was very limited. So the goal really of the Clean Water Act was to fund restoration and attempt to enforce certain types of pollution. So the big move really was shifting from, you know, we're going to acknowledge that this exists and we'll clean it up later, to you need a permit to pollute.

Liz Canada 12:57

You can't do it unless you get permission in advance. That's correct. Okay. That's the best we did. Okay. So I am here's a permission slip to pollute the waters.

Adrienne Lennon 13:08

Yeah, yeah. This is this is environmental protection 101.

Liz Canada 13:12

Ooh. Don't love any of that.

Adrienne Lennon 13:14

I know. I happen to really love old policy. I love reading old policy because it's so very well written. It's so intentional. It's really different from what you see today. So I want to read to you the beginning of it.

Liz Canada 13:28

I'm not going to make a joke about how law is created today. I'm just going to let that one slide. Let it rise. Fill in the gaps as you wish, listener. I'm ready.

Adrienne Lennon 13:37

Okay. So an act to provide for water pollution control activities in the public health service of the Federal Security Agency and in the Federal Works Agency and for other purposes, be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives or the United States of America in Congress assembled, et cetera, et cetera. The objective of this act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters. Remember that phrase. The nation's waters. Waters. And in order to achieve this objective, it is hereby declared that consistent with the provisions of this act, it is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.

Liz Canada 14:24

Oh my God. It's like a SMART goal. Specific, measurable. They're like, you have to do it. Okay. That seems pretty clear. All the waters got to eliminate pollutants. By 1985. Yep. By 1985.

Adrienne Lennon 14:37

And the next one is it is a national goal that we're ever attainable and interim goal of water quality, which provides for the protection and propagation of fish, shellfish, and wildlife and provides for recreation in and on the water be achieved by July 1st, 1983.

Liz Canada 14:55

Wow, they really set some like clear markers. Yeah. We're going to do that. Really, this thing. This is old policy. This time. Wow. Okay. Great stuff. Okay. All right. Well, that was a long time ago, because I was born in 82. So I'm excited for you to tell me that they met all those goals and things have gotten better since then. I'm ready for that big reveal at the end of all this. Okay. Hold your breath. Okay. Host down. Host is dead. Hold the breath.

Adrienne Lennon 15:22

So this goes on to say the national policy is that discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts be prohibited. Okay. The national policy that federal financial assistance be provided to construct publicly owned waste treatment works, that area-wide treatment, management, planning processes be developed and implemented to assure adequate control of sources of pollutants in each state, et cetera, et cetera. There's a couple more. So, you know, essentially what the Clean Water Act did was it said, you know, we definitely cannot stop the uh capitalist industrial machine, but we can at least try to regulate a little bit the worst of this pollution. And we can do it by trying to identify the worst pollutants, trying to limit that discharge, trying to reduce any new and additional discharge by funding restoration efforts. And there are a few tools. And I don't know if any of this will ring a bell to you, but sometimes this stuff comes up in the in the public zeitgeist, this kind of language. But the act is broken up into sections. And in the 400 sections are really where the tools of the act are implemented. So there is a section which allows for state leverage. And it says if a project needs a federal permit or license and could discharge into the waters of the nation, then states can certify conditions to protect their water quality standards. So it allows states to identify their own water quality standards under this federal permitting process. The section establishes this permit that's called the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, also known as a Niptees permit. Niptees. You may have heard of. I don't know that I have. Okay. You will hear it now. Okay. That regulates point source discharges. And that's pipes coming from wastewater treatment plants, uh, industrial facilities, and certain stormwater systems, right? So those are the pipes that you see that are just flowing out. Niptees. Yeah. Should I have heard of this before? Is that what you're telling me? Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about, yeah, I mean, in the whole street sweeper conversation, that should have come up.

Liz Canada 17:38

Okay. Not maybe not on not on the not on the recording. Adrian, you have to understand that I only just barely learned that the street sweeper helps our water system and our water treatment. Everything. I, like many people, just thought it was making the roads look nice. No. So I missed that other important variable. I barely know that it impacts nitrogen. And I barely know that that is something I should have learned in chemistry. I don't know. It's all coming in. It's coming together. The order of subjects I was good at in school, math was first, shockingly. Then it was English. And then it's a long drop to social studies and science. A long drop. And look what you're doing now. Yeah, I have a podcast. And I make jokes. That's all I've got. Okay. Never heard of it. I'm learning. I'm taking so many notes.

Adrienne Lennon 18:30

Good, good. Okay, so Niptees.

Liz Canada 18:33

Niptees.

