TRURO — After a year of work by town staff members, the select boards of Provincetown and Truro met jointly on Sept. 30 to learn more about the upcoming water needs of both towns and how they can work together to address them.
The meeting was guided by a professional facilitator, Jennifer Knauer, who is based in Vermont, and also included the Provincetown Water and Sewer Board, which has four members from Provincetown and three from Truro.
“The goal for today is to provide a foundation of information and gather emerging questions,” Knauer said at the meeting’s outset. “This is a complex topic ahead of you and a long process.”
The largest near-term expense will apparently be a new water tank in Truro, which is needed to ensure adequate flow from Truro’s fire hydrants and stabilize water pressure for the 530 ratepayers in Truro, said municipal water superintendent Cody Salisbury. Building that water tank could require a $9 million expenditure in the next few years, according to a slide laying out the system’s capital needs.
Developing an additional groundwater source will cost less, about $5 million, but will require many years of state permitting. There is currently no redundant supply large enough to replace the North Union wellfield on Old King’s Highway, developed in 2013, or the Paul Daley wellfield on South Hollow Road, developed in 1954, if they were to go offline in the busy summer season, Salisbury said.
“If we take a primary source out of service in the peak season, we can’t meet peak demands,” Salisbury said.
Provincetown’s two large tanks exist mainly to exert gravitational pressure on the town’s water lines, and most of the water in them cannot be used in an emergency without lowering pressure to the town’s fire hydrants, Salisbury told the Independent last year. Only a million gallons of tank storage are available to be used on high-demand summer days, which equals about two days’ worth of water at that time of year.
Provincetown saw what a “sewer emergency” looked like in August 2022, when the town’s vacuum sewer pipes were thrown offline by flood-induced power outages, Dept. of Public Works Director Jim Vincent told the Independent. “We don’t want to even consider what a water emergency would look like,” Vincent said.
There is a redundant water supply on the site of the former North Truro Air Force Station, Salisbury said at the Sept. 30 meeting, but it has less than half the pumping capacity of either the North Union field or the South Hollow field.
Expanding that wellfield, which is controlled by the National Park Service, doesn’t appear to be an option, partly due to the potential for saltwater intrusion because of the wellfield’s location near the Atlantic, Salisbury said. As it stands, the wells there could not replace either of the town’s primary wellfields if they were to be disrupted.
There has been such a disruption in the past, Salisbury told the boards: the South Hollow wellfield was taken offline in 1978 because of gasoline contamination.
According to Provincetown’s annual report from that year, a leak at a gas station near South Hollow Road on Route 6 was discovered in December 1977 when the town’s water began to smell of petroleum. It took six months to get an emergency water source online, and the town’s engineers performed “minor miracles” to get a temporary well installed in the Cape Cod National Seashore in time for the summer tourist season.
“Without this second source of water many if not the majority of the individuals and businesses in town would have been bankrupted,” wrote select board clerk George Bryant in the annual town report. “It was a close call.”
The New York Times ran reports on the town’s struggle to get a backup water supply; the South Hollow wellfield did not return to normal production levels until 1985.
Planning for Growth
The other reason to develop a redundant wellfield is planned growth in the two towns, Salisbury told the boards.
Housing that has been legally entitled, like the Cloverleaf project in Truro and the Jerome Smith apartments in Provincetown, and others that are still on the drawing board, including the old police station site in Provincetown and the Walsh property in Truro, will all need water.
There are also properties in Truro that may need to hook up to the municipal water lines along Shore Road or a new line that would serve Pond Road, Salisbury said.
A $75-million expansion of Provincetown’s sewer system, which voters endorsed in 2022, will permit more housing units on some parcels than would have been allowed under Title V septic rules.
These plans have raised the overall demand forecast for Provincetown and Truro above the baseline that the town’s consultants, Environmental Partners, had forecast, according to an analysis from June 2023.
Right now, Provincetown uses about 156 million gallons of water per year, and the accounts in Truro that are on town water use about 20 million, Salisbury said.
According to the demand forecast, by 2040 Provincetown and Truro will each need another 21 million gallons of water per year.
Even with that increase in demand, the towns may not need to increase their water withdrawal permit from the state Dept. of Environmental Protection, Vincent told the Independent. The towns use very little water in the winter, and the quiet months balance out the busy months in the annual withdrawal figures.
Still, the wellfields will be running closer to their maximum withdrawal limits every summer, Vincent said.
“It’s on the peak days in the summer when the water department stresses out — ‘Can we handle all this without something going down?’ ” Vincent said.
Select board members in both towns said they supported the efforts, though they had questions about the towns’ future growth projections and in particular whether an expansion of the water system was required to secure water for the Walsh property in Truro.
Without the planning process and additional capacity, “there isn’t sufficient water to accomplish building on the Walsh property now,” said Provincetown Town Manager Alex Morse.
“It’s possible there are sufficient gallons in certain categories, and the select boards could have a conversation about transferring some of those gallons to have more staged development at the Walsh site,” Morse continued.
But the bottom line, Morse said, is that “both Provincetown and Truro have needs and growth projections that just won’t be supported by our existing capacity.”
The select boards agreed to meet jointly again on Feb. 24, 2025 and have their staffs work with Knauer in the meantime to develop a timeline for future votes.
