Last year around this time, Bluestem reported about an elevated nitrate level alert in Fairmont's water supply in Paging Rep. Torkelson: City of Fairmont issues water advisory, nitrate levels unsafe for infants and Going with the flow: fertilizer elevated nitrate levels in Fairmont's drinking water supply.
Now the Mankato Free Press's Mark Fishenich reports in Nitrates rising in Mankato's drinking wells; Fix will leave city with conflicting financial, environmental costs:
Rising nitrate levels in the Minnesota and Blue Earth Rivers are forcing Mankato to adjust how it provides drinking water to residents and potentially threatens the city's attempts to limit the amount of water it takes from the region's most critical aquifer.
"The fix is going to be big," City Manager Pat Hentges said of the looming cost of reacting to the rising pollution levels in the rivers.
Options range from new water treatment systems or drilling another well into the Mt. Simon aquifer, which provides all or part of the drinking water for more than a million Minnesotans from southern sections of the state to the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
The Department of Natural Resources has been concerned for more than a decade that the amount of water being pulled from the Mt. Simon aquifer by municipal and industrial users might be exceeding the amount of water seeping back into the aquifer.
Mankato has traditionally attempted to minimize the quantity of water it draws from Mt. Simon to about 25 percent of its total, relying on shallow wells near the Blue Earth and Minnesota rivers for the majority of its drinking water.
Those wells draw water from just a few dozen feet below the rivers, so nitrates in the surface water percolate quickly through the sand and silt to the underground water. The Mt. Simon is hundreds of feet below the surface and is less vulnerable to surface pollution.
Recently, the nitrate level in the shallow wells has been rising as rainy weather boosted the erosion from river banks and farm land into the Blue Earth and Minnesota rivers. . . . [emphasis added]
Read the rest at the Mankato Free Press. Sharing the article on his Facebook page, Minnesota House Environmental and Natural Resources Committee Minority Lead Rick Hansen, DFL-S. St. Paul, wrote:
Prevention is better than cleanup. We used to have a polluter pays model and now we have a pay the polluter model. The Groundwater Protection Act of 1989 set Minnesota on a voluntary, best management practices path toward dealing with agricultural chemical pollution. Massive public investments have been made both with MN River CREP and conservation practice cost-share. At the same time, federal Conservation Reserve Program acreage fell dramatically and commodity programs and tax policies have propped up large farms to get larger further reducing rural populations. Now city dwellers, rural, suburban and urban will be asked to pay the cleanup bill.
Sad.
Meme: Worked last spring, works for an even bigger Southern Minnesota city now. Representative Torkelson, R-Hanska, had poo-pooed the problem of nitrates in Minnesota's drinking water supply. Too much and it's not healthful, especially to infants.
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