Friday, July 19, 2019
www.towntimes.com
Volume 23, Number 16
Waterline construction set to start in August By Everett Bishop Town Times
After decades of living with contaminated water, Durham residents may finally see some relief. According to Edward Hathaway, the
project manager for the Durham Meadows Waterline Project, work on establishing a waterline from Middletown to Durham should take place in early August. The Durham Meadows pro-
ject began in 2007 when Laura Francis, first selectwoman of Durham, first took office. The project was designed to provide Durham residents and commercial buildings with clean water free of contaminants.
A flowerbed at Leaning Oak Farms on Maiden Lane in Durham.
New ordinance allows agritourism By Everett Bishop Town Times
Agritourism allows farms to diversify their profits, which is especially important to A new ordinance in the town those that aren’t large of Durham would allow local enough to receive subsidies. farms to host agritourism “Durham’s brand is agriculevents. This could include tours, farm-to-table dinners, ture,” said Frank DeFelice, educational demonstrations chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission. and other ventures that would bring more visitors to “Durham has a unique geographic location. Because of local farms.
its central geography, Durham is in a unique position where people from all over the state can easily access the town.” Jesse Allen, owner of Leaning Oak Farm in Durham, said DeFelice had reached out to him, and also Tim Gastler of Gastler Farm, for See Ordinance, A5
Those contaminants had leaked into the bedrock under Durham due to industrial processes at the former Durham Manufacturing Co. and Merriam Manufacturing Co., as early as the 1970s. “In my process of trying to learn what the status was, the state of Connecticut said ‘Well, we need to do a feasibility study to find out where the clean water can come from. Would you be interested in applying for a grant to do that study?,’” Francis said. “I then said ‘The public needs to be a part of this.’ So we had a meeting and that’s when it became very clear to me how frustrated and frightened that our residents were having properties affected by the contamination.” Francis said from then on she “pledged to keep this on the front burner.” In a presentation given to the town of Durham in April, it was noted that the major contaminant of the area is trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical that the Center for Disease Control describes as carcinogenic. In order to provide residents and commercial buildings with clean water, Durham was given the greenlight to create a waterline from Mid-
dletown to Durham. The entire cost of the project is estimated to be around $35 million according to Francis and will be entirely paid for by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The plans for the waterline cover a large portion of Durham, as Francis and the EPA aim to not only provide clean water to homes in the contaminated “plume” area, but also in the buffer zone outside of the plume. “What the EPA intended to do was hook up homes in that buffer zone where they believe the plume is going to travel,” Francis said. “They want to try to make this as permanent a solution as possible. There will be properties that currently have a clean well hooked up because they’re in that zone.” Francis noted that the reality was “a little difficult” for some property owners to accept. In fact, there are approximately five people living in the buffer zone who haven’t signed the paperwork to connect their wells to the new waterline, according to Hathaway. See Waterline, A5
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