The City Knew About Water Risks in 2021. Those Risks Are Still Being Ignored

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Does your water taste and smell terrible? According to the City’s website and the Mayor, this is because of weather and a record cyanobacteria algae bloom last summer in the City’s Lower Artichoke Reservoir. What the website doesn’t tell you is that the City was put on notice in 2021 of many potential risks to its water supply, including algae blooms, by a report issued by an engineering firm it hired. Since then, the City has done nothing to treat the underlying problems and has merely treated the algae blooms as they arise to keep them from reaching toxic levels.  Although the record blooms this summer were kept below the level at which the City would have had to shut off our water, apparently they were significant enough to cause the current problem.

While bad taste and odor are certainly unpleasant, the 2021 report focuses on the more significant risks to the City’s water supply.  The reservoir that supplies our water is protected from the Merrimack River by a dam that is too low, which means that the Merrimack could contaminate our water supply.  That happened last year and forced officials to shut off all water to the City. Luckily, we had enough stored in the water tank to prevent interruption in water flow to residents and businesses.  The report also noted that the Lower Artichoke Reservoir is too shallow, which causes the algae blooms that could result in no water to the City, not just bad taste and smell.  As recently as last year, the Mayor’s Capital Improvement Plan did not propose breaking ground on a fix to any of these issues until sometime after 2030.

Lucky for us, the City Council was paying attention, and created an ad hoc committee to study the water issues.  After they made their report public, the Mayor finally acknowledged the issues and committed to addressing some of them (the permanent remedy for the taste and odor issues is not on the list, and the temporary one will make it harder to fix in the future). But when the City Councilor who spearheaded the ad hoc committee applied to the Mayor to be on the Water and Sewer Commission, she was rebuffed by the Mayor despite the fact that there have been openings on the Commission for months, and she is more knowledgeable about the issues than anyone outside of the Department of Public Services. 

Speaking of DPS, the Mayor has submitted to City Council his appointment of his Manager of Special Projects to lead that department. According to her LinkedIn profile, her only qualification is as a landscape architect, and from 1991-2022, that’s all she did.  She has no relevant experience for a job that will guide us toward resolution of our significant infrastructure deficits and troubleshoot the inevitable issues we are and will be encountering while we wait for a solution. 

The taste and odor issues are clearly significant, but they pale in comparison with the parade of horribles forecast in the 2021 engineering report. If the Mayor had focused his attention on the water issues when he learned of them, the City would be much closer to having them fixed by now. The Mayor’s failure to commit to permanent solutions to our water problems, fully staff the Commission, and hire a leader with qualifications beyond loyalty, makes me question his commitment to resolving the water issues going forward. 

Lauren Caverly
Newburyport resident

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