Water Rich, Water Poor

[warm, four-note Wisconsin Public Television piano theme]

[serious, dramatic high-pitched synthesizer]

– Once you’ve started taking from the springs and you’re in there, there’s no turning back.

– Art Hackett: When water bottler Perrier talked about packaging the state’s spring water, Wisconsin folks started worrying about whether they had enough water to share.

– You want to drill now and find out what the consequences are later.

– We don’t just start pumping and then watch everything dry up.

[music]

– I truly believe that there’s an underground system of water coming, whether it’s from Lake Superior or through the north from Wisconsin through the ground.

– It’s our name, in our community, is Big Springs and it’s provided our families in the area with much enjoyment with wildlife and good living and good clean water to drink. And we need to be concerned about it.

– Art Hackett: Given Wisconsin’s history of putting water in bottles, they just said old style slits or linen cools on them, you may have assumed there was plenty of water to go around.

– The fact is you can drill a well almost anywhere in Wisconsin and you’ll find an abundance of clean groundwater. Wisconsin is water rich.

– Art Hackett: Or so we thought.

– Compared to the states out west, we’re a water rich state. There’s no doubt about that. But we can be water rich and water poor at the same time.

[music]

– Art Hackett: Since people have been asking whether Wisconsin has enough water to share, we decided to ask the question, how much water do we actually have? The answer, it depends. In the northern parts of the state where the granite bedrock is close to the surface, a well wouldn’t produce the volumes of water a business like Perrier needs. In other parts of the state, developers are promoting artificial lakes filled with water pumped from the ground. But there are limits to Wisconsin’s water wealth. And around the state, we found many cities that are starting to bump into them.

[music]

– I’m getting water for my family because we have a water problem.

– Art Hackett: This film from the early 1980s tells the story of some residents of Wisconsin Rapids who hooked up to the city water system after their private wells were contaminated.

– Hooking up to the adjacent city’s wells will provide clean water. Because these people and many others hooked onto Wisconsin Rapids water system, the city drilled new wells. But those wells came at a price. There are now times when Bloody Run Creek doesn’t run at all.

– We’ve been here two summers now. And when we were actually sold the house, we were told it was one of the best trout streams in the state. And that summer, when everything, I guess, run off or cleared up, we found out it was bone-dry dirt and branches.

– Dennis Pelot lives just east of Wisconsin Rapids. Bloody Run Creek, so-called because of deposits left by the iron-rich groundwater which feeds it, runs through his backyard.

– Person that actually built this house, he had a water wheel that was mounted on these two brackets here. The water wheel would spin when the water come down the creek. And it just, there’s no need for it.

– Well, this is a Class 1 brook trout stream. That means there’s natural reproduction of brook trout in here.

– Jack Zimmerman was a Department of Natural Resources fish biologist at the time Wisconsin Rapids dug the well.

– And our concern was the consultants predicted that since the well was close to the stream, it would lower the water levels in the stream. And so our recommendation was to move it to a different site.

– Jim Reinholdt: And we have records also that show before that well was put in that there were periods of the creek being dry.

– Art Hackett: Nonetheless, Wisconsin Rapids Water Superintendent Jim Reinholdt says they did slightly move the well’s location to reduce impacts on the creek and agreed to limit the amount of water pumped from the well. But under Wisconsin law, Wisconsin Rapids didn’t have to do anything. The limited Wisconsin case law leaves groundwater more or less fair game for any reasonable use. But even reasonable use involving high capacity wells can cause problems with creeks and shallow household wells because of the way the groundwater system works.

– You actually have water coming in like this from all sides. And this represents the natural spring flow or the natural groundwater seepage into this river or stream.

– Art Hackett: The thing to remember is groundwater and surface water are the same water.

– Ron Hennings of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey uses what he calls the “ant farm” to demonstrate what happens when a well draws water near a stream.

– Instead of the flow all moving towards the stream right here, we’re now getting flow deflected. It’s moving down towards our pumping well right here. We’ve actually dewatered this part of the aquifer right here as we’re pumping the water out of this well. And that’s what basically happens in real life too. It isn’t that the groundwater is being all used up. It’s just that there’s more straws in that aquifer now than there used to be.

– Art Hackett: The city of Wisconsin Rapids and the nearby township where Bloody Run Creek begins are now trying to live within an agreement struck earlier to mitigate the well’s effects.

– It was in there that there would be water in the creek at all times.

– Is there water in the creek at all times?

– No, that’s the problem.

– A lot of people downstream here, they built on this creek because it was a nice little creek. And they walk right out the back door and they’re at the creek. And well, if you just got a swamp back there, they might as well move to Florida.

