 Okay. Oh, maybe it was just telling me to announce it. So I'm announcing it. It's being recorded. Hey. Don't say anything. You can't unsay. It's, there's a public meeting. If I am not understood correctly. It is. All the normal things apply. Yep. You don't get any attendees, but. Okay. Good. So this is the information from the water status webpage. Atkins reservoir levels. And you can see they rebounded. Pretty well. As of the end of. December where. We're back up. Yeah. I don't get any attendees, but. Okay, good. Let's see. We'll go back to sharing this one. Okay. So this is the information from the water status webpage. Atkins reservoir levels. And you can see they rebounded. So we're, we're back up. To full, which is good. And similar to other years. We're a little bit higher than a few, the other years, definitely higher than the drought year of 2016. So things are looking good. Somebody joined. And we can also look at the water demand. That's been. Happening this year in Amherst. And is on our webpage. So. The demand has just been low. It's been a lot lower this year. The only month that. It got close to previous levels and a little bit higher. Was June. But September, October, the last three months, September, October, November. It's been much lower. And it's dropping. We don't have the December data yet, but. So. So we're really in good shape right now. I know we haven't gotten a lot of snow. So. The winter. It's questionable again. And we'll see, we'll see how it goes. But as of right now, we're in good shape. Going back to the previous. Atkins. Water levels. The, the low. Point. The, the, the, the. Level. Is. Managed. Because when it gets too low, we simply. Use other supplies. Yes. Is that a correct statement? Yes. I mean, you'll notice this year. It went a little lower than other years. And, you know. Partly we had some other sources that we were resting or doing got a little lower than we would normally try to manage it. Normally, we would try to reduce, if not shut off Atkins for a little bit as it was getting to some of these lower numbers. But we were playing the game of maintaining some of our other sources that they would be available and good to go when the students come back, though. Sure. But my point is simply that the low is a managed level, not something that we need to be concerned about. Yeah, I mean, we look at this on a regular basis and as it's starting to get to a level that raises concern for us, then we do adjust sources to manage how low that gets. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. All right, does anybody have any more questions about what's on our water supply webpage right now? This is the precipitation for 2020, which actually, I mean, it felt like it was a, definitely it felt like there was a drought this summer, but when you look at precipitation, it was actually closer to the 10-year monthly average than 2016 was by quite a bit. So that's what we have. That's it and we keep updating that webpage monthly. Next on the agenda is water infrastructure projects update and we've got a lot of big projects going on right now. A lot of move forward quite a bit on a lot of things. Amy's gonna talk mostly about this, I guess, centennials first. So Amy, you want me to bring up the plans? Yeah, but you just wanna bring up those 30% plans just if people are interested at all in looking at that. And I think you wanna go to like page three, maybe the first, this is like a process diagram, but I think page three at least gives the lay of the land a little bit, or that's the existing site. Okay, sorry, one more page. This one? Okay. This one. So this is, this right here is the 30% design drawing. We actually last week had our 75% design drawing. So this, the design of the new centennial is moving right along. And again, you guys are aware of this, but we're looking at dissolved air flotation, so DAF technology for this. Yeah, it's gonna be a different footprint. It's gonna be a little more set back off the road, which we're excited about. That lagoon swale area in the back is gonna be, they actually in the 75% design, it's a lot smaller. Yeah. I don't know what questions you guys have. We're more just excited, although we're looking at, seven pounds worth of design documents right now to try to review all of that. So. Amy, can you reflect our memory? Did you receive a waiver regarding the net zero bylaw? So we didn't, it's, it falls into a weird space because it's in Pelham. So I think the net zero energy is technically written for buildings in, like Amherst town buildings in Amherst. And so we don't technically fall within the bylaw. It's just kind of an odd loophole. We're not 100% sure if it applies to this building anyway, because it's an industrial building, it's a treatment plant and net zero energy would be pretty hard to achieve, given the size of the pumps and the air generator for the DAF technology and all of that. That being said, that has been part of the conversation with the select board. And so we're gonna do what we can to make it as energy efficient as possible. They're doing things such as the roof, like the rating of the roof, they're gonna make sure that it has that little extra bit of like rating on it so that if we put solar panels up there, it can handle the weight of solar panels. Like they're taking some of those steps in the design to leave the door open for that in the future. But yeah, technically I don't believe we fall within the mandate of that regulation. And hopefully if you did, I mean, this is the classic example of why it's not a great regulation in blanket statement that this would need a waiver. I mean, this is a constrained site, one place to put it, can't do anything. So very, very challenging to meet a blanket type thing like that. So I would hope that a waiver would be straightforward for this application. Amy, as I've said in the past, happy to engage. Appreciate that. I'm here. You know what I know. Okay. What's the expected instruction phasing start date finished? And what's the design capacity of the plan? So the design capacity, it's gonna be 1.5 with three trains. So I can send you, if you're interested, they actually have a like seven or eight page document that just kind of lays out all the design criteria. Are you interested in that? I'm happy to share that. Maybe the whole committee is. Yeah, I'm happy to share that. I certainly am, I certainly am. You're like, I find that information cool. I don't know that everyone else does. But, oh yeah, and then you were asking timeline. So the timeline for this, we're hoping to get through the rest of design and permitting, there's a lot of permitting that has to happen as well. So we're hoping to get through that, through the spring and early summer and then go through bidding process. So we think we're probably two years out from this being done, done. We wouldn't start construction till optimistically in the fall and it might be later than that, given just permitting timelines that seem to be taking a little longer right now with everything else that's going on. Are the cost estimates still pretty much the same as they were? On an order of magnitude, they've gone up just a little bit, but they're still within the same ballpark. So we did get an appropriation for, I believe it was 11 million for this and cost estimate that we just saw with 75% was at, I think 13.2. So obviously it's above that. And right now we don't, the 30% design estimate, I think was at like 12.8. And so the number keeps shifting a little bit. So right now we're trying to decide when we go to the select board, if we have to ask for more or whether we start having the value engineering conversation. So