A sophisticated new analysis of conditions around hundreds of polluted wells in Wisconsin found that farming and animal manure pose far greater risks than other factors linked to two contaminants that have consistently posed serious health hazards in places with vulnerable drinking water sources.
The conclusions of the research led by U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist Mark Borchardt are bound to stir controversy because they raise questions about the adequacy of state regulations that are supposed to protect water from the hundreds of millions of gallons of dairy manure stored in lagoons and spread on the ground.
Tony Evers’ proposal to expand a state program that helps homeowners rebuild polluted wells.
In an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal before the conference, Borchardt said the study of Kewaunee County wells is applicable to all parts of eastern Wisconsin and other places in the Midwest with a porous bedrock formation called Silurian dolomite.
Borchardt’s research team analyzed conditions around each of hundreds of wells, including distance from farm fields, manure storage sites and septic fields, along with data on well construction, and the depth to bedrock and groundwater.
He said he was surprised to see that the highest risk for coliform bacteria was not how near a well was to farm land, but specifically the well’s proximity to a manure storage site.
The new study found the strongest statistical links by far were those linking coliform-polluted water with nearby manure storage.
Agricultural interests have opposed monitoring.
A few years ago, citizens demanded that a monitoring requirement be included in the permit of a large dairy feedlot, but the state resisted and eventually the case went to court.
The findings come on the heels of another study Borchardt was involved in that found 42 percent of wells in three southwest Wisconsin counties were contaminated.

Tony Evers pledged to clean up Wisconsin’s drinking water in his State of the State address, promising to work to replace lead pipes across the state and improve well water quality during what he dubbed the year of clean drinking water.
Meanwhile, at least 176,000 Wisconsin homes and businesses get water through lead service lines.
The state Department of Natural Resources adopted contentious restrictions on manure spreading in 15 eastern Wisconsin counties, including Kewaunee, last year.
Rob Cowles last year that allows public utilities to provide grants and loans to customers to replace lead pipes.
The new Democratic governor called 2019 the year of clean drinking water in his State of the State speech Tuesday .
Novak said he was glad Evers mentioned water pollution in his speech but he doesn’t know what to expect since Evers was short on specifics.
He said Vos’ task force will watch what the governor does.
Cowles said in an email that he was happy Evers and Vos want to work on cleaning up drinking water.
Wisconsin has never had a governor that made removing lead pipes a priority, she said.
Clean Wisconsin lobbyist Amber Meyer Smith said her group is excited to see Evers emphasize lead pipes and hopes that declaration will focus attention on all water pollution problems.

CENTRAL WISCONSIN (WAOW) — Two Wisconsin law firms Habush Habush & Rottier, S.C., and Pines Bach LLP will represent residents in a dispute involving big farms.
Dozens of residents met with representatives of the law firms Tuesday evening to get a clearer understanding of what lies ahead.
Critics claim a concentrated animal feed operation has caused widespread groundwater contamination.
However, in the press release, the law firms did not state what animal feed operations were responsible for the contamination.
Dozens of people who live in the area have been advised to not drink their well water.
Residents at Tuesday’s meeting said they’re hopeful that legal action will change that.
“It gives us a lot of confidence that they’ve looked at a lot of the data and they know what they’re doing,” said Nekoosa resident Clark Elmore.
“Again, I don’t want to make anybody destitute.
I just want to make sure we have clean water, that’s it.” Attorneys say they’ll file the lawsuit in the next few weeks.
If the case were to go to trial, they say it would likely happen in 2020.

Over 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water.
Scientists estimate somewhere between a half and three-quarters percent of all water on earth is liquid fresh water.
At the heart of the state’s water quality program is a permitting and inspection system that allows water discharge into our lakes, streams and rivers.
Inspections, reporting and enforcement actions impose the laws.
Two years ago, the Legislative Audit Bureau found that 94 percent of the time the Department of Natural Resources failed to take necessary action against industries and municipalities, which violates its own enforcement policies.
In a two-year period, only two out of 10 industries were inspected as required.
This lack of oversight meant DNR had no way of knowing or tracking problems.
However, problems in water quality and quantity exist across the state.
County conservation officers provide our front line for water protection.
For example, 10 years ago Minnesota passed the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment to their state constitution.

