The county has between 7,000 and 9,000 private wells, according to Carol Drury, the environmental health and laboratory manager at the La Crosse County Health Department.
The department warned 2,000 households last spring that their private wells could be contaminated with high levels of nitrates.
“We tested 540 wells during that time just from this particular area, the town of Holland and the town of Onalaska, and 30 percent of those tested at levels about the recommended levels of nitrates,” Drury said.
The county’s findings are high, said Mark Borchardt, a research microbiologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“The national average across the U.S. is between 4 and 5 percent.
High nitrate levels have been linked to health troubles, Borchardt said.
“It looks like the evidence is pointing toward high nitrate levels being associated with colorectal cancer, central nervous system birth defects and thyroid disease.
So, it’s not something to be taken lightly,” he said.
Drury said preventing pollution is a long-term goal and that the department is committed to better informing the public.
So in the short term, we want to do what we can.”

Home | Environment Union Leader Correspondent MERRIMACK — Residents will be updated this week on the state’s ongoing investigation into perfluorooctanoic acid in southern New Hampshire.
Representatives with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (DES), as well as town officials, will be hosting a public informational meeting on Wednesday to inform the community of ongoing efforts to combat the water contamination.
“DES now has some real tools, some real teeth to work with companies like Saint-Gobain,” said town councilor Bill Boyd.
A new law that went into effect on Sept. 8 allows the department to require controls for air emissions of certain PFAS compounds that impact soil and water.
Wednesday’s meeting will provide agency officials the opportunity to review results from recent tests taken from Saint-Gobain’s smokestacks at the Merrimack plant.
DES has already stated that the local facility is still releasing small amounts of polyfluoroalkyl chemicals from the stacks, which could be contributing to local groundwater contamination.
DES will update residents on the site investigation, ongoing water remediation projects with private wells in Merrimack and nearby communities, the air emission tests and Merrimack Village District’s work to improve public wells.
A question and answer session will be held, and break-out conversations with smaller groups will also take place at the meeting, which begins at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at James Mastricola Upper Elementary School, 26 Baboosic Lake Road.
“I absolutely am thrilled that DES is coming to Merrimack.
I think that since we started dealing with this issue some two-plus years ago, the opportunity to get up to date information related to water quality, air quality and legislation is critical,” said Boyd.

Traces of banned toxic chemical compounds, found in firefighting foam, have been detected in water samples drawn from close to an Auckland air base.
A New Zealand Defence Force spokeswoman said three selected bores tested positive for PFAS, but this result was below interim drinking water guidelines.
* Shell to remove fire foam chemicals from sites * Testing shows surface water and soil contaminated near Palmerston North Airport * Are fire foam chemicals the tip of the iceberg?
* Bores thought to be ‘unaffected’ by toxic chemical, say Defence Force No PFAS was found in three further deeper bores, she said.
A Government investigation, coordinated by The Ministry for the Environment, was launched in December 2017 when PFOS and PFOA were found at Ohakea and Woodbourne air bases in higher levels than health guidelines allow.
The West Auckland air base was in the second ‘tier’ of sites to be tested, as early work by NZDF suggested the risks of contaminated drinking water were less than that at Ohakea or Woodbourne, according to the Ministry for the Environment.
However, preliminary testing at the base showed low levels of PFAS in stream sediments close the air base boundary which spurred on further investigation.
They have been offered advice relative to their confidential results, she said.
Nearby Hobsonville, a former NZDF base, was cleared of concerns for soil contamination in March.
PFAS compounds have been commonly used since the 1950s in household products such as floor wax, furniture protectants and non-stick cookware.

The independent report released on Tuesday, said the water department withheld information for seven months from senior managers – including the council’s chief executive – on the risk of contamination.
It said the delay in informing council chief executive, Karleen Edwards, prevented the public from knowing sooner that the water would need to be chlorinated.
Karleen Edwards fronted for media on Tuesday and laid out why the seven month delay mattered so much.
"It would have allowed…a more co-ordinated planned approach involving appropriate authorities such as the Ministry of Health and the Drinking Water Assessor to achieve a longer term programme of repair," Ms Edwards said.
"More importantly, we could have taken time to explain to our community, so that they could better understand the choices and decisions that needed to be made, so I’m really sorry that we didn’t have the opportunity to talk to our community before that decision was made."
Despite this, Karleen Edwards said the head of Three Waters, John Mackie, was safe in his job.
My expectation is that people would raise issues of concern and risk and that’s something that we’re certainly working with [people on] across the organisation."
The council still hoped to have its $35m programme to make the water bores secure, completed by March next year.
We have elected members who represent that community.
Karleen Edwards said managers including John Mackie, had been offered training in the need to refer up when issues, such as the security of the city’s drinking water, became a concern.