that's kind of the point that we're in right now. Yeah, it never goes down. It only goes up, but it's close. Amy, what's the sort of availability or what's the situation with financing in terms of money? What kind of bond interest rate terms and or are we getting any state revolving fund money? I don't know the answer to all of that, although we certainly, we could get that. It's in my budget books. I just don't have that right in front of me in terms of what the bond rate, I believe it's a 20 year loan and whatever the standard interest was for a bond when they first appropriated for it last year. Although I think at that point they just assume because we don't, I don't know what you're saying. Yeah, that means that we haven't done SRF for it. So I could state my opinion on SRF or we can leave it at that. Let's leave it at that. Fair enough. All right, does anybody have any more questions on Centennial? Okay, next on our agenda is well number four. Stop sharing my screen, there we go. And I can talk a little bit about that and then Amy can, or I talk a little bit about it too. Well number four is off of Southeast Street. It's the well that's connected to baby carriage treatment plant, just so you guys a little refresher. And we're drilling a replacement well for well number four. I think we talked about this before about its capacity issues and drilling is supposed to start next week. So we're pretty excited about that too. Yay, moving forward. It's permitted, it's got all its DEP permitting that it needs. And we, yeah, we finally got everything ready and the drillers supposed to come out next week. And so that's great. I mean, I think the drilling is only gonna probably take a couple of weeks. We run a pump test, we do sampling and then we communicate again with DEP to get moving, having it actually running. So that's all I know. Amy, did you wanna say anything else about well number four? I guess the only thing I'll add, like the permitting ended up being a little more than we anticipated, like the timeline for it and the responses from the DEP. And so that's why I feel like six months ago when we had the meeting, it was like, oh, we're just submitting the permitting. We should be hearing from them soon. And, you know, it's been, we've spent those last six months basically with ongoing communications with the DEP to get the permit. So. But what's the depth on that? Well, the new one you're drilling. What is it? 170 maybe? I wanted to say 172. Yeah, it's 170. Yeah. The goal is to access screen about the same level, same aquifer. It's not how close to the horizontally existing one? It's about 40 feet, I think. Yeah, no, and it's gonna be screened in the same aquifer. And so we did a temporary well and everything was great with that, the pump test, the sampling with the small temporary well. And that was last spring, I think we did that. And so everything looks like it's gonna be good. Hopefully the manganese and iron levels are similar to well for no big surprises, no big surprises. Right, they were with the temporary well sampling. And like I said, once this is drilled, we'll be sampling again. We did for the temporary well, sometimes you do an observation well and then where you put the new well is a couple of feet offset from this. This instead, we put a temporary well and we're gonna pull that and put the new one in the same spot because we already have observation wells in that area. So this was more just, let's do it once and confirm that this is a good spot. New, same new vertical turbine pump. It's gonna be a new, yeah. It's gonna be a new pump. Yeah, it's gonna be a vertical turbine, pitless adapter that goes into the existing building and using the fact that we do have a well house but the new well will not be within the well house. So kind of similar to what we did at well number two when we replaced well number two just outside the well two house. So, yeah. So you just have the pump on top of it, the vertical turbine on top of the well but not the well house, not a whole well house. Right, sorry, no, it's a submersible pump because- I'm gonna say because unless you'd have a well house you don't have a vertical turbine pump. We don't have a vertical turbine pump. It's a submersible, thank you. Yeah. So it's a change into a submersible. Yeah. But and using the existing infrastructure with the well house with controls and- Yeah, all the controls will be in there. We'll wire controls out to that. We're actually leaving the existing pump still online. So now, like, so basically if anything happens to this pump and we have to pull the pump or something we could pump from the existing one on a rare basis. But yeah, the control wiring and access to sampling and all of that stuff will be in the existing pump house and then where it actually tees in is gonna be just outside the pump house. Does it require a new variable frequency drive or the same one used in new drive too for the pump? I believe it needs a new drive because the pump is gonna be because it's submersible. I guess it needs a slightly different like a slightly higher horsepower. Yeah, different stuff. That's my understanding. Yep. Yeah. Me. Yep. So we're excited about that one. That's moving forward. What's the horsepower on that? I don't know offhand. Again, with all of these questions if you want us to send you, I can send you information afterwards, like send that around to the committee if you guys are interested in that. Yes? Yeah, I'd be curious, yeah. I'd just like to keep tabs for knowing and teaching. Great. I'll send it around. We must have like what we sent to the DEP for the permit or some things. I'm sure we've got some pretty accessible information that we can share that. Who's drilling? Who's doing the drilling? It's Mahar drilling. They did the temporary well too. They were good. Yep. That's sorry. Say the name again. Mahar M. I think it's M-A-H-E-R. Yeah. Yeah, Mayor. I was going to say Mayor. Is it Mayor? I thought they announced it, Mahar. No, that's a high school. Sorry. Maybe it's Mayor. In Massachusetts, drilling wells. So, OK. Well, if I guess we're done with well number four discussion, we can move on to the waterline extension into Leverett. Everybody froze. Everybody froze? For me, I'm on the back. No, and everybody's OK for me. Oh, and now you're back. You were gone for a minute. Now you're back. Yeah, which makes no sense since I have a hard wire connection in an office that you mask, but who knows, right? It's about the most robust that could be. Oh, all right. Let's share the plans for Leverett Road. I guess this is all. Yeah, it's kind of because it's so long, you have multiple pages, but it's basically, you know, the waterline extension from our last connection on East Leverett Road and, you know, continuing up East Leverett Road. You kind of show the next one. Yeah, continue, you know, continuing all the way up. What's the length, total length? Some 9,500 linear feet approximately. Size and material. It is a I want to say. We're making space because partly we're going to leave some of that open to bid. I believe we finally talk them into 12 inch diameter, but during the bid, we're going to have, we're going to do the bid as the C909 and have a bid alt to do it as ductile iron or vice versa. So we're going to look at prices and decide on the material based on prices. And, you know, based on ultimately, that'll be the tiebreaker. Jason will talk about it in a second. We did put C909 on the West Pomeroy Lane. And I guess that's the first time we've used it in our system, but I know like South Hadley Fire District number one is using it extensively and they're a big band. And so, you know, we think that