Call him Agua Man... Carl Behrens, superintendent of water and sewer, at Cape May’s desalination plant. Raise A Glass Of water, that is! Thanks to an under-the-radar desalination plant, that water in your glass is seriously fresh. Here’s how it stays that way. article bill barlow photography suzanne kulperger Typically, when visitors to Cape May evangelize about our beautiful water, they’re gushing about the ocean. Pretty, clean and frequented by leaping dolphins, it’s an understandably big reason this little resort is regularly ranked among the best in the nation. But it’s not the only newsworthy H20 in town. Cape May’s drinking water has won multiple awards, including the title of fifth best in the nation, according to the National Rural Water Association. Most recently, in 2014, it took first in a contest run by the South Jersey Water Professionals Association, which judged appearance, odor, flavor, mouthfeel, aftertaste and overall impression. (Yes, those words DO apply outside of the Washington Inn’s Wine Bar.) But it’s not just the quality that sets apart potable water on the Cape. It’s the fact that potable water exists here at all. If it weren’t for an inauspicious, underthe-radar desalination plant on Canning House Lane, just off Broadway, which transforms saltwater into fresh, Cape May would have been thrust into a water-scarcity crisis long ago. Unlike the almost-submerged Concrete Ship at Sunset Beach or our storied lighthouse in Cape May Point State Park, this plant isn’t covered in town brochures. But, while our famed beaches and historic sites command all the attention, this marvel of modern technology is, perhaps, the most essential feather in Cape May’s cap. Since its storied launch in 1998, the desal plant has kept Cool Cape May from going dry… one pure, fresh, sustainable glass at a time. Cape May’s Water Emergency For more than a century, Cape May obtained its water like much of South Jersey — from wells dug in the early 1900s. These wells tap into Jersey Cape aquifers which, contrary to popular belief, are not underground lakes. “Everybody thinks that,” says Glen Carleton, a New Jersey-based hydrologist with the US Geological Survey. “It’s absolutely nothing like that.” Instead, under the earth for the hundreds of feet between, say, Madison Avenue exit zero 38 fall and the bedrock of the continental shelf, sit layers of clay alternating with layers of sand and gravel. When rain is absorbed into the ground, it becomes suspended within this sand. These wet sections are the areas from which freshwater can be extracted. The good news is that such aquifers are, for the most part, plenty full in South Jersey. Thanks to eons of rain in the New Jersey Pinelands, many hold a healthy freshwater reserve. Stone Harborites, for instance, will likely draw as much uncontaminated water as they want for hundreds of years to come. In Atlantic City, that time period is likely closer to thousands of years. But, the farther south you travel in the state, the more vulnerable these freshwater reserves are to saltwater intrusion. As Glen puts it, “Cape May is between a rock and a hard place.” Or, more literally, we’re between a bay and an ocean. The infiltration of saltwater is exactly what began happening in Cape May in the 1960s, when the city’s first two wells — one near Madison Avenue, the other across from Cape May City Elementary School — were contaminated. More were dug, but those
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