While the sprawling algae blooms are not the result of human activity directly on the lake, the phenomenon has prevented people from enjoying Lake Mendota’s full potential.
More seriously than a decrease in summer activity, though, the algae represent a health risk to both human lake-goers as well as the animals and organisms who call Mendota home.
These high levels come from sediment runoff from the agriculture industry.
Although the problem in Mendota is most visible to the Madison community, agricultural pollution has jeopardized water quality and aquatic ecosystems across the state.
They have improved various practices, especially with regards to tillage and fertilizer planning, according to Kucharik.
In Wisconsin particularly, these large-scale farms have increased the number of their cows, resulting in more concentrated areas of manure, which contaminate water sources.
In a recent interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, the director of Wisconsin Land and Water, Jim Vandenbrook, pointed to this lack of state funding as a serious obstacle in its fight to improve overall water quality in the state.
It will take years for the pollution in water sources like Lake Mendota to improve.
However, the long timetable does not mean the state and its population can continue to ignore the problem.
Kucharik notes that this issue will eventually “come to a head,” and that “the state would be well-served for the future to start thinking about those things now, instead of kicking it down the road for the next group.” The algae that blooms in our campus’s lake represent more than just an obstacle to summer fun: It indicates a dangerous epidemic within our entire state.

For more than 80 per cent of Ontarians who get their drinking water from the Great Lakes, now is the time to think about Racine, Wisconsin.
It’s there that officials are considering whether to grant Foxconn, a major Taiwanese electronics company, access to water from Lake Michigan for the purpose of manufacturing LCD panels.
Or Wikwemikong.
Or Wasaga Beach.
The city of Racine has filed what’s known a diversion application — an official request to access millions of gallons of Great Lakes water per day.
Of that 7 million gallons per day, 4.3 million would be returned to the Great Lakes in the form of treated wastewater.
The decision to grant Racine’s request rests with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The international agreement that governs the use of Great Lakes water — the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact — allows communities that abut two basins to request water from the Great Lakes for areas that might fall beyond the dividing line.
No matter where these diversions are happening, they have an impact on the Great Lakes basin,” says Wilson.
A diversion request from Waukesha, Wisconsin, for example, was granted in 2016.

Tapping The Great Lakes, a documentary from Detroit Public TV and Great Lakes Now released in March 2018, offers a bit of perspective by juxtaposing Wisconsin’s water controversies with another in Michigan related to bottled-water operations.
Michigan-based environmental activists including Jim Olson and Peggy Case speak in Tapping The Great Lakes about how, in the 18 contentious years Nestlé has been pumping water in the state (something it had initially hoped to do in Wisconsin), surface waters near the company’s wells have changed.
Each Party shall have the discretion, within its jurisdiction, to determine the treatment of Proposals to Withdraw Water and to remove it from the Basin in any container of 5.7 gallons or less.” Given this rule, if Nestlé or another business wants to sell water sourced within the Great Lakes Basin in small bottles, it’s largely an individual state’s decision whether or not to allow it.
When the city of Waukesha sought to tap Lake Michigan for its drinking water supply, though, it took the unanimous approval of the governors of all eight Great Lakes states, in their capacity as the Great Lakes Compact Council.
That’s because the city isn’t in the Basin at all, but is within Waukesha County, which straddles its boundary.
Waukesha argued that the radium tainting its groundwater and the depletion of its groundwater supply (which in turn made the contamination worse) left it with no other option.
What happens with more Waukeshas, more Nestlés, more industrial users like Foxconn?
Michigan U.S. Rep Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, said in Tapping The Great Lakes that Waukesha started out claiming that it needed Lake Michigan water because of radium contamination, not because of the depletion of those groundwater reserves.
In 2010, Waukesha asked to use 10.9 million gallons per day — far more than it’s using in 2018 — then walked their request back to 8.2 million gallons per day and proposed using it in a smaller service area.
Do the Compact and state and federal laws make it too easy for businesses and certain communities to misuse a resource that belongs to the people of the Great Lakes Basin?

