For more than a century, Bethel drew its drinking water from a pristine, gravity-fed surface source — Chapman Brook — requiring no filtration and minimal infrastructure. That changed in 2007, when a sudden microburst storm destroyed the system overnight.

There was minimal filtration, Lucien Roberge, superintendent of the Bethel Water District, said. “That’s how pristine our water source was.”

Before the storm, Bethel operated under a rare state waiver allowing the town to bypass standard filtration requirements, thanks to the brook’s exceptional water quality.

“The water would flow from the source, Chapman Brook, to the impoundment area,” Roberge said. “It wasn’t perfect, the town was getting bigger and the source was nearing capacity and rain sometimes caused turbidity and that would shut down the water temporarily.”

Despite those challenges, the original system, built in 1890 without electric power, served Bethel well — and cheaply — for generations.

But in 2007, a powerful microburst storm swept across Chapman Hill, triggering massive flooding and widespread destruction in the 2,300-acre watershed.

Roberge and Assistant Superintendent Donnie Katlin surveyed the damage the morning after.

“The microburst moved rocks the size of Volkswagens, totally destroyed the water system,” Roberge said. “The rain totally overwhelmed the brook. The trees were making dams. As it got closer to the bottom there was so much destruction. We were looking at trees that were 12 feet across. It moved the brook from its bed and made a new bed.”

In one spot, the water main hung 6 feet above them.

“We were shocked. I was numb,” Roberge said.

Before the storm, Roberge and Katlin regularly hiked the remote watershed to inspect the source, even guiding emergency crews to a plane crash site in 2006.

But after the 2007 storm, that era came to a sudden and irrevocable end.

The weather disaster permanently shut down the gravity-fed system and since then, Bethel has relied on five drilled wells to supply its drinking water — an upgrade that came with higher costs but modern infrastructure.

The regulated, quasi-municipal entity is tax-exempt and serves 750 residents.

“Every customer owns the water district,” said Roberge, which became official in 1968.

“It costs a lot more to make water, these days,” he said. “We chlorinate and fluoridate it. We monitor it by a SCADA system, the latest technology we can use. We are right on the pulse of it as best we can.”

He and his assistant, Eric Belcher, are trained certified operators. “We are highly skilled at what we do. We are not just pumping water. We’re fixing leaks, gate boxes and meters,” Roberge said.

Roberge also is responsible for testing and administrative work such as sending monthly reports to the state.

Because the town’s five wells are close to capacity they are looking for other water sources.

“We are having growing pains,” Roberge said. “We have to start expanding the system. There is a lot of growth in Bethel.”

He added that when the wells don’t recover and the capacity starts to dwindle, they periodically call in help to purge and flush the five wells at a cost of $70,000.

West Bethel is particularly problematic with soil like beach sand.

“The mains are 6 feet underground,” he said. “It’s like being at the beach, the water usually doesn’t come up until the leak develops really good.”

Roberge spent several days in October with a Maine Rural Water technician searching for a leak.

As for the original Chapman Brook water source, Water District Trustee Randy Autrey said, “Their supply was a pond and that pond fed a pipe and the pipe went down the hill into the town.

“We have wells now, there is no exposure,” Autrey said. “For us in the water district, it’s so much safer. We try to provide the best possible water.”

What Roberge and Belcher do “every day with the lab testing, everything they do every day is to make sure people don’t get sick.”

Note: This is the third in a series of stories looking at Bethel’s water and wastewater systems.