By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist

Boston Globe, Sunday, October 22, 2006
 
 A guy named Kevin Kelly has a website that includes something called The Big Here. The Big Here asks 30 environmental questions that humiliate virtually all of us in the chattering class and many of you, too, dear readers.

They involve things such as watersheds and test our grasp of the ground beneath us -- the here in our lives -- and the larger world. To wit: Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap. How many people live in your watershed? (What watershed, by the way, do you live in?) How deep do you have to drill where you live to reach water?

And: Where does your garbage go? From what direction do storms generally come? Where does your electric power come from? Point where the sun sets on the equinox. Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?

My ignorance here is abject. Ask me where the J.P. House of Pizza is and I point like an upland hunting dog. Ask me where the sun rises on the summer solstice and I develop a facial tic. Most people I know can locate Darfur easier than they can the nearest earthquake fault.

Humiliated, I look for answers and end up talking to a group of smarties I call the Water Boys. Included are Bob Zimmerman, head of the Charles River Watershed Association; Jim Hunt, chief of Environment and Energy for the city of Boston; Mike Hornbrook, chief operating officer of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority; and John Sullivan, chief engineer of the Boston Water and Sewer Commission.

What makes me sit up and bark is the news that more than half of the 330 million gallons of water treated daily at the MWRA Deer Island facility in Boston harbor is perfectly good ground water that enters leaks in the pipes along with the overflow from storm drains.

My eyes normally glaze over at numbers higher than two digits but this one is a show-stopper. It means we're wasting huge amounts of water that should pour into our rivers and streams to keep them healthy. Many in the state are dry as popcorn in summer. The upper third of the Ipswich River is bone-like, says Zimmerman, and most of what flows in the upper Charles is waste water effluent.

"We're running out of water," he says. "We're throwing it away." About Boston, he adds, "We've taken a water-rich city and turned it into a water-poor one." That does bring to mind the drop in the water levels in parts of the Back Bay that threatens the wooden pilings beneath the buildings there.

Nuts, say Hunt, Hornbrook and Sullivan. The ground water problem is site specific, not widespread. And Boston has plenty of drinking water, most of which comes from the Quabbin Reservoir 65 miles away.

Also, the Deer Island facility handles the waste water for 43 cities and towns in the MWRA district, and get this: The MWRA owns 240 miles of sewer pipe, whereas the member communities own 5,400 miles of it. Add more than 5,000 additional miles of homeowners' pipes leading to public sewers and you get a sense of the smorgasbord of leaky pipes out there. So don't blame it all on Boston.

The good news is we're using a lot less water than we used to. MWRA drinking water consumption is down from 330 million gallons a day of drinking water in 1987 to 225 million gallons last year. Boston is the real success story here. Today it consumes less than the 90 million gallons of drinking water a day it did in 1910. Chalk this up to conservation, improved leak detection and staggering rate increases. The annual bill for an MWRA family of four using 90,000 gallons of water a year has doubled since 1997 from $450 to $930 last year. (A gallon of drinking water delivered to you.) New toilets use 1.6 gallons per flush or less, says Hornbrook, about a third of what was used in the past. (Here's one hand clapping. My experience with the new ones is, um, mixed.)

Also, new construction in certain areas of the city now must have underground chambers to trap the first inch of rainwater. And Boston Water and Sewer has removed 19,163 downspouts over the past decade or so, almost of them from private homes, steering rain from sewers, where it is lost, onto the ground.

The larger urban problem is that virtually all of our surface is impervious to water. It has been paved over and there is nowhere for rain to go but into the storm drains. We need to lose a lot of asphalt.

You've got to get creative. Zimmerman's outfit has been working with Harvard to bring water smarts to many facets of its planned campus in Allston. Two underground streams currently piped from North Allston to the Charles may be "daylighted" to the earth surface, providing cleaner water.

Our water conundrum is obvious: We want ground water in most areas but not in others, like the profusion of home basements and the below-ground apartments across Boston, where many sump pumps illegally send ground water into sewers.

What we have here is a war of competing needs. The Water Boys talk about a delicate balance. The bottom line is we need more ground water. All the best, guys.

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