Cross examination of Blake Martin went fairly quickly today.  Next up was Jesse Schwalbaum, WP’s hydrogeologic modeler.  Our attorney Mr. Pasakarnis did a competent job of working through the mechanics of modeling and establishing the chronology and meaning of the model results produced by Mr. Schwalbaum.  They tried to get him to admit to doctoring up the results, or at least to cast doubt on changes made by Wright Pierce during the process.  He had pretty good answers to all of those questions.

Next up was Peter Atherton, the WP Vice-President at the heart of the matter.  Our lead attorney Mr. Deschenes grilled him for a few hours, all the while trying to put some meat on the bones of the town’s fraud allegations.  Mr. Deschenes may be developing a more subtle strategy to prove this serious allegation, but there were no obvious admissions by Mr. Atherton.  In fact, Mr. Atherton seemed to do a good job of explaining the snippets of emails that Wolfeboro had used, when amending the complaint, to suggest that fraud was plausible.  He went on to do an excellent job of tying together the concepts of annual average and daily flow as it relates to Wolfeboro’s Wastewater System, and to explain why various people on the team had different perspectives depending on their responsibilities.

Wolfeboro still has a few Wright Pierce witnesses on their schedule and may yet produce some meaningful evidence of fraud, but I haven’t seen anything convincing yet.  I’m not going to hold my breath.