– Art Hackett: Because Wisconsin Rapids is still growing, the city is starting to think about drilling yet another well. The DNR, mindful of what happened with Bloody Run Creek, is asking them to at least consider drawing water from either the Wisconsin River or Nepco Lake.

– Everybody felt that the Great Lakes region was an area where fresh water would always be there. And it is there. It’s just that because of the growth in the areas, it’s not as easy to get to anymore without a lot of expense.

[music]

– At what point will we no longer be able to count on groundwater to reliably supply our collective faucets? If you live in Green Bay, the answer is 1957.

– We kind of outgrew the abilities of the aquifer in the early ’50s. And in ’57, we started using Lake Michigan as, for all practical purposes, our exclusive source.

– Art Hackett: Since 1957, Green Bay has drawn its water through a 30-mile-long pipeline that extends all the way to Kewaunee. The water goes through an extensive treatment plant midway. Lake water requires more treatment than well water. The expense is one reason the suburbs surrounding Green Bay continued pumping their wells. But 40 years of continued growth finally caught up with them.

– A lot of the private wells are drying up, especially in the town of Hobart. They’ve been having real problems. And the aquifer that many of us are on in the eastern part of Wisconsin here is dropping.

– Art Hackett: Just like Green Bay, Allouez and seven other Brown County municipalities are planning to build their own pipeline to the lake. Just like Green Bay, they’ll have to build their own treatment plant. The price tag is estimated at between 163 and 175 million dollars. Because of the expense of pipelines and treatment plants, cities are searching for ways to stretch the capacity of existing ones. That’s why Green Bay, which hasn’t used its wells for decades, is drilling a new water hole. It’s not so they can take water out. It’s so they can put treated water from Lake Michigan in.

– The intent is to store water during low demand times, for instance, during the winter months. And then, at high peak demands, normally during the summer, we will pump out of our well into our distribution system, therefore saving on expansion of our existing facilities.

– Hopefully we’ll be able to utilize God’s natural storage facilities underground.

– Art Hackett: But the Department of Natural Resources considers aquifer storage experimental. There are questions whether the process is safe.

– The water that you’re putting into that aquifer is geochemically different from the native groundwater which has flowed there over hundreds of thousands of years.

– The DNR is concerned lake water could dissolve arsenic and other naturally occurring contaminants which would then wind up at your faucet when the stored water is pumped back into the system.

– If it were to create some unforeseen chemical reactions that haven’t shown up anywhere else in the country or really the world where this concept’s already been tested, certainly if that were to happen, we’d support abandoning the project immediately.

– We don’t want to get put in the position of triggering a geochemical process that can’t be stopped.

– Art Hackett: Sometimes taking water out of a lake might be a popular choice, especially when lake levels are high and water is flooding the homes on the shore. Here’s some news. Madison is drawing water from these lakes, even though the city uses nothing but well water. Confused?

– On this map, the redder and greener areas are areas where there’s been a significant draw down in the deep sands to an aquifer around Madison.

– Ken Bradbury of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey has been chronicling the effects on Madison and Dane County as more and more water is pumped from the ground.

– Historically, pre-development, the lakes were a sink for groundwater. In other words, groundwater flowed into them and discharged into them. Now, because of the pumping, we’ve lowered water levels beneath the lakes and the lakes are actually losing groundwater over large parts of their bottoms. Groundwater is leaking out. And in fact, some of the Madison wells are getting up to 30% of their water, which ultimately began as leakage, out of the lakes.

– Art Hackett: On the average day, an American uses 63 gallons of water, 25 to flush the toilet, 13 to bathe and to shower, 10 for drinking and washing hands, 7 for laundry, 6 to cook and wash dishes, and 2 to wash the car and water the lawn.

[water whooshing out]

How much does that add up to? The city of Madison pumps between 20 and 35 million gallons of water a day. In comparison, Perrier is talking about bottling a maximum of only 700,000 gallons of water a day. But unlike agricultural wells, which operate part-time, both industrial and municipal wells pump continually, creating a permanent cone of depression, an area where the water table is artificially lowered. In the case of Dane County, that cone of depression keeps reaching out.

– Currently, groundwater moves to Madison from a line around about here and it moves toward the city, toward these wells. Historically, that line was several miles closer to Madison. In fact, it went somewhere just east of Verona down here.

– Water once started flowing towards Madison’s lakes and into the Yahara River Basin from a point near the Dane County Nursing Home, just east of Verona. The pumping of Madison wells has caused a change of direction. The groundwater divide now is as far as 5 miles to the south and west, somewhere beneath these farm fields.

– That’s a problem because, again, to maintain water quality and aquatic life and just the beauty of streams like the Sugar River, you need that groundwater coming in as base flow. Base flow is the constant discharge of water that maintains these streams and springs. And if we start pumping a lot, we can change that.