Illness caused by water pollution is a leading cause of child mortality in the Gaza Strip, says a study by the RAND Corporation, a copy of which was obtained by Haaretz.
Some 90 percent of residents drink water from private purifiers, because the larger installations have been damaged by fighting or have fallen into disuse since they couldn’t be maintained.
The current situation, according to the study, is that Gaza is incapable of supplying enough water for its 2 million inhabitants.
In Gaza, a third of monthly wages goes toward the purchase of water.
Another factor in the rise of Gaza’s morbidity is the poor condition of its infrastructure.
Efron, who led the research, says the amount of sewage water flowing from Gaza into the sea toward Israel and Egypt on a daily basis equals the contents of 43 Olympic-size swimming pools.
A potential humanitarian disaster Despite the high risk for a cholera outbreak in Gaza due to the polluted sewage system, researchers at first estimated it wasn’t possible to determine when and if such an epidemic would occur, since the residents are immunized.
“If the situation isn’t dealt with, it may unfortunately be just a matter of time before Israel and Egypt find themselves facing a health crisis because of Gaza.” Efron says this is a resolvable crisis and the obstacles are mainly political.
With regard to the Gaza electricity crisis, the researches propose the use of solar energy.
They also recommended that the diesel fuel that does get into Gaza be supplied straight to the hospitals, where it should be used for examinations and life-saving treatment.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 15 (Xinhua) — Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights (IHCHR) said that up to 111,000 people were affected by contaminated water in Basra in southern Iraq, a local newspaper reported on Monday.
The IHCHR office late on Sunday asked the federal and the provincial governments to take "clear and serious" stance toward the water issue in Basra, the independent Azzaman newspaper quoted IHCHR report as saying.
"The deterioration of water continued as the high level of salinity is increasing, turning it to a heavy water," which increased the number of affected people to 111,000, the report said.
"Schoolchildren are among the victims who could have been poisoned in educational institutions," the report quoted Mahdi at-Tamimi, director of IHCHR office in Basra, as saying.
Meanwhile, Sayf al-Bader, the spokesman of the Iraqi health ministry, said that "the water supplied by the government-owned purification system is not ideal for drinking."
"The areas that are located far from the water purification plants may have up to zero Chlorine," al-Bader added.
Basra, the province’s capital city which bears the same name, has long witnessed protests among its over two million residents about the collapsing infrastructure, power cuts and corruption.
Water supply in the province is also widely criticized for high salinity, with dozens of thousands of residents having been hospitalized.
The protestors also accused the influential political parties of being behind the wide-spread corruption, which led to high unemployment and failure in rehabilitation of the country’s electricity, water and other basic services.

Thomas Esqueda, associate vice president of water and susainability at Fresno State and executive director of the California Water Institute discusses groundwater contamination and overpumping at the Arsenic Symposium at Fresno State on Oct. 11.
(Courtesy of Jordan College of Ag Sciences and Technology) The California Water Institute at Fresno State hosted the Arsenic Symposium, a community event focused on analyzing arsenic levels in groundwater.
Thomas Esqueda, Fresno State’s associate vice president of water and sustainability and the executive director of the California Water Institute, said the need for discussions about water infrastructure and safety is especially relevant in the San Joaquin Valley.
“Because we live in this environment where we are pretty much a rural area, the San Joaquin Valley, closely linked to ag, can’t grow food without water.
With the anticipated growth of the Valley’s population, Esqueda said it is vital to begin planning and implementing infrastructure that will supply safe, dependable water for the Valley.
“There’s no lack of water issues in the Valley.” Fresno State utilizes both public water supply wells as well as its own irrigation wells on the campus.
Esqueda said the two issues to focus on regarding water are the quality and the quantity of water in the Valley.
While the Arsenic Symposium addressed quality of water issues, a future event planned for January will discuss solutions concerning the Valley’s quantity of water.
The symposium took place one day after the fourth annual “Imagine a Day Without Water” events, for which Fresno State’s California Water Institute partnered with the city of Fresno, elected officials, water utilities and community leaders to raise awareness of the need for investing in the nation’s water infrastructure.
“People have to have food, and people have to have water.”

