Down column in Strib reporter Tony Kennedy's Town's contaminated water highlights a larger problem for Minnesota, we get to that larger problem. The lede:
A drinking water crisis in the small town of Adrian, Minn., this spring is highlighting Minnesota’s larger problem with farm chemicals polluting wells and surface water.
Located just 18 miles west of Worthington — where Gov. Mark Dayton is scheduled to talk Thursday about requiring farm buffer strips to clean up Minnesota streams, rivers and lakes — Adrian is one of eight Minnesota communities relying on special equipment to treat water with excessive nitrate levels in municipal wells.
For the second time since the town purchased a nitrate-removal system in 1998, the facility has failed, and City Hall has declared the water unsafe for infants and expecting mothers. While the public utilities department works on a $15,000 repair, the town is issuing vouchers for free bottled water at local stores.
That larger problem?:
But the public cost of groundwater contamination isn’t always as obvious as it is in Adrian, according to Karla Peterson, a supervisor in the Community Public Water Supply Unit of the Minnesota Department of Health. Some communities with wells polluted with nitrate levels approaching the federal limit of 10 parts per million are blending water from one well with cleaner supplies from other wells, sometimes in deeper aquifers, she said.
Other communities have simply capped polluted wells, digging elsewhere for cleaner water, she said.
In addition to Adrian, Peterson said, six other communities are operating nitrate-removal systems: Hastings, Edgerton, Ellsworth, St. Peter, Pipestone and Darfur. And the town of Lewiston shut down a well that was high in nitrates and is pumping from a deeper well contaminated with naturally occurring radium, which is being removed at a treatment facility.
We know of other cities removing nitrate from their water; nearby Clara City is one example, though a 2003-4 article in the MDH's Waterline attributes the presence of nitrate to "high levels of ammonia in the groundwater, possibly the result of an ancient forest."
Pollution of groundwater isn't the only water pollution caused by agricultural chemicals. In 2013, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency released Nitrogen in Minnesota Surface Waters (pdf), which revealed "elevated nitrate levels, particularly in the southern third of Minnesota."
Agri-business can send agricultural and rural leaders to communications boot camps until the cows come home, but while many conflict-adverse Minnesotans might find the Stepford-like messaging in the "story-telling" by the graduates to be a great comfort, it doesn't clean a drop of water.
Photo: Adrian, Minnesota in 1910. Credit: Minnesota Historical Society photograph and art database First published prior to 1910 Used for Wikipedia page on National Historic Register buildings.
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