– Art Hackett: The Madison Metropolitan Sewage District is trying to remedy this by putting the water back. The district is pumping up to 3 1/2 million gallons of treated sewage a day into the Sugar River Basin, an attempt to restore the balance of nature.

– In Wisconsin, we have very plentiful water, but the problem is how we use it all in one place. Everybody’s putting all their straws right in the middle of the milkshake. If you can think of it that way.

– Straws in a milkshake. In the early 1960s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point became concerned irrigation wells like these would be the straws. What would happen when the Little Plover River in Portage County became the milkshake? Forty years later, George Kraft and Bryant Brown continue to document the connection between wells and groundwater.

– This water’s a lot clearer than the creek water because this is groundwater that’s discharging up through the bottom of the stream instead of water that’s made its way through wetlands or anything else.

– Kraft says 95% of the water in the Little Plover comes from the ground. Very little is runoff from the surrounding fields. Even though it had rained heavily the night before, the water fell on the sandy soil and soaked in.

– The water levels up a little bit, but compared to other areas in the state where the same amount of rain has brought flash flood warnings and such, we’re just up a little bit.

– Kraft and his colleagues found the center pivot irrigation wells decreased stream flow in the Little Plover by about 15%. But the greater problem may turn out to be municipal wells like these drilled by the Village of Plover.

– We’ve done some preliminary computer modeling that show if those wells get to their design capacity, that indeed will be missing maybe as much as 40% of the flow out of the streams.

– And almost all the water came from rainfall on the surrounding potato fields. Please don’t call it an underground river.

– You don’t like the idea of the underground lake, the underground river.

– No, we don’t. No, we don’t like that at all.

– Never mind the beer commercials.

– Far below this valley floor lies a deep underground reservoir of sparkling pure spring water that some say stretches all the way to Canada.

– There is no underground lake, no hidden river.

– We have just cracks in the rocks. We have spaces between sand grains that are conduits for water to move. And we certainly don’t have anything like an underground lake.

[water splashing]

– We still get more rainfall in the state of Wisconsin than we use. You know, we only use about 3 or 4 or 5% of the water we have available every year.

– But there’s more to the groundwater supply than just the falling rain and the water that’s pumped from wells. Out of the average 30 inches of rain and snow that falls on Wisconsin each year, 75% evaporates and goes right back into the atmosphere. Only 6 to 10 inches of that moisture soaks in and becomes groundwater. This process is known as recharge. It’s a process with which development sometimes interferes.

[music]

Cities like Waukesha used to draw their water from the uppermost layer of groundwater. Sometimes there were springs which brought the water which soaked in fairly nearby back to the surface. In the 1890s, Waukesha was a springs resort. The water was so prized there was a water war when some people proposed building a pipeline to ship the water to Chicago. But today, cities seeking cleaner and more plentiful water supplies drill deeper into the ground. That deep water may have taken centuries to accumulate and may have entered the ground far away. Which brings us to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee geology professor, Doug Cherkauer and his students. They are working with regional, state and federal agencies to figure out how quickly the aquifers in southeast Wisconsin are being depleted.

– Heidi Yantz: Well, we’re trying to understand how the land allows for recharge. So we’re looking at slope of the land, soil permeability, the type of land use.

– This field, for example, would promote recharge. It’s flat and the loose sandy soil allows rainfall to soak in. But farm fields are giving way to office parks.

– Doug Cherkauer: We’ve paved it and we’ve put in storm sewers and so we’re getting most of the water to run off across the ground surface rather than going into recharging the groundwater system.

– Art Hackett: The effects show up on the computer models built with the data the students have collected. The red areas have the lowest recharge rates. Eventually, the group will know how much recharge is enough.

– And the areas in gray are the highest areas of recharge at 14 plus.

– Craig Lacoste is pointing to a narrow strip of land. It happens to be the only known recharge area for the deep aquifer that supplies Waukesha with water today.

– Most of the large population centers in Waukesha County are on groundwater and most of them rely on the deep sandstone system. And it only gets its recharge from a very thin band in the western part of Waukesha County and a little bit of eastern Jefferson County.

– If you’ve driven between Madison and Milwaukee on Interstate 94, just east of Oconomowoc, you’ve passed over a small river connecting two lakes. That’s as Cherkour is a channel left by the runoff from the glacier which covered the area 11,000 years ago. The flat fields nearby sit atop sediment that provides the only direct connection to the sandstone. This is where Waukesha gets its water.

– Those communities are drawing more on stored groundwater, the stuff that was put in there hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a lot there and they will — they have a lot of supply to draw from. But eventually they’re going to eliminate or use up all of that water.

– Cherkauer notes Waukesha’s prime recharge area is also being developed into office parks, slowing the recharge rate. It’s a problem Cherkauer likens to one you may have with your bank account.