that might be the right material here and it's, you know, more cost effective. So that's our hope, but. So it goes. Goes, yeah, you just showed it like goes up and turns on teawaddle and then goes down that bottom one there shows down on teawaddle. Right? C909. I was saying, I'm waiting for it. I know, Jason, you know better than I did the trade. Well, it's got a few sort of trade nicknames, but the one that sticks the most is the C909. Googling it real quick. Yeah, me too. Not 900 is common, but. Yeah, the 909 is a whole lot more flexible and that's why South Hadley prefers it. The 900 is, it's a slightly thicker wall, but extremely rigid and can be fragile. It will shatter as opposed to flex. Right? C909 has some really, the guys from South Hadley sent me some pretty cool videos of them playing around with an excavator in their yard. They crushed a piece of C900 and it shattered into billions of pieces. It looked pretty dangerous actually. And they took a piece of C909 and they were able to crush it and it actually rebounded back to semi-round. It didn't go exactly back to round, but it didn't rupture at all. So we like that material. It gives us a little more confidence, because it's really easy to put an excavator tooth through a piece of C900 and blow a water main out. Whereas if you, you know, that's why we like Duckdoll is because you can hit it with an excavator, you know it's there and you don't necessarily end up with an instant leak. So we feel more comfortable with the C909. Cool. A little bit more resilient. So it's quite a new pipe, relatively new. Yes. Yeah. So it's like the move from cast iron to ductile iron. It's nice. Exactly. Yeah. Brittle PVC to flexible. PVC. Good. Ultra blue, I see it's advertised as. Yes. Jameagles ultra blue is the other, yeah. It's the other training. Not just blue, but ultra. Yeah. You can Google all sorts of fun videos showing excavators crashing the stuff. You would think cameras would only put an ultra blue pipe, huh? Well, our water department is sold on it after they did West Pomeroy for sure. It's much easier to work with. Good. So this is going, we're working on the permitting right now for this project. And I'm assuming we're going to bid and possibly do next summer. Is that right, Amy? Yeah. East or Leverett, the town of Leverett is really hot to trot on this. And so they're kind of driving this pretty good, but looking to bid maybe they want like end of this winter, early spring for construction over the summer. So we're just picking our way through the permitting process. The one difference, we don't have the finalized design drawings. The one difference between, you look at this drawing here and it has it serving all of the houses on T Waddle before there's a little stream and then it goes up the hill. And I guess on the other side, Beth, where it says limit of work right in that area is like where the end of work was initially. We're also going to do at least at this time a bid alt to go under that stream and serve the next house. It wasn't originally in the scope, but I guess Leverett found that the house on the other side of that river tested for some background levels of PFOS. And so the DEP may at some point make the leap that PFOS is also because of the landfill and have them connect to water. And so at this point, they're not sure if they're going to do it or not, but we're going to do a bid alt to at least extend to that one house if they decide they want to provide water to that house preemptively. So ultimately a Leverett decision, but that's kind of the one major change since this set of design drawings that we're showing. Question on the Leverett project at all? All right. Yeah, I had one question. Sorry, I was on mute. How do we get by the relatively new bridge that was put in six, seven years ago? If they're going to directional drill underneath. Under the bridge, under the stream? Yeah. Okay. Great. That would be for both streams that they extended across the stream on T-waddle. Yes. Yeah, both directionally drill there as well. So we thought that was much easier than any other option for stream crossing at this point. Yeah, it's much easier for all the wetland permitting. Definitely. And you don't have to mess with the bridge. Exactly. All right. So some more questions on that. We'll move on in the agenda to the waterline replacement in West Palma, right? And Jason, I thought you could sort of summarize that work. So... Yeah, that project came out really nice. We did temporary piping along the side of the road for all the house, all, it was all of six houses and it's 900 feet of pipe that we had to replace. This was the section I showed you guys that piece of Swiss cheese ductile iron pipe and we were just getting a leak there. Last winter, I think we had three leaks spring up and most of them on holidays, of course, where the guys had to come in and patch another hole, patch another hole. They just kept finding more and more holes. So we decided it made the final decision to just rip it all out and replace it. So we installed temporary water main down the side of the road, fed that to the six houses and then went in and started pulling out the ductile iron and replacing it with the C909. Everything came out really nice. We added a couple of hydrants. We did ductile iron for all the hydrants and fittings and just transitioned back to C909 every time for the mainline stuff. And yeah, it went out and came up really smooth. The highway department and the water department worked together on it and they really, they probably took about two to three weeks. Well, it took a couple of weeks to set up the temporary main. Then it was a couple of weeks. I think it was three weeks of excavating and replacing main and then testing and cleanup. So it came out really nice. We had Warner Brothers do the trench patch and everything came off really nicely. We had a little bit of hard time pressurizing it. It behaves a little differently than ductile, I guess, as far as doing the pressure testing. But we figure we got it nailed down pretty good. So yeah, I guess 900 feet of pipe, three weeks. It came out really nice. The guys love it. The pipe is so much easier to work with. You don't have to have the excavator sling it into the trench for you because the guys can actually pick, two people can easily pick up a piece of pipe, at least the eight inch anyways. So yeah, it worked out really nice. And the service lines where you just replaced a little bit of copper connected to the... We went from the main to their curb stop, basically, to replace. To replace to the curb stop. I found all their curb stops and went and replaced from one to the other. Good. Tapping goes well. The crew likes tapping. Yeah, it was nice and easy. It did saddle taps for all of them. But yeah, it worked out nice. They ran all the main line first and we did the pressure test, bacteria test and chlorinated the line. And then once we made sure there was no bacteria, bacteria samples came back negative. We went ahead and tapped all the services and reconnected them and disconnected the main and hauled all the ductile iron in them. So we didn't see as much. We didn't get any great Swiss cheese samples that came out. I was expecting a whole lot more Swiss cheese pipe to come out of the ground. But there was a lot of evidence that there... I think the tar coating on the ductile that came out, there was a lot of like missing tar coating where there was gravel stuck to the bottom of the pipe in a lot of cases. So that was the only thing really noticeable that if that rust were to progress, it would eventually eat through the pipes. So I expect we would have seen more breaks there this