Adrienne Lennon 18:34

It's it's an acronym and it stands for the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit. And this is the uh permitting mechanism. This is the tool of the Clean Water Act, and it regulates point source discharges. And those specifically are the high polluting discharges. Those are coming out of wastewater treatment systems, they're coming out of industrial facilities, and they're coming out of stormwater systems. So this is how the teenage mutant ninja turtles get around. This is all the open exposures of flowing water into waterways now permitted by this Nipdies permit. It also includes this special consideration, which is for municipal separate storm sewer systems. And that's called MS4. And I promise I won't be any more jargony than that on this subject.

Liz Canada 19:32

If we say that too many times, someone's gonna think it's a gang and it's gonna be a total thing. But yes, totally true. Municipal and a few S's.

Adrienne Lennon 19:40

Yeah, municipal separate storm sewer systems. And that is specifically talking to very old infrastructure systems where sewer and storm water are piped together. And there is a mandate to separate them anytime you encounter this. However, in pre-industrial and industrial cities, we have a lot of them. And that tells a little bit of the story of how we've landed where we are in drinking water supply in some of our bigger waterways. So state leverage to certify specific conditions and define water quality standards, the permit, and then another set of permits specifically for dredge and fill permitting. What does that mean, like in regular person language? Okay. So let's say you are building a road in New Hampshire.

Liz Canada 20:36

Hopefully to affordable housing.

Adrienne Lennon 20:37

Am I right? Sorry. Police, right? So you're building a road and there's a a well and there's a swamp on the right hand side. And also on the left hand side, there's some freestanding water. Not a ton of it, but there is some. And it's too much to be able to support a actual roadway. You could have a dirt road and cross over it here and there. But if you need to actually pave a two-lane roadway, you are going to have to bring in fill to create that roadway. And that is where that dredge fill permitting comes into play. I see. You're kind of reducing the size of the resource for whatever your development purpose is. Pretty common with roadways. That's very helpful. And then, of course, you know, in other sections, there's actually very specific language about how much money is to be allocated. This is 1972, 1973 dollars. And that is what we were thinking at the time, before both of us were born, basically, um, in terms of improving surface water quality. And um I can report that Did we do it? No, we did not. Did not. Something that's important to know is that the Clean Water Act has been somewhat under a scope attack over the last 10. Years or so. So the language of the act itself hasn't changed. But there's been this fight around what is the definition of the waters of the nation. You told me to write that down. So the law itself hasn't changed, but how it's interpreted definitely has. And most of that is around which waters are actually protected. Things like wetlands and small streams or seasonal waters like vernal pools or what we like to call intermittent or small streams have gone in and out of this federal jurisdiction of waters of the United States, depending on the administration and also the Supreme Court.

Liz Canada 22:41

How? Aren't they here? Aren't they in the United States? Pardon the nation? Isn't it water in the nation? But are they considered waters, right? Is it sludge? Is it muddy? Like why? Right. What is surface water? What is water? What is water? Right. When you really get down to it, what is water? Should have paid more attention in high school science.

Adrienne Lennon 23:03

So initially there was this kind of expansion of federal jurisdiction, and that was in 2015. Follow me on the years here. Oh god.

Liz Canada 23:12

Remembering them well.

Adrienne Lennon 23:13

We were also young then. We were. It was a different time. Different time. In 2015, the clean water rule was implemented and promulgated, and it actually expanded and clarified this federal jurisdiction around this concept of what's called the significant nexus in waterways. And the significant nexus determines if non-navigable waters are in fact waters of the United States.

Liz Canada 23:44

Non-navigable waters.

Adrienne Lennon 23:46

Right. So the assumption is all navigable waters are waters of the United States, period.

Liz Canada 23:51

What's a navigable and a non-navigable water?

Adrienne Lennon 23:54

Great question.

Liz Canada 23:55

So if you can float a canoe, you're in navigable waters. The train is coming from Topeka at 200 miles per hour, and a canoe is coming from the Merrimack River. Is that canoe in navigable water?

Adrienne Lennon 24:08

Absolutely. So that's not the question. The question is smaller water bodies, okay?

Liz Canada 24:14

Oh my god.

Adrienne Lennon 24:15

Smaller than you can float a canoe in. For example, small streams and brooks, small wetlands, vernal pools, surface waters that are only, you know, a couple inches to a foot deep, things like that. You know, the thing about wetlands, small surface waters like this, is that they don't just exist in a vacuum, right? They're part of some larger hydrology. So there's this assessment that says if there's a significant nexus, if there is a hydrologic connection, a presence of surface or shallow subsurface water connection. And we know, you know, water doesn't necessarily only travel over the surface. It's also traveling through the earth, all around your basement foundation.

Liz Canada 24:58

And into our basements every spring. Yeah.

