The Dedham Water Project began as a part of a review of a potential development project proposed for Dedham in 2022. While reviewing the potential project's scope and impact to the Dedham community, a variety of inconsistencies surfaced with respect to community perspectives, town bylaws, processes, and data leveraged for decision making. What came to light through mre than 3 years f research is that our local water resources have been, and continue to be, taken for granted. If our current issues are not openly addressed the foundation of the Dedham community will be undermined resulting in significant financial impacts to residents, increased risks to health, furhter contamination of our natural resources, and the general degradation of our local ecosystems and quality of life.
We can not look at the value of our local water from the same perspective leveraged 30 years ago when much of the initial legislation was envisioned and created. The intent of this site is to be a community driven resource to promote a more comprehensive understanding of our local water resources so that we may learn from the past, leverage the lessons for the challenges of today, and better set the stage for the success of our children tomorrow.
Water is a complicated resource that we leverage with little thought because of its historical abundance. As we have modernized and leveraged new technologies the tradisional water cycle has been disrupted impacting both the quality and quantity of water available to us for consumption. While there are those who look to the past for perspective, the environment has changed and we must instead look to the data of today so we might better plan for tomorrow.
The site provides direct access to a consolidated collection of more than 100 documents from many different federal, state, and local resources categorized by topic. A number of the documents reposed within the site were forgotten through time, but within the context of this site the lost institutional knowledge is now being rebuilt for the benefit of all.