winter, but we preemptively removed it. So we're happy. We didn't have to go out there for any winter repairs. So, but yeah, everything else on that project came out really nice. Glad the job went well. I wouldn't describe the road as always smooth as one who uses it a lot, but it was great during construction as normal, but it was great. It was great. Nice that you got it done. All right. Any more questions on West Pomorai? All right, so moving on, our 2020 lead and copper sampling. So we did that. We did all lead and copper sampling in October. We sampled from 37 residences and two schools and our 90th percentile measurements were below action levels. And everything went really smoothly. The schools we sampled were the UMass Center for Early Education Care and the All About Learning facility on Pomorai Lane. So yeah, so we don't have to do that potentially for another three years. I'm assuming some of you all know that the lead and copper rule got revised and the new regulations put into the federal register just in the last couple of weeks. So last Friday, yeah. So we've looked through that. We kind of have a good grip on it, but we need to look at it more and I'm waiting for DEP's direction. They tend to take something like this and put together forms and put together a whole plan for communities on how to move forward and what your requirements are. And we're sort of waiting for that to see how where Amherst fits in. But, you know, we were on a schedule where we did our lead and copper sampling every three years and we'll see where it goes from here. But it was good to get it in this year in 2020 and kind of have some very recent data. What's the new action levels? For lead, the action level is still 0.015 milligrams per liter, but there's this 0.010 milligrams per liter where you still have to do something at 10 now. So it is a little bit more restrictive. Copper stays the same at 1.3 milligrams per liter. So, yeah. So we need to get a good group on those. What was the copper level again? What was that, Brian? What was the copper level? 0.013? No, 1.3. 1.3, OK. 1.3 milligrams per liter is copper. Yeah. And that stays the same. You know what the 90th percent level for Amherst for the Homes was? For lead? For lead? Yeah, what the number was. I know you said less than the AL, but what was the number? Yeah, it was 0.0071. 7.1 micrograms, OK. Yeah. Just put one quick comment in context so you know I'm very involved in this. DP's goal for schools is one PPB or less. That's what we want schools to achieve. It's extremely stringent. It's appropriate from a health perspective, but it's very stringent. So the national rule didn't go very far, but it went in a good direction, in my opinion. So yeah, I mean, I have a pretty strong opinion about this. The water industry failed us. And I'm part of it. We kept using lead long, long, long, long, long, like centuries after we should have. So we got to deal with it. Can't put our head in the sand. It's a past problem we caused, and we need to fix it. So I'm going to encourage DP. And I don't know what they'll come out to, but my own strong personal preference is there's almost no benefit to taking two samples from a school. There's just, it's just, OK, two samples. There is no representative sample from a school. Sample all the fixtures or don't, in my opinion. So that's just, I strongly urge towns to take, now put on my board a health hat, to take as strong as measure possible to protect the health of our kids. So measuring, doing schools appropriately is what needs to be done. I know, Amy, school department, SWIG. We got a SWIG grant. Did any of those fixtures get installed? I don't know. I'll ask. You guys should know. The reality is they would have done the installation with that, but I did tell them, call me when they're in. And I'm happy to do the sampling for you. And I hadn't heard. OK, that'd be great. Yeah, and if you do this, if you get involved in that and what should have been done that's pleased to deal, please, please make sure you use the lab that does the EDDP upload because the SWIG grant requires compliance with DP's LCCA program. You can't use the lab just because it's cheap, because it's, and it doesn't do EDDP upload. We've talked through this before. If it doesn't go into the tool, you haven't met the requirements of the program to get the grant. Our program, our staff people are talking with people all the time who don't get it and they do the wrong thing and they get to do it again. So. Hey there, John, can you just remind me what EDDP means there? Sorry. EDDP is the electronic upload from labs directly into the DP database. And it's required for certain types of analyses. For example, the next topic that's happening is under certain programs. So this one, it feeds information into what's called the LCCA program management tool, which is an online place that schools can look at their data, track their data, note changes, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, the LCR, it'll be different year next time. I know. Yeah. Yeah, I will, but it's all good. That's a good thing. Having the labs directly upload skips the middle person. So that is no delay in the upload. When it gets to DEP at the same time, it gets to the person who submitted the sample. The results do. Yeah, that seems like a good check on the system. Yeah, I mean, I'll just speak in the defense when we were doing the sampling at the schools because one set of ours got sent to the DEP. They started analyzing it for our 15th percentile. And it somehow got kicked into the wrong system. And we nearly got a violation because we were doing the sampling at the school. So it is good in some ways with checks and balances, but it also, unfortunately, if it's not handled properly on the other end, it's sometimes more harm than good. Remember, that was August 2016. You were the first school in our entire program, of which we did 800 schools. We had to train the labs that this is not. I mean, it wasn't like a required sample that would. No. And there is no MCL. I mean, the labs treated this number like an MCL and they're just dead wrong. The lab was dead wrong and what they did. So and it didn't happen again once they learned. So, yeah, and remember, you guys were the guinea pig. That was the program was getting going. It was local. We could do it. We get and it was great that it was done. And it pointed out significant issues with those buildings, which we expected, and they need to be addressed. So I mean, it's all right. But yeah, labs, it's a challenge for labs to. They like to show numbers and they've got some reporting requirements. So they're going to err on the side of overreacting and overreporting then under. So, oh yeah, the result was coming off the GC to Dave Rekau and me, like each sample. This is over the MCL. And we said, no, there is no MCL. This is just a reporting number. This is a program. So don't tell us the result every time a sample comes off the AA or whatever it is, ICPMS. So that took a little bit of training. But yeah, I hear you. I understand that getting violation notices is not fun on the water supply side for sure, especially mistaken. Right. All right. So no more questions on the LCR. We can move on to PFOS or other popular contaminant. So I'm going to, John, I'm going to give you a chance to definitely talk all about PFOS. But I just wanted to mention, so we will be sampling. Amherst will be sampling in 2021. We start in April. And you have the initial monitoring is four quarters. And we're always, so we'll start in April. And we have to do our entry points from all of our sources. So it's looking like we're going to be collecting five samples