Climate Change Worsens Half-Century of Drinking Water Problems for Maine Native Reservation – Inside Climate News

Second of two articles about the Passamaquoddy Tribe’s struggles with sea level rise, water quality and habitat resilience on the coast of Maine.

SIPAYIK, Maine—The smell of saltwater is one of Brian Altvater’s favorite parts of living in Sipayik. Wherever you go on the tiny Maine peninsula, home to the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation, you can see—and smell—Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays.

But when Altvater, 69, goes home and turns on his faucet, the water doesn’t smell salty; it smells foul.

Altvater is a pipe carrier, a spiritual leader who conducts sweat lodges, naming ceremonies for infants and sacred fire ceremonies when elders die. He also, like the 600 other Passamaquoddy people who live in Sipayik, hasn’t trusted his home’s tap water for more than 50 years.

“We haven’t drank the water out of the tap for many, many years,” Altvater said.

For this tribe living at the eastern edge of Maine, the growing impacts of climate change are playing havoc with their tap water source, creating even more hurdles between the Passamaquoddy and a reliable source of clean water.

“No One Drinks the Water”

Most Sipayik residents don’t trust that their tap water is safe to drink.

“I don’t drink the water. No one drinks the water,” said Chris Soctomah, 34.

And with good reason. Their water system has had around 50 “boil water” or other water quality notices since 2000, according to the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. It leaves permanent stains in toilet bowls and bathtubs.

At least a few times a year, the tap water is visibly discolored, appearing yellow or brown. It smells and tastes bad pretty much every day, said John Carter, 34, who grew up on the reservation.

“I thought it was normal,” he said. “… I go to my friend’s house in Dennysville [around 15 miles away], I’m still not used to opening his tap and just taking a cup of water.”

The water situation means that Sipayik residents must plan their lives around finding clean drinking water. Most either drive to the local well or use bottled water. The tribe has a weekly bottled water distribution program, but getting enough bottles for a household’s needs can still get expensive, Carter said.

Altvater also buys bottled water for household use. He said he and his wife have pensions and can afford it, “but a lot of people can’t.”

Even if they’re drinking bottled or well water, people on the reservation still use tap water for daily tasks such as cooking, showering and brushing their teeth. Some people have had skin rashes or other reactions to showering in the water, Soctomah said.

The main culprits are trihalomethanes (THMs), which are byproducts of interactions between organic materials in the water and the chlorine used to treat it. High exposure to THMs has been connected to an increased risk of certain cancers, such as bladder cancer, and damage to the kidneys, liver and nervous system. 

In a community survey, many Sipayik residents said they felt the drinking water quality was negatively impacting their health, said 25-year-old Jasmine Lamb, co-director of the Sipayik Resilience Committee.

“We obviously have different health outcomes from people in whiter and wealthier populations,” she said.

Shallow Waters, Severe Storms

Sipayik’s tap water is drawn from a reservoir on Boyden Lake, about 5 miles northwest of the reservation. The reservoir is fairly shallow (only around 11 feet at its deepest point), making it susceptible to environmental changes, according to Billy Longfellow of the Sipayik Environmental Department.

When heavy rains hit, they flush sediment, organic waste and other runoff into the reservoir, where the contaminants are then carried into the drinking-water intake pipe.

At the other extreme, droughts—or the occasional ill-placed beaver dam—will lower the water level in the reservoir, which also raises the concentration of sediments, Longfellow said.

When the water has more contamination, the Passamaquoddy Water District must use more chemical disinfectants to treat it. As a result, the levels of THMs start to rise.

The Passamaquoddy Water District is a private corporation, serving around 2,100 people in Sipayik and the neighboring city of Eastport. Longfellow said the Sipayik Environmental Department assists the water district by conducting regular testing at the reservoir, at locations upstream and in home faucets around the reservation.

There’s a clear pattern, Longfellow said: When the weather gets extremely wet or extremely dry, Boyden Lake’s water quality declines, and more THMs and discoloration appear in people’s water soon after. After Tropical Storm Henri in 2021, testing showed THM levels reaching 120 to 160 parts per billion, well above the EPA’s limit of 80 parts per billion.

