WINDHAM, N.H. — A water quality study starts this month at Cobbetts Pond, the state's poster child for a pond in peril.
The goal is to have a cleanup plan and some water filtration strategies in place by November 2009, said Bob Hartzel, the Cobbetts project leader.
Hartzel works for Geosyntec Consultants of Acton, Mass., which was selected last week to do the study by the Cobbetts Pond Improvement Association.
Also last week, the governor and Executive Council approved an $83,531 federal grant for the Cobbetts Pond watershed restoration plan. About $57,000 in matching funding and in-kind services from the pond association and the town make the total grant worth more than $140,000.
Hartzel said a core group of six Geosyntec workers will work on the project. Six months of water sampling will start in May. In the meantime, the consultants will start an inventory of all the catch basins, pipes and tributaries that drain into the pond.
Already, Geosyntec has started to map impervious surfaces — driveways, roads, roofs — around the two-mile-long pond.
The consultants will complete an inventory of septic systems to figure how poorly functioning systems may be contributing to the pond's poor water quality.
The main study's main focus will be on "nutrient loading," seeing how the introduction of fertilizers influences clarity and aquatic plant growth.
"The same nutrients that feed your grass also can run off lawns and fuel growth in the lake," Hartzel said.
Derek Monson, Cobbetts Pond association director, said the group is excited to see the project underway.
The pond is rapidly aging and choked by aquatic plants, the growth of which has been spurred by nutrients washing into the water, said Jody Connor of the state Department of Environmental Services.
DES is also a partner in the pond cleanup program.
State surveys and annual water sampling of the pond since 1988 point to a direct relationship between the pond's decline and the runoff, road salt, sedimentation, and fertilizers that flush into the pond from roads, parking lots and house lots.
