EDITORIAL – Revamp R.I. Water System

As Rhode Island’s population spreads out across areas that not long ago were rural, it’s clear that the state’s water resources are becoming stretched. Some water districts, especially in the central and southern parts of the state, are getting a little thirsty. And the shortage of water is affecting economic development.

Last summer, the General Assembly ordered the Kent County Water Authority to supply Amgen, the huge pharmaceutical manufacturer in West Warwick, with water – over Kent’s protests that it would undermine its ability to supply its residential users. Quonset Point’s scant water supply may become a problem in attracting companies. The water supply there may need to be augmented with a desalinization plant.

For generations, much of the state’s water needs have been met by the Providence Water Supply Board’s large reservoir system on the Pawtuxet River, including the Scituate Reservoir, completed in the 1920s. Filling it submerged several villages forever but provided Providence, at that time a larger city than it is now, and other cities and towns with more than enough high-quality water. Water boards such as Kent County’s continue to meet their needs with water from the Providence system.

But now Kent and Washington counties – villages and farmland for the most part in the ’20s – are heavily populated. Some localities, such as Narragansett, are fully “built out.” The Scituate and other reservoirs are sometimes alarmingly low in summer.

Rhode Island is hardly short of water – it gets a lot of rain, of course. To paraphrase Samuel Coleridge, there is water everywhere, but sometimes not a lot to drink. Some businesses are bypassing the water boards altogether, by sinking wells on their properties. Nicholas Cambio, who’s building a large housing and retail development not far from the Amgen plant, believes that there is plenty of water from two aquifers under it. Mr. Cambio’s property is also not far from land that the state took by eminent domain for the construction of a second large reservoir in the 1960s.

That project, the Big River Reservoir, was never built and the state now manages the mostly forested land as a reserve, with water from wells augmenting the supplies of local water boards. The Kent County board is putting in several wells to increase its supply. Submerging the land beneath a reservoir was strongly opposed by many environmental and conservation groups.

A problem with this approach is that it may overtax these springs, and it further fragments a system that was haphazard to begin with. A unified system, as Governor Carcieri proposed in his latest state-of-the-state address, would bring the hundreds of water boards, authorities and backyard wells that still supply many neighborhoods together under a single management.

But to get back to Amgen: After its run-in last summer, it redesigned its manufacturing system to use less water, and reuse some of it in other applications, such as heating and cooling. People tend to waste vast quantities of fresh water, and there are always ways that it can be better conserved.

Much of the water that comes out of the state’s reservoir systems has to be treated again before it returns to the environment, most of it discharged ultimately into Narragansett Bay. The progress made in addressing pollution of the state’s inshore waters, largely because of the building of treatment facilities that are finally adequate to the task, could be set back by a large increase in the amount of water to be treated.

What is becoming increasingly clear is the need for a general reorganization of Rhode Island’s highly fragmented approach to water distribution.

(c) 2007 Providence Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.