Van Schalkwyk also said he was proud of the work done by the DPW and the Water Department and thanked them for their service, while he asked residents to bear with them as they continue to do everything they can to supply Ayer with clean, drinkable water. “We haven’t worked with any other towns directly, but we have a lot of good groups and people in town that care about these issues - I’m confident that we’ll continue to be there for other towns should they need some guidance.” “We were kind of the first town to tackle this sort of thing, so people all over the state were calling him and asking how he would deal with this or that.” “(Former Ayer DPW Superintendent Mark Wetzel) was a real canary in the coal mine,” Van Schalkwyk said. While Ayer has not collaborated with other towns on PFAS treatment, Van Schalkwyk said he was proud that the town has served as a leader in the fight against PFAS contamination. Since MassDEP inspected and approved the facility back in June, Van Schalkwyk said water tested by the state has continued to return with “non-detectable” levels of PFAS. After it is filtered through the GAC vessels, the clean water is piped out to Ayer residents. Both contain 40,000 pounds of GAC - carbon that is high in surface area - that, as the water passes through, can filter out PFAS chemicals by “catching” or adsorbing them. While both facilities make use of chlorine and potassium permanganate to filter out iron and manganese, Spectacle Pond uses two 27-feet-tall, 20,000-gallon GAC vessels to filter out PFAS, as opposed to Grove Pond’s smaller ion exchange vessels.Īfter the raw water is filtered for iron and manganese, it is piped into one of two enormous tanks. “Several different events in the past contributed to the contamination, so there’s no one entity to sort of point the finger at.”īecause of that variety, the Spectacle Pond facility required a different type of PFAS filtration: granular activated carbon. “At Spectacle Pond, there are multiple sources (of PFAS),” he said. In fact, there were so many potential sources that Van Schalkwyk referred to it as a “PFAS soup.” Unlike the water from Grove Pond, however, where PFAS contamination was linked back to the Army base at Fort Devens, the source of the Spectacle Pond contamination was not immediately apparent. Spectacle Pond’s own PFAS treatment facility was later approved at town meeting in October 2019. “We started with a moving target (at Grove Pond) and, after we found (PFAS) at (Spectacle Pond), the moving target kind of kept on moving,” he said. While the town was not required to test the water at the time (PFAS sampling was not required in public water supplies in Massachusetts until October 2020), it did so out of “an abundance of caution,” according to Van Schalkwyk, as Ayer worked with the Department of Environmental Protection on the PFAS extension at the Grove Pond treatment plant. The chemicals were first discovered in the Spectacle Pond wells in 2018. Often dubbed “forever chemicals” due to their inability to break down, PFAS can be found almost everywhere and can cause serious health issues. If two or three lakes are smaller in size and are located in the same area, we combine them into one download.PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are human-made chemicals used in a wide range of products. Some of our lakes are placed together because of their proximity to each other and their size. Question: Why are some lakes combined together into one download?
These thumbnails denote the number of pages that will be included in each download. You'll notice thumbnail images on each lake information page. We therefore based our prices on the lake size and number of pages included with each download. Though we provide detailed information for all of the lakes that we cover, some lake downloads include more information than others. Question: Why are the lake downloads priced differently?
#SPECTACLE POND PDF#
Stocking information, fishing hotspots, contour lake map and more in this downloadable PDF version! View your map on your phone, tablet, or computer, or print a copy to take on the lake.
#SPECTACLE POND DOWNLOAD#
This download also includes: Bear Pond and Little Long Pond
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