quarterly this year for our initial monitoring. And then based on the results of that, we see what future monitoring Amherst is going to have to do. But this is the start of DEP's PFOS program. And I know John knows a lot more about it. So maybe he could share some information. Encourage you to get the first quarter for free through the program that we're helping DEP run. They don't know if there's a reason not to, but if there is, I'd be curious to know it. But I would get the first quarter free because it's up being offered. And then you're on your own. Extensive QC things going on with these lab results that Massachusetts is way marry different than a lot of other states. There's only a few states with MCLs. Vermont's one, for example, Massachusetts does. So we're really working hard. We have a lot of people spending time on QC and working with the labs. This is a very difficult analysis and difficult to get rid of. And the levels, the 20 PPT for PFAS 6, though PFAS 6 is the sum of six compounds and they need to be less than 20 PPT. But if there's any detect at all, we do a confirmatory sample. There's a lot of nuances to this. So it's a challenge. And the labs are just starting EDP, just like almost actually, right about now. So we get good labs, we get challenging labs. It's an interesting time. So. I guess are some towns starting in January? Are some, is there a sampling being done? Yeah, yeah, 300 PWS is in the system so far that we've been part of the program. The large ones started in January and then the medium started in April and then the small started in June or July. Yeah, so that's kind of it. And anybody who wanted to get going on this could use a sample as their first quarter. In other words, you could use anything done appropriately in recent times as your first sample. So, I mean, there's, you can use some historical legacy measurements. So, doing that. There's also a private well sampling program you may hear about. I mentioned this before. Belcher Town's the pilot town, our next door neighbor and postcards went out to owners there asking them to volunteer. We're just getting the process going. We'll see what happens. It's a document you get assigned. There's a lot of questions about the program. DP's, the goal is to get a sense of how extensive PFAS contamination is in the commonwealth, you know, in the waters of the commonwealth, so. How many towns are gonna do the residential, the private well, I guess not the residential? There are 83 communities with 60% or more of the residents receive their drinking water from private wells. So, there's currently 83 communities on the list. And interesting, Belcher Town's one of the bigger, like population, Belcher Town's 15,000, 11,000 people get their water from private wells, 12,000, something like that. It's one of the bigger, but most of the communities are 400 and 500, things like that. There are communities that have already had issues like and have asked for measurements like Leverett, private wells in Leverett have been measured. There are communities that. Did you say 4,500 wells or 4,500 populations? People, people. Yeah, I didn't say what we're doing. The goal of the program is to get samples from 20 to 40 wells per community. And a huge amount of background work going on to identify a subset of wells that are targeted based on potential releases and then a subset of random wells. And the targeted releases are largely related to landfills industry and firefighting activities. So there's discussions going on with communities. You find out there was a big truck fire, a vehicle fire from place. So AFFF, the firefighting foam was used and it's now a potential very likely groundwater contaminant source. So chapter 21e has waste people. They get roped in pretty quickly. So if you do it well and it's above like 90 PPT, you're now in the has waste cleanup side of the world. So there's, you know, responsible part of all the discussions that go along with has waste site stuff kick in. Challenging. So John, do you expect that all 83 of the communities will participate? Well, it's not about the communities. It's about two individuals. So we're right at the point right now. Nobody's agreed yet. We have, we sent out 200 postcards in Belchutown 10 days ago and we got six people to sign up so far or at least say they will sign up. The next step is to send them this agreement form. Now we'll see how many agreement forms come back. And that we're right there at that moment right now. Okay. This project has about eight subgroups. We have calls, I don't know, three or four subtopics a week, 15 people on a column, Private Wells, DEP, UMass Amherst, UMass Lowell, it's a huge program. I don't know what quite, we got GIS. GS is extensively involved, State GIS and mapping, trying to lay this stuff out. So it's interesting, you know, the state really has not done comprehensive private well water testing, right? It's not that we, it's a very loose thing. There's not much requirements. So in each community, the outreach is to the board of health to try to meet with board of health and the fire department, police department, find out stuff and say here, we're gonna send out these postcards and you got communities don't have the time of day for it and you've got communities full of very active, it's a huge hot topic. So it's an interesting thing. What's the owner's responsibility if the limits come back higher and it becomes a hazard waste? It's described in a sheet of paper that I think it's sent to the homeowner and it becomes one of level and if it can be determined if the source of the contamination is on site or off site. In other words, are you a being harmed party or a harming party? That's that kind of, that's are you a potentially responsible party or are you being harmed by a upstream source? So up gradient, up something source. So all the words are caveats that say you may be subject to requirements under chapter 21e to take blah, blah, blah. I mean, the words are there, so it depends. Which in essence means that you may, if it's detected you may either need to filter of course before you consume it in any way or have an alternate water supply. Figure out an alternate water supply. That's another. Who pays for your cleanup? Filtering is wonderful if it's my well and I'm drinking it, but what about the rest of the story? Yeah, I mean, if it's your issue whether you own it or not. Right, if you're the responsible party, you own it, that's now, that's an issue. If you're not, then the other parties that that's a different, right? And that takes money to do that type of research to find out who is causing the problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. I hope that's well spelled out for the people that are signing that form. You know, that's a topic we're, yeah. The legal folks at DEP and 21E are all involved in that particular form. So at the moment, I don't know if we'll get anybody to sign up, if I gotta be straight up honest, right? That's, we got, we have 30 or 40 people who've signed up quote and a bunch of those are from communities that are not actually on that list of 81, but there's a whole bunch of interested homeowners. And if you're diligent, you can find the sign up link on the website, even though you weren't invited to sign up, but you can find it, it's semi public. If you live near a likely source and you're concerned about it, then you'll likely sign up because you'll feel that the likelihood is if they find something in your book that it belongs to the neighboring source or the upgraded source. And ultimately you would be the beneficiary of somebody else's remedial project. True. Yeah. Other than that, I don't know why