Adrienne Lennon 25:01

When the snow melts and it rains, that is the hydrologic connection of water and subsurface. I'll remember that.

Liz Canada 25:08

When the sump pump is working hard.

Adrienne Lennon 25:10

Yeah. There is hydrology there.

Liz Canada 25:12

There's that connection.

Adrienne Lennon 25:13

Yes. Um, you may be in the middle of waters of the United States. You don't even know. The Nexus itself. Right. So, and then, you know, what is the function of that small surface water area? Is it storing flood waters? So if it's adjacent to a navigable waterway, does it provide flood storage capacity? Is it filtering pollutants and is it transporting nutrients? And then the third is the distance, like what is the actual distance from this surface water and the traditional navigable waterway? And there's this sort of assessment criteria that's been established, was established in 2015 that said, you know, if you could prove these three points, then you had waters of the United States. And that significantly expanded the protections of wetlands and waterways by capturing all of these small streams and small bogs, marshes, and vernal pools and small wetlands that otherwise would not have been captured because they're not navigable. So this was, of course, you know, appealed and taken across the coals in following administration. In 2020, there was an attempt to narrow that federal reach, which was later vacated. And then in 2023, this waters of the United States rule was overturned. And it was overturned in this famous CPA case called SACIT versus CPA. And that again significantly narrowed what wetlands qualify as waters of the United States and emphasized that wetlands had to have continuous surface connection to covered waters. So really, really rolled back protections all the way to where it was before.

Liz Canada 27:00

2015, there is an expansion of what is considered the nation's waters. That's right. It's giving the criteria of like if you meet these three things. You're in. You're in. You're protected. You're United States Sort of protected. Yeah. Sort of sort of protected. Protected enough, right? If you will. Right.

Adrienne Lennon 27:20

And then the new administration, 2016, they seek to Um, yeah, I mean, there was the challenge to try to roll it back, essentially.

Liz Canada 27:28

So that happens through that administration, federal administration. And then by 2023, now it's a Supreme Court case. That's right. Sounds like. That's right. The Supreme Court makes the call of rolling it back significantly from before the 2015 protections-ish.

Adrienne Lennon 27:47

Yeah. In some cases, even farther back because it required this continuous surface connection, which essentially says navigable waters. And sometimes you can be in navigable waters that are seasonally navigable and they would still be considered navigable waters. But now we're calling for all season surface connection.

Liz Canada 28:07

So that was a 2023 Supreme Court decision. So what does that mean for us now? Right. For the nation's waters or for the nation's not quite water. Right. Or not quite nation water? I don't even know how how you would call that, but sure. Water that happens to be nearby. It's nearby water. Right. What nation does it belong to, if not the United States? But it's just It's not water. Okay. It's not even there. It's not American. Not American enough. Boy, oh boy. Bring your birth certificate to be a nation's water. That's right. That's right. You better show your connection to your better show your passport if you want to be called the nation's waters.

Adrienne Lennon 28:50

Wow. So this part really matters because wetlands and headwater streams are where a lot of our water quality protection actually starts. Okay. And it's also where a lot of our surface water drinking water supply comes from. So when the protections shift, it falls back onto states and communities to try to figure out how to fill in the gaps. And that's where things like get a little bit messy. So ongoing Clean Water Act. In the beginning, you know, the best we could do was say, we just want to clean up the waterways. This is how we're going to do it. We're going to permit it. We're going to try to fund restoration. Never even got close. Now we're starting to unpack it a little bit in these ways that are not obvious enough to bring a lot of attention to the matter, but they are definitely impactful.

Liz Canada 29:41

What has New Hampshire done when it comes to having clean water? So we have safe enough water. Right. What is the role of New Hampshire? And what is the role of towns and cities as well? Because they must have some sort of role, or else we wouldn't be talking about water and sewer in our town. Right, right.