However, the issuance in 2016 of two permits by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources — for a high-capacity well on a nearby farm and a new dairy farm — posed imminent threats to the lake’s water level and even the lake itself.
That’s why owners of lakeside and other nearby properties decided to purchase and conserve the 105-acre Bula Farm to protect Pleasant Lake and its watershed lands — and to challenge the DNR permits in court.
The most-recent owner of the Bula Farm purchased the property in 2015 and obtained a permit in 2016 from the DNR to install a high-capacity well for irrigating the land.
In light of that, residents determined they should buy the Bula Farm to deed-restrict the property to prevent any future high-capacity well installation and to stop manure spreading on the property now and in the future.
Land values go way down if the water goes down.” Nearby, the proposed Richfield Dairy has not yet been built, but a renewed permit was issued for it in 2016.
Manure spreading has been found to cause groundwater and surface-water pollution from nitrates and other contaminants of concern, especially in vulnerable areas such as Wisconsin’s Central Sands.
After research, community discussions and consultation with experts, they formed the Pleasant Lake Management District as a governmental body with taxing authority.
Purchasing nearby farmland, if it became available for sale, was one option considered within the plan.
Kunes said, “It’s a very significant related legal issue, in addition to and separate from the farm purchase.” The district also is fighting high-capacity wells — which recently became an even bigger problem.
Kunes noted long-term issues at stake: “Loss of lake water levels and contamination of private wells will result in degradation of both water quality and property values.

It doesn’t just disappear," said Joe Grande, the water-quality manager in Madison, Wis. • Road salt is polluting our water: Here’s what we can do to fix it Madison is one of the more notable cases of drinking water contamination by sodium chloride.
Most people start tasting salt in water once it reaches concentrations of 250 milligrams per liter.
Even before that point, though, water can start to taste off.
The water, Fitzpatrick said, "does taste a little saltier, but it’s not like you would drink it and say, ‘Oh my gosh that’s super salty.’"
• ‘Dead fish or dead people?’
The challenges of curbing road salt use Madison has tried alternative deicers like cheese brine and beet juice, Grande said, but the level of organic compounds in those solutions create such an oxygen demand when they run off into lakes that they risk killing fish.
And there’s no way to clean up salt-contaminated water, aside from reverse osmosis.
In Minnesota, we’re safe from drinking salty water for the near future.
However, Brooke Asleson, water pollution prevention coordinator for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, said they’re deep enough that the chloride contamination already found in some of the state’s surface water hasn’t reached them yet.
While there is an increasing trend in chloride levels in these aquifers, they’re not close to affecting how the water tastes, Asleson said.

A public interest law firm and a group of citizens on Thursday asked Cathy Stepp, regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to step aside from any involvement in the federal agency’s ongoing review of Wisconsin’s water pollution program.
The deficiencies largely involve technical issues designed to assure Wisconsin is properly enforcing water regulations.
Frustrated by the pace of the state’s response, Midwest Environmental Advocates and a group of 16 citizens asked the EPA in October 2015 to conduct a formal review of the DNR’s water pollution program.
Kamp said as DNR secretary, Stepp had authority over the agency’s response to the deficiencies, and now is in a position to decide whether Wisconsin is adequately addressing those issues.
While serving as the DNR secretary, Stepp sometimes sought to downplay the significance of the deficiencies during hearings with lawmakers and meetings of the Natural Resources Board, Kamp said.
Six environmental groups, including Midwest Environmental Advocated, asked the EPA in 2014 to investigate groundwater contamination in Kewaunee County in northeastern Wisconsin, where residents have raised objections over contaminated wells that critics have tied to the agency’s regulation of large farms.
Stepp, a former builder and state senator from Racine County, left the DNR for a post in President Donald Trump’s administration in the Kansas City office of the EPA.
The groups’ petition is a check on how states manage water pollution programs.
Such actions are not uncommon, but Kamp said the petition allows groups to hold an agency’s feet to the fire.
Environmental groups have interpreted this as backsliding on enforcing environmental regulations — something Stepp rejected as secretary.