I come warily to this writing. It is, after all, summer’s end, and with it, our turn toward winter. Still, Mere Brook and its watershed insist. “We’re central; we’re Brunswick,” they might say if given voice’s chance.
Near the midsection of August, I sat in on a US Navy-convened meeting of interested parties that included Brunswick Landing’s Restoration Advisory Board (RAB). Comprised of representatives from Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell and other stakeholders, this federally mandated group has for years voiced ideas and concerns about how the former Brunswick Naval Air Station would become the civilian magnet now called The Landing.
How, in short, would the temporary and hard use of place that the military often exercises be redressed when that place is given over to being home for families and businesses, for you and me?
There are many approaches to this question, but one that both the RAB and the Navy favor is watery. Look closely at the water that flows on top and beneath the Landing, and you will gain a sense of how this transition is going.
A comprehensive review of the Landing’s waters is way beyond the scope of this column. But a brief look at a few focal waters may help us gain purchase with this question.
As described in an earlier column (pressherald.com/2022/05/06/your-land-what-you-can-see-and-what-you-cant-earth-day-22/), 80% of the Landing’s stormwater flows into and through the stormwater retention ponds system located along the east side, adjacent to Neptune Road. Pressed by the Navy into stormwater service in the mid-1990s, Ponds A and B, and their downstream neighbor, Picnic Pond, slow the rushes of storm-bred water before they join Merriconeag Stream and then Mere Brook and Harpswell Sound. They are the eastern branch of the Mere Brook watershed.
This slowing lets many pollutant particles settle out of the flow; those that do so are kept from the lower watershed and the sea. A cleansing of sorts. The settled pollutants accumulate, however, and so the sediment in the ponds becomes unsavory, a problem to touch.
Knowing this, the Navy has embarked on a $5-million toxic sediment removal project for all three ponds, with the work slated for completion in 2023. Left intact with newly sand-lined bottoms, the ponds will return to their work until the next necessary cleansing. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but one with demonstrated effect.
A new chemical concern threatens, however, to upend plans and progress in the Landing stormwater system, and also on the 20% of the Landing that drains into the Androscoggin watershed, passing in route through Brunswick’s Jordan Avenue well field — read, town water source. PFAS, acronym for a class of harmful, “forever” chemicals much in our current news, have appeared in a number of test wells and in some Jordan Avenue Town wells (now closed).
Here, uncertainty hovers. Not only do PFAS chemicals resist decay that would render them harmless, but they also could be dubbed “everywhere” chemicals too. Coming into use over 60 years ago, these exceedingly stable chemicals went into products requiring unchanging, impermeable surfaces — nonstick cookware, food wrapping, papermaking. They also found broad use in firefighting foams, which were deployed extensively at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station and are still stored at the Landing today.
As seems humanity’s MO, we invented the PFAS family first, then began considering their effects later. That considering goes on, now in service of figuring out what, if any, concentrations are safe. Current Maine DEP suggestion is that water contain less than 20 parts of PFAS per trillion, down from 70 ppt. An arrestingly small concentration that new science says is still too high. When the EPA’s needle settles to a final recommendation, what will this vanishingly small concentration be? Zero?
All of this is backdrop to the Navy’s monitoring of a number of identified PFAS hotspots at the Landing. The aforementioned RAB meeting and its PowerPoint slides (available at Curtis Library) describe a growing number of test wells the Navy has drilled to discern PFAS presence in the groundwater.
And yet, watershed hope grows locally. In addition to the long vigilance of the RAB and Brunswick Area Citizens for a Safe Environment (BASCE) at the Landing, Brunswick’s Environmental Planner, Bina Skordas, has applied for and received recent word about a grant for Mere Brook’s improvement under the 319 program of the Clean Water Act.
Preliminary awarding of the grant will bring $150,000 of support for initial work on 3 faulty culverts and an outfall in the western branch of the brook. That work, combined with a current, (also partially grant-funded) Hydrologic and Hydraulic study (H&H), will begin the 10-year project of lifting Mere Brook from “urban-impaired” to Class B citizenship. The effects of this effort will, over time, join with the work on the Landing to lift the whole watershed. Which is where most of us live.
As go the waters of Mere Brook, so goes the health of the water and soil that undergird our town.
Foot Salve
Perhaps the prior consideration has made you pine for a little simplicity and beauty. Here’s a local trail recommendation (that implicitly asks that you share your own as well): for me, the most beautiful trail in town is a tenth-of-a-mile connector in the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Crystal Spring Trail complex. The Wetlands Trail crosses from one sector of the Main Loop Trail to another, and it is the most Maine of trails. Skirting a plant-rich, slow-water wetland on a pine-needle softened track, the trail rises gently, meanders a bit, and comes finally to a rustic bench at its uphill juncture with the Main Loop. I like to sit there and let the birds get used to my presence, begin then to “talk”; everything slows and expands, a bit. Here, on the edge of the Mere Brook watershed, water joins land in the process of becoming life. Here’s a link to the Crystal Spring trail map: btlt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/web_BTLT-CSF-Map-2019-2.pdf.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick, Maine resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com
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