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Plant in Massachusetts Signals Desalination’s Arrival in Region
What Exactly Are We Getting Into?
by Stephen Hochbrunn, NEIWPCC
It started simply. In the early 1990s, a mechanical engineer named Jeff Hanson was merely looking for a way to provide his employer, Commonwealth Electric, with a new customer that would demand a steady, heavy dose of electricity. Knowing a water desalination plant would do just that, and being aware that many communities south of Boston were desperate to increase their water supply, Hanson began investigating possibilities. In 1993, he proposed a major desalination plant on the shores of the Taunton River that would utilize the tidal flow to reduce concerns about the discharge. Soon, the idea consumed him. For well over a decade, he relentlessly pursued it. Even in the face of ridicule.
“The first time that I proposed the desalination concept was at a meeting of a task force formed by Governor Weld to address water supply problems on the South Shore,” Hanson said. “It got a great big laugh. Everybody laughed. They thought it was absurd that anybody would think of doing reverse osmosis desalination in Massachusetts.”
Thirteen years after Hanson first pitched the idea, his vision is emerging in steel and concrete on the shores of the Taunton in Dighton, Mass. The region has never seen anything like it. The facility will pull brackish water out of the Taunton, remove the salt and other contaminants, and via a 16-mile pipeline, deliver sparkling clean fresh water primarily to Brockton, Mass., a city that for decades has been looking for new ways to quench its thirst. In the Middle East, it would be just one more desalination plant among the hundreds already in operation. In New England, it is unique. From the beginning, it’s been scrutinized and analyzed and criticized.
“It was a long, long struggle to get people to even warm up to the idea,” said Hanson, whose firm, Hanson, Murphy, and Associates, is now overseeing the construction of the plant pipeline. “I would not go away.”
But even as his vision becomes a reality, as the form of the desalination plant slowly rises in Dighton, the questions haven’t stopped. Is the facility, while innovative in many respects, the right answer for Brockton’s water woes? What are the environmental costs of desalination? And in an area hardly lacking in lakes and rivers and other sources of fresh water—why do we need to do it at all? Is desalination really here to stay?
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