Nantucket Harbor water quality ranked best in Southeastern Mass.
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Nantucket Harbor's water quality is the highest of 20 embayments along the southeastern coast of Massachusetts examined in the first round of assessments by the Massachusetts Estuaries Project.

Although Nantucket Harbor is rated the cleanest, securing this notoriety is not enough for Marine Superintendent Dave Fronzuto and Nantucket Health Inspector Richard Ray who list Nantucket Harbor's health as "acceptable."

"I think we're doing as much as we can with the manpower that we have," Ray said. "We will do all that we can to try to maintain that water quality. Nantucket Harbor actually has acceptable water quality; we just don't want it to get any worse. Madaket's water quality is not acceptable and we do not know how bad it is."

Currently, Ray and his department are engaged in inspecting all the septic systems in the watershed protection districts for Nantucket and Madaket Harbors, and ordering replacements of systems that fail inspections in hopes of boosting harbor water quality.

In the Nantucket Harbor Watershed to date, 275 of the 616 properties have been inspected, with only 20 of them failing, whereas in Madaket, of the 70 septic inspections done out of 699 properties in that watershed, 12 failed the test.

These inspections are the mandate of Nantucket's Septic Management Plan that came out of the recommendations in the Comprehensive Wastewater Management Plan. All property owners in both harbor watersheds must submit to inspections of their septic systems. Those whose systems fail the town's inspections have two years from the date of failure to replace them. However, some Madaket property owners are subject to more stringent replacement protocol adopted when the Board of Health approved Madaket's septic regulations on June 14.

Property owners within Zone A, a subdistrict of this watershed extending inland from Hither Creek, have 18 months to replace their systems if they fail their inspections. Those farther upland of Hither Creek in Zone B will get 24 months to replace their faulty septic systems.

Of the 32 properties that failed inspections, Ray said they are all in the process of being replaced.

"Those systems that were hydraulically failed are in the process of permitting installations now because they have a system that's not functioning," he said. "However, those systems that were deemed in failure by definition because of ground water separation issues, they're going to have to bring their system into compliance within 18 months of the adoption of the assessment report, or 30 months of the expiration dates of Zones A and B. Most of them are in Zone A and that expires on Dec. 14."

Faulty systems are those with broken or leaky system components; those whose leaching fields can no longer handle the output of the buildings on the property; those whose capacity is below the number of bedrooms on the property; and systems with less than six feet of separation between groundwater and the leaching field. Properties with cesspools, which are prohibited on Nantucket, would have to install new systems as well.

Inspections cost $500 to $1,500 and new septic systems run $20,000 and up, said Ray.

"These systems are not getting inspected as fast as they could be and it's not the property owners' fault," he said. "We do not have enough inspectors on the island. They are flat out busy with their own work."

Ray uses island septic system installers who are state certified to inspect septic systems; he is at every inspection as well.

"There's a glimmer of light in that a couple of engineering firms from the Cape are going to open offices here to do inspections, but they're going to focus their attention on Madaket because that's where most of the inspections need to be done," said Ray.

Ray's other battle for higher harbor water quality is fertilizer use. In his travels attending to septic inspections around Nantucket Harbor, Ray told the Shellfish & Harbor Advisory Board at its July 17 meeting of "iridescent green lawns" in close proximity to the harbor.

"For fertilizers, it seems to me that there is a modicum, if not a substantial flow of nutrients into the harbor and it is because of all of the green lawns around the harbor," he said.

While Ray said most of the landscapers are doing a very good job not using too much fertilizer on their clients' lawns, it is not practical for his department, given the manpower and budget at his disposal, to ensure that all landscapers are adhering to the Nantucket Landscape Association's Best Management Practice doctrine of one pound of slow-release nitrogen fertilizer per 1,000 square feet of lawn.

"I can't have somebody driving around neighborhoods measuring the brightness of grass or nutrient-loading in the ground," said Ray.

But help is on the way. In September, the Massachusetts Estuaries Project will produce a total maximum daily load number (TMDL) for Nantucket Harbor based on water quality data collected by the town and analyzed by the project's staff and graduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth where this program is based. The TMDL number represents the total amount of nutrients - sewage, fertilizer and other toxic runoff - that a given body of water can absorb before dipping below its ability to sustain life and into the realm of beach closures.

Nantucket's Planning Board and Conservation Commission will be able to use that number to limit the number of bedrooms per new house as well as the size, type and location

of new septic systems. I