Adrienne Lennon 30:03

Regulator. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you have this federal floor of the Clean Water Act, and then it's the state implementation. New Hampshire has established surface water quality standards, which is not true for every state in the nation, but those rules do include designated uses and protecting existing water quality, not just meeting minimums. So there's this term called anti-degradation that's used in New Hampshire surface water quality standards essentially says, you know, you can't leave it worse than you found it. So that's one thing. There's a floor. That seems like a floor. It is worse than we thought. But it does get better, okay? Additional protections in New Hampshire that are actually quite nice include the Shoreland Water Quality Protection Act, which sets minimum standards within a protected shoreland zone. So that's a buffer zone or a vegetated area that is on either bank of a waterway and sets limits of disturbance for what you actually can do there in an effort to protect water quality, which is a good thing. It can always be better. One of the challenges of the Clean Water Act and the NIFTIS permitting process around point source discharge is that because they can't be improved, they're often, you know, subject to significant neglect as opposed to having the system be altered or modernized in some way. So it's it's cost prohibitive to go in and improve that infrastructure that would cause for the discharge or to come up with other infrastructure solutions that would eliminate the discharge. And because of that, there's very limited motivation to take those that exist out of the subsurface ground and come up with a new solution. The cost. Right. But in capital infrastructure planning, there is always this effort to say, okay, if we're going to be rebuilding a road, then we're going to do this while we're in there. And so, yeah, I mean, Manchester has made a big effort. They've gotten some federal dollars to do it, I believe. And that's really the driver is federal dollars through things like the Clean Water Act to try to get this done. Because again, it's not something that the state of New Hampshire or that the city of Manchester can just impose upon taxpayers to try to fund. It's just the numbers are too big. So importantly, you know, operators of wastewater treatment plants and and places where we have these discharges, they're, first of all, really hard to find. Exceptional professionals, really talented engineers. You know, they're not the people that created this problem. The problem existed long before most of us were born, but they are very good at navigating it and trying to avoid, reduce, and minimize. But sometimes environmental conditions are so extreme that they're not really able to overcome that. Like in 2023, we had a very, very wet year and we had significant flash flooding and um, you know, aerial storm events that caused a very high number of storm discharges into our major waterways and wetlands because um everything overflowed and we're vulnerable to that, right? We don't have capacity. Interestingly, other cities like in New Hampshire, Nashua, up until like the 1980s, Nashua was farmland. People don't realize that now. They don't think of that now. But before Route 3 was cut through New Hampshire, there was only Route 3A. And Route 3A doesn't look any different now than it did then. And there were farms, big dairy farms and, you know, other types of agrarian practices. There were not really mill facilities so much, except for really in the center of the city of Nashua. So when Nashua was building a wastewater facility, they actually had so much space that they were able to build an entire secondary facility for things like these major storm events, which, you know, other cities upstream just don't have that option. They never had the space in the first place. They were already developed. They were not farmland, you know. So everybody has kind of different challenges. And the smaller the municipality gets, the less redundancy you have. So you have fewer water resources, fewer staff, tighter budgets, and and significantly more reliance on groundwater and private wells. So those land use decisions and those budgetary decisions, especially near recharge areas, areas where you have surface waters, they can matter a lot in terms of what your drinking water is like.

Liz Canada 35:48

How are regular people supposed to keep track of all of this?

Adrienne Lennon 35:52

You know, I don't know if it's necessarily tracking, right? It's my job to know this stuff, the policy. I think for regular people, you know, when you're thinking about the local and community level, you know, what first of all, what does that mean? When I think of the local level, I'm really thinking about your property, your homeowner land. Exactly. What are you putting on your lawn? Are you putting fertilizers and pesticides on your lawn? Are you putting it on right before it rains? Do you live near surface water supply? Where do your downspouts discharge to? Are you just downspouting from your roof immediately off, you know, surface of your lawn or something into a water resource because the runoff on the roof is not clean? Are you cutting your native vegetation right down to water resources, you know, because you want a view or something like that? Are you preventing any kind of filtering or cooling or stabilizing of banks so that your property isn't just eroding into the water resource? So that's and then if you have a septic, are you inspecting that on a regular schedule? Are you upgrading failed systems? You know, failed septic systems are a major local water quality and public health issue. So, you know, as a homeowner, those are kind of the central things is how are you caring for your own land? And how are your neighbors caring for the the land around you too? Right. It has to happen at every level. So, okay, so that's your local me, my home, my property, my neighborhood level. At the community level, guess what? You have to invest in stormwater upgrades and maintenance. You have to hire the street sweeper. You have to bring that street sweeper. We gotta do it. It is not, it is not glamorous, but it is a huge lever for surface water protection. You have to encourage enforcement and adoption of buffers and wetlands protection and wellhead and recharge area protection. And that is especially true where groundwater is the main source of drinking water. So, you know, there are things you can do at the local level in terms of local policy to protect. And also, as a community member, you should be joining your local land trust and, you know, finding out where they're looking at and identifying land to protect for water quality because they're absolutely doing that. Um, if you have a watershed association related to the watershed you're in or the waterways in your community, then look them up, see what they're up to. They probably have a plan for restoration or conservation or other management of the waterway. So, you know, these organizations exist. They do have influence at the regional and state level. I just don't necessarily get enough visibility because nobody really thinks too much about the cleanliness or safety of their water coming out of their tap until it doesn't come out anymore. That's a very disturbing sentence you just said.

Liz Canada 38:54

It's true. Very true.