you would sign up unless you're really concerned about the possibility of that being in your water supply. Because if it comes in at a very mildly detected level, you're still on the hook. Yeah. And the levels are incredibly small. So anyway, the town, I hope our water supplies from a PWS perspective are good. Grandby's a town that has private wells, for example, but there are on the order of 19 PWS's in Grandby. So I'm talking about a school, a building, a non-trant, right? So Amy knows this really well about how most public water supplies are tiny. There are vast numbers of them and some towns have many, many, many PWS's stuff. It's those sources, some of those are coming up challenging. I mean, there are, I will say in the PWS sector there's plenty of hits. And there's a pretty good website, public website dashboard, storyboard, story thing on the DEP website you can get to. So yeah, we got to, like you said, the source to sample. You can get, by the, you can, if you want, get raw and treated sources. So you're required to do certain things, but you can get raw. So baby carers work, for example, raw and treated you could get or Centennial raw and treated. I encourage you to do that. Yep. Well, I mean, I would say- Especially the free one, the first time. Right, as you say, Amy and I were just talking yesterday about that grant program, so. Yeah, what's the time? Great. If we're sampling in April and we want to take advantage of the funds, when should we be submitting to? Any time, you know, get in the queue, the path is through the regions? To us, there's the Margaret Fenn DEP basically releases PWSs to the program when the regions have vetted them. Said, okay, yeah, you want to do it. And you know the state, the regions are a bit of a fiefdom-ish thing. So. Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh, never. Wero, zero, Nero, all those, yeah. Okay. I'd never come across another state that had such regional differences, especially a tiny freakin' state. Yeah. The trade take kills. Crazy. It makes no sense. Makes no sense, but I'm glad we're in the Western region. Yeah. It depends. Depends. I've heard other regions in the state are a little more collaborative than the Western region. To be fair. Yeah. That was a comment to the chief. No. In the house. Those are just ways, I'm glad we're in the Western region. Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, it depends on the program. Yeah. You know, there are some great Western region folks. I love these subjects. I'm gonna say, I only got about two minutes. I gotta jump on a call with Springfield Water. Okay. We can just quickly move on to watershed work. Yeah, we had the Atkins Dam inspected, so it needs to get a phase one inspection every two years. So we had time bond came out in October and did an inspection. And we just got the final report actually and it got submitted to the DCR. So the DCR dam program. We did, we did all right. We got a fair rating, which is what we got two years ago. And the reason that we were getting a fair reading instead of, you know, good or is that we have sort of a slow embankment seepage on the left side, on the down slope left side. And it's been there for a while. We were already aware of it. It wasn't something that we just found out about with this inspection. And the recommendation from time bond and kind of what we've been trying to do the last couple of years is monitor it and sort of assess it. We had been doing a little bit of measuring with a weir and we need to get back to doing that now that we've got this new inspection report. We'll get back to doing that. So that's, you know, that's a project. And but we got a fair rating, which is great. There was a lot of positive things they had to say about the maintenance of the dam. Hey, Beth, a few years back when I was teaching groundwater, we tried to measure the seepage out of the dam. And the discharge was too low to measure. We used a salt tracer technique where you dump salt upstream and then try to measure it downstream. And basically the flow or the advection of the saltwater was slower than the diffusion of the salt. And so we didn't get a good measurement. I don't know what the lower threshold is, but that was I think 2016. It was the fall of the bad drought. And so one thing to keep in mind was the dam, the reservoir was about eight feet lower stage than full, but we couldn't detect it basically. We could see a tiny bit of seepage, but it was too low to measure for what that was. Interesting. Yeah, I didn't know that UMass had done that. That's cool. Yeah, it was a lab as part of a class doing a reservoir sort of balance, try to see how water and water out. So we were trying to measure all the water out point, but we couldn't get a discharge out in the seepage. Cool. Yeah, during the inspection this year, again, the water was really low, which actually I think may have benefited us a little with when time bond was out there. But again, it was a hard year this year to measure anything because the reservoir levels were so low. So that is that. Does anybody have any more questions about that? No? Okay. Moving on, something else we've been working on in the water said is something that we had Brian work on is the Pellum Reservoir sediment study we're heading eventually into dredging the reservoirs and also the sedimentation basins at Atkins. So right now we're just collecting data to eventually put together a project like that. I mean, that would be a lot of permitting. That's a big project. So right now we're just really in the phase of collecting data. And I asked Brian to kind of talk a little bit this morning about what he found when he did the sediment study. Brian? Hi, Beth. Yeah, I'm just taking notes on the Atkins thing still. So for how I compared slides, but the Zoom format here is unfamiliar to me. I don't see any, I can't even turn on my video because you can't see me, can you? No. Are you sharing your screen? No, no, I can't even turn on my video camera much less screen sharing. I don't know why. It's like, it looks like a town meeting format where the only thing I can do is. Yeah. It's probably not a presenter. That's as tough as the panelist versus me. I got to go to another meeting. Thanks. Sorry. Yeah, thanks for talking about all those important subjects. They're all great. Sorry, I got to go. Bye. Thank you for talking. Bye, John. OK, bye, John. Bye. See you all. Bye. Yeah, Brian, you joined as an attendee. One thing you could do is go into your email and find the email I sent you with a panelist link. OK, I'll be right back. I'll take me two seconds. Well, we're waiting for him. Are there any other questions or topics that we want to hit on or that people have on their minds? No. I have one. So I'm curious about this proposed wastewater recycling line for irrigation. Yeah. And I just I don't know anything about this. But I'm kind of affiliated with Amherst Golf Club. And that was kind of discussed by Guilford. And oh, Brian's back. So but at the end of the meeting, we can talk about that. Yeah. All right, can you see my screen? Yes, I'm not going to present their view because I'll try to save time. So briefly, look at the sediment volumes in the Pelham reservoirs. These are the Pelham reservoirs. If you haven't been there and are not familiar with them. Pelham reservoir is fed basically by the headwaters of Amethyst Brook. I don't remember the actual name of the stream, but it's essentially Amethyst Brook. Pauly reservoir is the one you can see from Amherst Pelham Road. It's got that really pretty spillway that spills about eight months a year and now and then drops below the spillway. It's fed by a pretty small