Our Personal Water Supply
EDITORIAL

If there are trillions upon trillions of gallons of icy, fresh clean water hundreds of feet beneath Nantucket's sandy, gravelly surface and if in fact it leaks out at low tide along Monomoy Shores, bubbles up onto a Wauwinet Road lawn at Eat Fire Springs and into the reeds of Folger's Marsh, why then do we talk of watering bans and record pumping days during the busiest summer months?

For the same reason there are two harbor watersheds - one each for Nantucket and Madaket harbors - and a wellhead protection district. Clean drinking water will probably never be in the come-to- Nantucket rhetoric in off-island advertising. Only on monthly water quality reports does Nantucket's water supply shine like Nantucket's brighter jewels of open space conservation, beaches and the wealth of endangered plant and animal species.

But our water, our sole source aquifer, is just that, our only source and literally the lubricant for all activities topside on Nantucket. Being at sea 30 miles out brings splendid isolation, peace and solitude from the ills of the mainland, but we pay for that with varying degrees of self-sufficiency, one of which is reliance on one source of water: what falls from the sky and what is already in the ground.

Though it is voluminous, clean and its lower layers are believed to be 20,000 years old - older than the last glacier to grind over the island - unlike the sandy shores, the wilderness and the critters that cohabitate with us on the island, all of which if we had to, we could deal without, we cannot function without water. And right now, we can barely pump and store enough of it in our two town storage tanks. Yet, as stewards of this precious resource, we seem to place a mainland culture of green lawns and botanical opulence at a higher value than the essentials of island survival.

With saltwater intrusion always an enemy of potable, healthy water and not a contaminant that we islanders can completely divert from the aquifer, there are water polluters that can be controlled such as the amount of fertilizer used on properties all over the island - not just in the two watersheds - through the Nantucket Landscaping Association's Best Management Practices. There are also common sense, non-glamorous preventive and conservation actions that can be taken, including maintaining septic systems or replacing them at the first signs of malfunction, bicycling, walking or riding the bus for your island conveyance to reduce the potential oil and fuel drippings and spills and limiting water usage with low-volume toilets and low-flow shower heads. Planting drought-resistant flowers, shrubs and decorative grasses, and watering lawns and gardens sparingly by hand can wean water abusers from too much use as well.

These conservation measures may all sound nitpicky, given what we know of the size of the massive lake below us, but because the town's wells, 'Sconset's wells and all the private wells on the island are drawing just at the very top of the aquifer where the highest concentration of toxicity resides, it behooves all of us to tune our collective conscience to a reverence for water as if each drop we drank or bathed in came from our own personal supply. I