Aside from storm events, summer appears to be the time when THM levels are consistently at their highest.

Maine is experiencing increased weather variability due to climate change, according to state climatologist Sean Birkel, resulting in swings between intense rainfall and intense droughts that have caused so much disruption to Sipayik’s tap water.

2020 was the state’s driest year on record, and many lakes and streams in Maine hit record lows that September, Birkel said. 

Meanwhile, 2023 was the state’s second-wettest year, and also one of its warmest. Maine is experiencing more heavy rain events, where a few inches are dumped in a matter of a few hours and the water runs off before most of it can be absorbed into the ground, Birkel said.

“The amount of precipitation that’s falling is definitely more intense, and we are seeing it happen more frequently,” said Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey.

Discolored water is easy to spot, so it’s usually what gets tribal members calling Longfellow’s office or posting on the Environmental Department’s Facebook page. But it’s challenging for residents to determine when THM levels are elevated without access to testing equipment.

A Five-Decade Fight

Sipayik first connected to a municipal water system in the 1970s. Complaints about the taste, smell and color of the water came soon after.

The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 required testing of the reservation’s tap water, leading to the first discovery of its elevated THM levels. The Passamaquoddy Water District formed in 1983 and took over from the previous water company.

Since then, the tribe has spent decades trying to get safe drinking water and upgrade its water treatment and testing systems. However, the Passamaquoddy have been hamstrung by their lack of tribal sovereignty, a situation unique to the Native tribes of Maine.

Until 1975, the state of Maine treated the Passamaquoddy tribe and its fellow Wabanaki Nations as wards of the state rather than as sovereign tribes. It took a federal court case to extend federal recognition to the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes.

Following that recognition, the Passamaquoddy and other tribes began to pursue the restoration of or compensation for land that had been illegally taken from them. This led to the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and the state Legislature.

The Wabanaki Nations agreed to relinquish their claim to land that was stolen from them in exchange for federal funding to buy back 2.5 percent of what had once belonged to them, amounting to a payment of $81.5 million.

The wording of the act, however, also meant that the Wabanaki Nations no longer had the same sovereignty status as recognized tribes had elsewhere in the U.S. 

The state of Maine now exercises a high level of control over tribal lands and how they’re used, from drilling wells to fishing and hunting to logging rights. The state also has the authority to block the implementation of federal laws related to Native American rights and welfare that have been enacted since 1980, including access to certain funding sources.

According to a Harvard University study, the Wabanaki persistently lag behind other Native tribes in economic performance, and the state’s restrictions on their ability to self-govern play a significant role.

“The Wabanaki tribes have been left out,” Lamb said.

Because of this, the tribal government of Sipayik was unable to make their own decisions about drilling, testing and permitting new groundwater wells, blocking one avenue of securing clean water for years.

In 2018 and 2019, Sipayik’s tap water quality was so poor that THM levels were elevated for three-quarters of each year. THM levels also exceeded EPA standards in 2020 and 2021, and the tribe lobbied the state legislature for relief.

During the 2022 legislative session, the legislature passed LD 906, the Act to Provide Passamaquoddy Tribal Members Access to Clean Drinking Water. The act lifted the Passamaquoddy Water District’s obligation to pay local property taxes to the town of Perry and the city of Eastport, which had cost the company around $66,000 the year before. 

It was the only water agency in the state that had to pay such taxes, and the tribe wanted instead to put that money toward infrastructure upgrades, said Rep. Rena Newell, the tribal representative in the state legislature.

The act also allowed the Passamaquoddy people to drill new wells on fee lands held by tribal members and to regulate their own water under guidelines established by the EPA and the Safe Drinking Water Act, instead of being subject to state control.

Maine Governor Janet Mills signed the bill into law in April 2022, but only after ensuring that the law applied just to specific parcels for drilling wells, not to other tribal lands in the state. 

Mills has vetoed other attempts to expand tribal sovereignty in the state, including 2023 and 2025 bills that would have amended the Settlement Act to bring the Wabanaki peoples’ sovereignty rights more in line with standards for other federally recognized tribes.

