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The town’s Planning Office is creating a digital map of Harpswell’s water resources to help guide future growth.
Water usage and availability emerged as prominent issues in the recent comprehensive planning process. The voter-approved plan calls for enabling residential growth while preserving many of the town’s characteristics.
“We’re trying to answer where in town is there more or less capacity for growth,” said Town Planner Margaret McIntire, who is in charge of the project.
To do that, McIntire’s office is starting from two previous water studies, completed in 1982 and 2001. The current effort will build on those by gathering information about wells and septic systems through a voluntary online survey. Funding the work is a $65,000 Community Resilience Partnership grant from the Maine Office of Community Affairs.
The survey asks about the locations of wells and leach fields; the ages of the systems and how they are used; and more specific questions, like the depth of wells and whether there have been problems with water quality.
McIntire said her office is happy to help people locate a well or answer other survey questions. A link to the survey is on the News Items/Notices page of the town’s website.
While some data about wells and septic systems is public information, McIntire said her office is asking property owners to fill out the survey because state databases are incomplete. For instance, she said the state only has information on a few hundred out of Harpswell’s thousands of wells.
Mary Ann Nahf, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission and its Resiliency and Sustainability Committee, hopes most property owners will respond. She said she believes nearly 80% responded to a similar survey for the 2001 water study.
Project consultant Carol White, a hydrogeologist who assisted with the 1982 water study, told the Select Board on July 16 that she hoped this could be Harpswell’s last water study. White said a new app lets the state collect data on new wells and septic systems more easily, so once the existing data is collected, it will be easy to keep it updated in the future.
Helping McIntire with the project is Miriam Oliveri-Schneider, a Bowdoin College student who is interning in the Planning Office. Oliveri-Schneider, who is majoring in biology and environmental studies, has been helping to digitize paper records of wells and septic systems.
She has also been building an online map of those systems using a geographic information system, or GIS, which can present and analyze information based on location.
Nahf thinks the map will help the town make decisions about growth by putting together the locations of wells and leach fields with the geographic information available in GIS. “It would let us be able to see where would be better to develop in Harpswell,” Nahf said.
Harpswell’s fresh water comes from rain and snow seeping into fractured rock below ground. That geology makes it hard to predict where good sources of water will be and makes wells vulnerable to saltwater intrusion as sea levels rise.
While the project’s first goal is to better inform plans for future growth, McIntire is thinking about other ways the information could be useful.
It could help protect marine resources, another goal of the comprehensive plan, by potentially identifying sources of wastewater pollution that threaten shellfish harvesting. Maine’s Department of Marine Resources can close shellfish grounds when it detects elevated bacteria levels, as is currently the case at several locations in Harpswell.
McIntire said Brunswick recently completed a similar GIS project and used the data to assign risk factors to septic systems. She said Harpswell could do the same without much more work.