Craft-Turney representatives and representatives with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) held an informational meeting addressing people’s concerns following the "Do Not Use" order in Jacksonville.
The representatives spoke about what they could release, but many answers the community wanted were not able to be answered due to the investigation.
The room went from standing room only to less than half way full during the first hour of the meeting.
"We’re scared," Shelia Warren, a customer that’s been affected said, "I know it’s frustration but we’re scared because they won’t tell us the truth about what’s going on."
"We haven’t known where to go shower.
We don’t know where to go eat," she added.
The "Do Not Use" order has been lifted for the majority of those affected.
Warren says her biggest question is how long the contaminant was in the water before they were ever told.
Warren is concerned about her daughter-in-laws pregnancy since she ingested the water and how it will affect her unborn grandchild, not to mention her other grandchild.
It seems that many people, while understanding of jeopardizing the investigation, left the meeting more frustrated and with more questions than answers.

FAIRBANKS — Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation seeks to tighten the standards for per- and polyfluoralkyl chemical pollution in a set of regulation changes up for public comment through Nov. 5.
PFAS chemicals are found in many products, including nonstick pots, waterproof fabrics and high-end ski wax.
PFAS can easily spread across property lines because they dissolve in water and move with underground water flows to pollute nearby wells.
Since 2016, Alaska has required PFAS polluters to clean up the source of contamination based on the concentration of two perfluorinated chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOS, and perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOA.
The regulations up for comment this month add three additional chemicals to the list of substances that require cleanup when concentrations in groundwater reach a concentration of 70 parts per trillion, which represents about 3 1/2 drops of liquid in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
And the toxicity information, even though its limited, indicates that these compounds cause adverse health affects at similar doses as PFOA and PFOS,” said Sally Schlichting, a policy and regulations manager of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation in Juneau.
By making them part of the cleanup standards, the state would further require PFAS polluters to clean up the source of the chemical and to map the spread of the chemical in the groundwater.
In Fairbanks, the city government has spent more than $3 million since 2016 testing water, delivering clean water and connecting properties with contaminated drinking-water wells to city water.
It’s hard to know whether any additional homes will need to be connected to city water based on the changing state standards, said Fairbanks city engineer Robert Pristash.
In addition to the new cleanup standards for five of the chemicals, a separate standard will apply to water contaminated with a sixth PFAS, perfluorobutanesulfonic acid (PFBS), though it’s only considered harmful at much higher concentrations, 200 parts per trillion.

Dangerous chemicals from local manufacturing plants have contaminated the water supply in communities across New York state for decades, but the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to take timely action to address this growing public health crisis.
It is time for state lawmakers and regulators to take the lead in protecting New Yorkers from continued exposure to these harmful chemicals by establishing sensible and enforceable standards for New York state.
One groundwater sample revealed PFOA levels in Hoosick Falls at 130,000 parts per trillion (ppt), more than 18,000 times the EPA’s acceptable level of 70 ppt.
The contamination has left residents susceptible to a range of health issues, including low infant birth weights, immune system hazards, and increased cancer risks, as well as depressed property values after locations in both towns were declared Superfund sites.
Petersburgh and Hoosick Falls residents have filed lawsuits against local manufacturers whose plants knowingly discharged the toxic chemicals, and a New York Supreme Court justice recently certified a class action of current and former community members in the Petersburgh case.
At the state level, Gov.
Andrew Cuomo signed the Clean Water Infrastructure Act in 2017 and recently announced an additional $200 million in grant funding to upgrade state drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, fund modern filtration systems, and regularly test for known contaminants.
A recently released study by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry finds acceptable health advisory levels should be around 7 to 11 ppt, far lower than EPA’s current guidelines of 70 ppt.
If New York lawmakers truly wanted to be national leaders for water contamination protection, they could follow, or better yet, exceed the minimum risk levels outlined in August by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and set New York state’s MCL range no greater than between 10 ppt and 20 ppt, the safest currently known level of PFOA and PFOS exposure.
As communities across the country continue to face water contamination crises, state lawmakers must take action and regulate these dangerous chemicals by establishing a safe, sensible, enforceable maximum contaminant level to protect New York state residents from serious health risks.