watershed, Harris Brook. And it's got sort of these two wings of the reservoir, two arms of the reservoir. And then they merge just above the intake reservoir. And that's where the intake is for Centennial, which we were talking about earlier. So this is the system we're looking at. And the town just wanted to know how much sediments in them to plan for any possible dredging. Rather than do the summary at the end, they thought I'd just give you the summary at the beginning. The reservoirs are in some about 20% full of sediment. And they'll fill in about 400 to 700 years. But that's a minimum estimate. I did a really quick and dirty estimate. I calculated the trapping efficiency of each one and then looked at the sediment loads and adjusted the sediment loads for trapping efficiency. But the thing is, although the trapping efficiencies of the reservoirs are sort of moderate right now, as you get more and more sediment in a reservoir, the residence time for water gets less and less. And so your trapping efficiency decrease as you start to fill the reservoir. So you sort of have to do a differential approach to do a more sophisticated reservoir lifetime, which I didn't do. This is just sort of a minimum estimate. The trapping efficiency stays the same. They'll fill up in about 500 years. Dredging would restore, right now, would restore about 2% to 6% of the water storage of the reservoirs. And the reason it's not 20% is because a lot of the sediment that's in the reservoirs, that sediment volume is mostly water. So the porosity of the sediments are something like 70, 80, 90%. And so if you remove a yard of sediment, you don't restore a yard of water storage. You could only restore 20% of that yard because only 20% of it was actually filled with mineral materials. And the total volume of sediment is about 30,000 cubic yards in all the reservoirs. And that's the in-situ volume. If you allowed it to dewater, the volume would be less. And so I don't know much about dredging procedures, but I would assume they could pilot up, let it dewater for a time, and ultimately remove less volume. A little bit about the reservoirs, these are sort of metrics on the reservoirs. So their volumes are about 10,000, 80,000, and 40,000 cubic meters. And you can see that Pauly Reservoir has a much smaller watershed than Hill Reservoir. The intake doesn't really have much of a watershed because as you recall, it's downstream of the other two. And so that 1.7 square kilometers is just the watershed area between intake and the upstream reservoirs. So the total watershed area is about 16 square kilometers. And then I'll just show you some maps of the sediment if you want to see them. Questions before I jump in the maps? All right, this is Pauly Reservoir. The color corresponds to sediment thickness. And the thickest sediment is about a meter thick. But the average sediment spread out over the reservoir is about a foot, about 30 centimeters of sediment across the reservoir. And the reservoir depth, average depth, is about six feet. So that's that 20%. Here's Hill Reservoir. It's a much bigger reservoir than Pauly. And it's much deeper, too. So it's about 40 or 50 feet deep in this central basin. So basically, there's a big delta that has filled up the area near the inlet. And then there's a sort of the toe of the delta right here. Sediment thicknesses in the delta are pretty thick. And the sediment's pretty sandy. And then out here, it's pretty organic rich. Some nice event deposits in the sediment out here, probably corresponding to some big hurricane floods. And I think you can see the 1955 hurricane in there. Kind of neat for me. But it's not that much in terms of total sediments. It's only about, yeah, maybe a centimeter. So the numbers here correspond to sediment thickness. And then the color is interpolated. And then the last one, this is the intake reservoir. I think this was last dredged in 1990. Is that right, Beth? Yep. So this is the only one that has been dredged. It's really tiny. You can swim across it in about 20 seconds to swim it across it. Maybe a minute to swim the length of it. If I can do it much less, so it's really small. No swimming, Brian. No swimming. I just had to do it for science. And I did not swim in it. But I did see a really nice, big blue heron at this reservoir, which was a nice day. And Beth and an intern helped me at this reservoir, which was really appreciated. But anyhow, this is the sediment there. These are the sediment volumes by reservoir. It's super important to see them, but just gives you a sense of where the sediment is. And then I gave a sense of how the mass would decrease if you allowed it to dewater. And then last, trapping efficiencies. So the trapping efficiency of a reservoir is the number that says how much sediment is trapped in it as a function of how much comes in. If you have 10 tons a year coming in and 8 tons a year get trapped, you would say it's an 80% trapping efficiency. So it's a number between 0 and 1. And this equation is taken from the Broon Rule, which is widely applied, developed in the Midwest, but now used all across the country. And I think this is a modified version of the Broon Rule that is more widely applied. Sorry, I forgot about it. It's from Heinemann, 1981. And the C and I is the capacity of the reservoir, so how much water is in it, which will tell you the residence time of water in it. Big reservoir, water sticks around for a long time, and most of the sediment drops out. Small reservoirs, water goes through really quickly, and a lot of the sediment will get transported through. I is the inflow, and so it's a function of watershed area mostly. And so you calculate it. So I just calculated an average runoff for the region to get annual inflow. And so trapping efficiencies, intake, trapping efficiency is sort of meaningless. It's tiny, the trapping efficiency is really low, and it's basically 0 when you do the equation. Of course, it's not 0 because there's some sediment in it, but the reservoir traps about 40%. Holley reservoir traps a little bit more because it has a smaller inflow, so a longer residence time. And yeah, they're all about 20% full of sediment. And that's the big takeaways. Any questions? OK, great. I went really quick just in the interest of time. No, that's fine. Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Fascinating. Brian, you're not allowed to have that much fun doing work now. We partly looked at this too because the question was, should we try and dredge these reservoirs while Centennial is down before it gets built? Because we won't want to take it down for dredging if it's going to happen in the next few years once we have this new treatment facility. So I appreciate Brian's work to kind of answer the question if it was worth it at this time or not. That was great. Going out on the canoe was fun too. It's all good. