Provencher Engineering was contracted by Capital Group Properties and Rosewood Construction of Southborough, Massachusetts to perform engineering and permitting of a new bedrock well for a new community public water supply for a 46-unit senior housing development. A sophisticated pump testing program, which far exceeded the requirements of the Massachusetts DEP, was developed and implemented, as a result of concerns from abutters about potential impacts to their own private wells, and concern about drawdown impacts to vernal pools and wetlands, as voiced over several planning board and conservation commission meetings.
Seven Provencher Engineering owned data logger transducers were installed, one in each of four operating private drinking water wells, one in a monitoring well in a vernal pool, and one in a monitoring well in the proposed wastewater disposal leaching field. Several weeks of baseline data was collected prior to and during a 48-hour pumping test that we conducted on the water supply well. We collected an additional week of transducer data after pumping. The data was evaluated and was determined not to indicate any drawdown interference on the neighbor's wells, the wetlands, or vernal pool from our pumping. The monitoring well in the leach field did not draw down, indicating that wastewater effluent form that leach field would not be drawn toward the well.
A new pump station with a water softener, dual 15,000 gallon underground storage tanks, an exterior dual wet-well submersible booster pumping and distribution systems were then designed by Provencher Engineering, and approved by DEP. To reduce the site footprint and impacts, we designed the pump station building to be located above and between the two storage tanks, with pipe penetrations between the tanks and through the floor. The exterior wet-well boosters also reduced the building footprint.