A water company in the Berkshires is facing scrutiny for delays in making critical upgrades to its filtration system.
There are larger questions about how Massachusetts officials have handled the situation.
Hudson/Catskill Bureau Chief Sam Dingman spoke with Talia Lissauer, the South County reporter for the Berkshire Eagle about the history, regulatory challenges, and community impact of the ongoing water crisis.
Click the play button to listen to the full conversation.
Read Talia Lissauer's reporting here: Housatonic Water Works warned MassDEP it was falling behind. Now Great Barrington wants action
See the full interview transcript below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dingman: Let's start by setting the scene here. Where exactly in the Berkshires is this issue with the water happening, and what is the issue specifically?
Lissauer: This is happening in Housatonic Village, which is in Great Barrington. And it is happening because there is an excess of manganese in the water source. About 800 people are affected by this.
Dingman: And this issue with the manganese in the water, what impact does it have on the water? Is it obvious, visually, that something is amiss?
Lissauer: The main impact is the visual. It is causing discolored water. It can be a dark coffee color. It can be a light yellow, depending on the level of excess manganese.
Dingman: Those are both not colors you want the water coming out of your tap to be. So to be clear, is this a dangerous situation for them?
Lissauer: As far as I'm aware, there have been no health impacts of this, which is part of the reason why there hasn't been lasting solutions.
Dingman: So, people have just been dealing with this really unfortunate discoloration, and want something to be done about it.
There's a company called Housatonic Waterworks that delivers water to folks in this area. They theoretically had a plan to fix it.
Lissauer: Yes, so, a lot of the pipes have not been replaced in many, many, many years. That is about 16 miles worth of pipes that need replacing, ultimately. They are under an order from the Department of Public Utilities. They can raise their rates about 90%, but they also have to make significant upgrades to the aging system.
Phase two of this plan was supposed to go into effect Aug. 1 of last year, but that was very clearly not going to be possible due to ongoing litigation from the towns. So, you have the Great Barrington Health Board, the Great Barrington Select Board, and then West Stockbridge. Their only way to put pressure on the company was through litigation. But then the company was saying, because of ongoing litigation, 'we can't do this.' There's still not a filtration system in place.
Dingman: If I'm understanding correctly, the towns were engaging in this litigation because there had been a delay in implementing the filtration system.
Lissauer: Yes. Last summer, there was an agreement, another administrative consent order with the Department of Environmental Protections that said that they have to have a filtration system in place by March 1, 2026.
Dingman: If I'm tracking all this correctly, this is a second order that Housatonic Waterworks is now facing to implement this filtration system. And again, as I understand from your reporting, they have not complied with that order either.
Lissauer: Correct. So they got an extension to June 1 of this year, which they did not meet.
This order was going to be different, supposedly, because there were all these milestones within the order that the company had to follow. So, they were going to track that by these monthly reports. I got my hands on these monthly reports. And in it, it was very quick that things were shifting. Deadlines were changed to TBD. There were lots of things that were just copy and pasted from month after month.
In May, the most recent extension request was denied. That was denied just a few days before the June 1 deadline, when it was just far too late. But, it was really clear to me months ago that the June 1 deadline was not feasible.
Dingman: Because you had been looking at these reports where the status was never changing, it sounds like. What has the state's response been to that missed June 1 deadline?
Lissauer: In June, about two weeks after the deadline was missed, a fine of $2,500 was issued. And then in late July, another fine was issued for $3,500, bringing the total fine to $6,000.
Dingman: So, meanwhile, folks in the village are continuing to have discolored water coming out of their taps. What has their response to all of this back-and-forth been that seems to have resulted in very little if any progress?
Lissauer: When this order first happened, a lot of people that I talked to were very skeptical. They did not believe that this would result in a filtration system that worked. Some of these were customers for 30-plus years and they just were not convinced that this was gonna be the end. And a lot of them have gone ahead and installed filtration systems in their homes.
Some people only use them for their kitchen sink or their tap water. Some people have them for their whole house. But if you're drinking the water coming out of the tap, you might be brushing your teeth with dirty water. You might be showering in dirty water. Your toilet has dirty water.
Dingman: It seems like things are sort of at a stalemate here. What happens next year?
Lissauer: Several times, the town of Great Barrington has tried to acquire the company because it is a private utility company.
They have tried to take it over to make it a municipal. That effort has failed several times.
Where they're at currently, is the town put in an offer to purchase the company in November of last year. After several months of negotiations, they were basically at a standstill.
They submitted a joint petition to ask for the state's help. A lot of people are hoping that a municipal takeover is the next step. I don't know because you still have miles and miles of aging pipes. Significant funding needs to be put into this system, and those are not funds that Great Barrington has to spare. And then on top of that, you will need a large chunk of the town to approve this at a special town meeting and when you only have 800-plus customers, that's really hard to do and they've failed several times. We really just have to hope that this filter gets in eventually and does its job.