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to be, because I did the work, I feel like it's responsible to present the findings and let y'all or slash the town decide. But for 2% to 6% of storage, I don't think it's worth turning a great expense personally. Doesn't seem like it, no. No, it's just interesting because without that data, our guys just see the tips of the reeds coming out of the top. And so the assumption is that it must be more full of sediment. And so without the data, the perception is that we would have moved forward. And so we appreciated that we were able to bring in Brian to actually get us information to make that decision rather than just our visual observations that we were seeing above the surface. I think if we were to do anything small there, the sediment for bay for the intake reservoir, is that was pretty deep when we dredged it way back when. And right now, you can walk across most of it. The gravel road sort of spills into that and fills in that sediment for bay pretty quick. Yeah, I think that for bay and the sedimentation basins at Atkins are more, we've got data on those too. They're a little bit easier access. They're kind of a quick and easy project. You don't have to do too much. It's not as involved as a full dredging. So those might actually pay off a little bit. Yeah. And you need to know the volumes to do any permitting. So when we had some volumes already on the Atkins basins, but we didn't really know what Hill and Holly had for volume. So it's all good. We appreciate Brian's work. It was great. What is next on our agenda? MS4, the stormwater MS4. Not sure how much you guys are interested in this. It's not really water supply so much. But we are moving forward with all the work that we need to do with the MS4 program. We have submitted draft bylaws, two different bylaws to town council. And they're in the review process right now. And those bylaws are one is called stormwater management bylaw. And one is IDDE, which is illicit discharge detection and elimination bylaw. And basically, the bylaws are a first step with the program to give the town the authority to do inspections on private property for illicit connections to our stormwater system, and then also authority to review application to actually require applications for projects that are going to involve stormwater, especially when it's going to affect our stormwater system. So that's where we are with the bylaws. What else did we do this year? We've put together, we've started inventorying our outfalls, our stormwater outfalls. And we've put together some nice forms for collecting data at the outfalls and entering that into GIS. And we're continuing to do all the public outreach and public education that we started last year that's really just the continual part of that MS4 program that we have to do. We have a website. We do mailings, we try to do projects. This year, I would like to do a touch base and painting project that we were gonna start last year with the schools, but then the schools all shut down. So, but that's really something I'd like to do for public outreach. I think that's it for MS4. Does anybody have any questions on that? Brian? Yeah, I just wanna mention Fort River Watershed Association collected data on outfalls directly to the fort. And so we have locations and we have, I don't know if I've shared the data with you Beth, but I can. We have conductivity, temperature, things like that. Yeah, no, I would love all that information. That's right, develop the program. I know you guys are doing some good stuff. So yeah, we should definitely communicate and keep sharing. So that's all I have on that. I guess the next is to select a date for our next meeting. And Jack, you had a question about the reuse. Did you wanna talk about the... Yeah, I was just curious. It seemed like, you know, pretty big project. And I just really didn't know, you know, how that was gonna work. But it was just mentioned that it would be accessible, you know, along West Street, at some point in the future. And if someone knows something about it, that I'd be curious to hear about it. Yeah, so by way of a little bit of background, currently right now, there are a couple of trailers that UMass owns that takes some of our wastewater effluent and treats it for reuse. And they use that at the central heating plant for a couple of uses on campus for, you know, for an alternative water source. That trailer is kinda nearing the end of its natural life. So kind of the timing of all of that, we are looking at building a reuse facility within the wastewater treatment plant. So rather than UMass taking our water, treating it, and then using it instead, we would treat it and then send it to UMass. And so at least initially that would be the user for this reuse water is at least the sources at UMass that are currently using reuse water or that are looking to pipe in the near future. That being said, yeah, it's kind of that conversation in the future of are there other, you know, large uses or ways to get it. So stuff like the Amherst golf course, you know, the fact that Wildwood Middle School and high school are all close together and they have a lot of fields, like that's a good cluster of water use. It's just a matter of, you know, you need to have specific pipes to go to those places. And so that's kind of a future build out sort of thing. But for now, we're moving forward with the design. We're gonna be actually doing a bunch of sampling over the next six months to kind of hone in on the specifics of the design of this reuse facility in hopes that we'll have it in the next couple of years at the wastewater treatment plant. Yeah, I know like you have a couple of farms, you know, Mill Road and the incubator farm, they're off West Street, but I can't think of the name right now, but just curious, but it seems like a big kind of infrastructure project to lay, you know, separate piping, but. Yeah, I think that's why with some of these we'll be looking at where there's like clusters of users that it makes sense to run a pipe to somewhere. So we'll have to kind of balance the number of users versus the length of pipe to get it there. Yeah, so we're talking about reclaimed water usage. Yes, yeah. So typically golf courses, parks, places like that. Right. Thank you. Is there any way to incentivize businesses or public golf courses to do that as opposed to paying the water bill for fresh water to irrigate? Well, I mean, part of the incentive is that currently right now you, if you pay for water, you're paying the sewer rate as well. And so, you know, the cost for reuse water would be, you know, less than the cost of water and sewer combined. We don't know the exact cost because, you know, that's part of the design process, but it'll be, you know, probably close to the water rate. It might be a little higher than the water rate, but definitely lower than the water and sewer combined. But yeah, it's all things that we're interested in. Yeah, so it's fine. You know, there's a financial incentive there. And I imagine that piping wouldn't have to be the level of quality of a drinking water line. I don't know if you get away with, you know, cheaper installation, you know, methods versus, you know, drinking water line, but I don't know. No. You know, it has to be purple, right? I forget who we were talking to, but so I think the DEP was saying that there were some people that literally thought that like the water that reuse water was purple, that you had to like dye it purple, that, you know, they're like, wow, people. I think that's fuel. Yeah. Red, red di-dissol. Yeah. So it's all things that we're exploring, but yeah, it's, yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Thank you. All right. Does anybody have anything else they want to talk about? No? All right, for then we can set our next meeting date. I think, so do we typically do the third Thursday of the month? Is that, because I've got either the 16th or the 25th of September, they're both Thursdays. One is I think the third and one may, I think there's five Thursdays in the next September. I just wrote down those two dates earlier. So I guess I vote for the 16th unless anybody has an issue with that. No? Okay. September 16th, and hopefully we can actually meet in person, which would be amazing, but yeah, that might be pushing it. We'll see. Zooming is fun. All right. It was nice to see everybody and keep in touch. Well, thank you. Thanks. Have a good day. Thanks, Brian. Too.