Despite the narrow scope of LD 906, Newell said, its passage cleared the path for two important changes to Sipayik’s drinking-water system.

“Will We Ever Fix This?”

Sipayik took two giant steps toward improving drinking water quality in 2022, with the addition of granulated activated carbon filters to the water district’s treatment plant in August and the opening of the Samaqannihkuk well in October.

The charcoal filters keep more organic materials out of the treatment plant’s water, Longfellow said, so there are fewer opportunities for the chemical reactions that create THMs to occur. 

“There’s been a lot less complaints and our data has backed up that it is helping the issue, but it is not solving the issue,” he said.

The Samaqannihkuk well is located across from Sipayik Elementary School, on tribal fee land next door to the reservation. It’s tapped into an aquifer 180 feet below, so weather extremes don’t affect the water quality in the same way as the surface water at Boyden Reservoir, Longfellow said.

Instead of traveling 15 miles to get well water, Newell said she now only has to drive a little over a mile to reach this well.

Use of the well has increased substantially as more people from Sipayik and neighboring communities become aware of it, Longfellow said. From its opening until July 2024, the well had dispensed about 24,000 gallons of water; by July 2025, that total had surpassed 160,000 gallons.

“People are getting used to having it as an available resource,” he said.

Sipayik’s water situation isn’t resolved, however. There have still been occasional surges in THM levels in the tap water, despite the charcoal filters, and the filters don’t address discoloration at all, Longfellow said. 

In 2024, low water levels in the reservoir caused multiple discoloration and contamination events. Residents continue to complain about the taste and odor.

“I think they’ve made a difference, but they haven’t gotten rid of trihalomethanes altogether, and there are still these times where they’re really spiking. And it’s just like, ‘All right, will we ever fix this?’ I don’t know,” Soctomah said.

Not everyone trusts the new tribal well yet, Longfellow said, and there are community members who can’t drive or walk to reach it.

Samaqannihkuk can handle the community’s drinking-water needs, he said, but it’s “not even close” to producing enough to cover cooking, bathing and other daily water uses.

Plus, both systems include ongoing maintenance. The well has an arsenic filtration system due to high levels of the chemical detected when they initially tested the water at Samaqannihkuk, Longfellow said. There’s the possibility of sea-level rise causing saltwater intrusion into the well’s aquifer in the future, which has already happened to wells on other Maine peninsulas, Slovinsky said. 

The well station also requires heating to keep the water supply from freezing up during the winter, Longfellow said, which can cost up to $600 per month.

It costs around $40,000 to replace the charcoal in the filters at the water treatment facility. So far, Longfellow said, the filters have been replaced about once a year.

“It’s great to have a system, but nothing is without cost or maintenance,” he said.

Trusting the Water

In Longfellow’s opinion, there isn’t going to be just one solution to guarantee Sipayik residents always have clean water to drink.

“Right now, there’s understandably not a lot of trust still, even though we have made strides into improving the water,” he said.

It’s going to take ongoing work to improve water treatment at the Passamaquoddy Water District and to maintain the Samaqannihkuk well, plus the possibility of digging other wells near tribal lands to increase the reservation’s groundwater supply.

“We can’t stop at better. It needs to be fixed,” Longfellow said.

Longfellow said the Sipayik Environmental Department had applied for a grant to install an early detection system in the reservoir, which would automatically update a website to notify residents when the water is likely to contain high amounts of THMs and discoloration. Another grant would have funded hiring a full-time water testing manager and installing carbon filters in Sipayik homes “so they could trust what comes through the tap no matter what time of year it is,” he said.

However, both grant programs lost their funding as part of the larger cuts to federal grant dollars that have happened since the second Trump administration took office.

“We’re not going to give up, basically. We’re going to figure out how we can still do it,” Longfellow said. “… We’re very aware of the steps we want to take, and we’re hoping for more funding opportunities.”

If the tribe can secure the resources they need to make Sipayik’s tap water consistently safe and clean, Longfellow said, then they’ll face a whole new challenge: convincing the residents of Sipayik that their water is finally, after 50 years, safe to drink.

“Even if we were to have the best system in the world, … it would be generational, or at least many years, for people to build trust back into the water supply,” he said.