– Cherkauer: You know, in your bank account if you are pulling out, if you’re withdrawing more money than you’re putting in, eventually your balance goes to zero. And the same is true in a groundwater system.

[music]

– Art Hackett: As increased use of groundwater puts aquifers under stress, there can be more than just problems of too little water or reduced stream flows. Sometimes it causes water quality problems that can present health risks.

– Well they left us a message on the answering machine, stop drinking your water, don’t cook with your water. It was like, I mean that’s something you use every day.

– Paul and Cheryl Barfknecht live in the town of Algoma just west of Oshkosh. Well drillers call the area Arsenic Alley.

– We knew when we built in ’93 that there was a problem with arsenic in the area. But we, first time home builders, we figured, you know, it would be taken care of, the well would be dug deep enough.

– This is an area where you do see a lot of homes real close together and it has a city type of look where you’d expect that there’d be public water here.

– But DNR drinking water specialist Kelly O’Connor says the city style homes hew to a country style tradition.

– They’re all on wells and I’d say probably 50% of these people out here exceed the Safe Drinking Water Act standard for arsenic. You can see down the road here there’s another whole part of this subdivision being developed all on wells. Odds are they’re all going to have a problem with arsenic.

– People had no idea that arsenic was there. We went out and was doing some routine surveillance at a landfill and the arsenic levels came up and they said well there must be something that was put in the landfill and doing some further research on that, trying to figure out where the groundwater was coming, which way it was flowing. It was clear that it was flowing from, it wasn’t coming from the landfill at all but it was naturally occurring in the ground.

– Lemke says the arsenic was deposited when the rock that is now Wisconsin was pushed up from below. The toxic and carcinogenic heavy metal didn’t cause a problem until it was exposed to the air.

– How can air get at it? Well that’s because we have a lot of growth, a lot of people in the area, more wells going in, public and private wells both and they’re actually drawing down the water table and exposing that layer of metals to the air.

– The Barfknechts purchased a system to try and remove the arsenic.

– And then that ran up to the kitchen faucet.

– It wasn’t effective nor was the more sophisticated system provided on an experimental basis by the DNR. They hoped it would bring the arsenic level below the federal drinking water standard of 50 parts per billion.

– For us on March 3rd, our arsenic in the raw water was 190 and then treated water was down to 90, which still is unsafe.

[water dispenser glugging]

Macaroni and cheese uses a lot of water and this is just to boil the noodles, you know.

– The Barfknechts used bottled water for drinking and cooking. They hoped for the day when a treatment system will provide safe water at every faucet.

– We both grew up, I mean you could just drink out of anything, drink out of the hose out in the yard. And then when you have kids, are you putting them at an increased risk? Yeah, I think I think about it most times when we give the kids a bath.

– Yeah, we’re scared.

– Water we expose to the air.

– It’s just so much thinner and absorbs more and we’re just– they’re our babies, you know.

– Art Hackett: A few miles away, a drilling crew is digging a new deeper well at Steve Last’s home. His old well was 40 feet deep.

– I’m at about 130 feet right now and we’re going to about 140 feet.

– The deeper well is required by the dropping water table that the DNR believes is responsible for the arsenic contamination.

– I know that every year our average well gets deeper and deeper. We do go back and lower pumps on a regular basis.

– Wells in Arsenic Alley have to be enclosed in a cement casing all the way to the bottom. If the well passes through a layer of contaminated rock with arsenic, the hope is the casing will prevent the arsenic from leaching into the home’s water supply. There could have been a different solution, giving up on groundwater. The town of Algoma considered hooking all these homes to the City of Oshkosh’s water system, which draws water from Lake Winnebago.

– Well, it was brought up and the person on the town board that brought it up was more or less almost crucified at the spot because all the newer people have new wells that they paid good money for and they don’t want to invest in more money for piping. And I think at the time it was rumored $10,000 to $12,000 per household to get the city water piped.

– In the meantime, the homes remain tied to individual wells. Pumping those wells harder may make the arsenic problem even worse.

– We try to promote water conservation. I mean, it would take quite a bit of water conservation to stop the drought on the water table because we’re estimating it’s approximately two feet per year in this area. I just think in the past we’ve all thought Wisconsin is such a water-rich state and this isn’t Arizona. We don’t have to have brown laws. We don’t have to conserve water. We’re a water-rich state. Well, I think it’s kind of getting to be time to pay the piper.

– Perrier, go away.

– Art Hackett: Right now, the controversy involving the state’s supply of groundwater involves big users like Perrier would be. But when you look at the many Wisconsin cities visited in this report, their problems didn’t come from one big user. The problems came simply from growing populations of thirsty people. It’s not a case of a single user that’s breaking the groundwater bank. It’s a problem of too many straws in the milkshake.

[music]