(WSAW) — New efforts in the state legislature are looking to help people facing contaminated groundwater throughout Wisconsin.
A local group is hoping to push those efforts even further, ensuring state leaders know it is a life-threatening problem in the central sands area.
More and more people with private wells are learning they have to rely on bottled water to cook, brush their teeth with, and, of course, drink because their only source of water is contaminated by nitrates.
It is becoming a crisis in several areas around the state, but people in Portage, Wood, Juneau, and Adams counties are working to ensure lawmakers know it is chronic for them.
At that time, he along with all Assembly republicans wrote a letter to Gov.
One of those places was clean water.
"That’s kind of what set me off," said Bill Leichtnam, a member of the group Protect Wood County.
The farm group is currently being sued after research about contaminated private wells in Juneau and Wood counties pointed blame to its other large farms.
"I think it will help us have a serious conversation in the legislature about protecting access to clean water for everyone in the future and preventing well contamination, but we also need to give immediate relief to people in rural Wisconsin and homeowners with private contaminated wells," she said.
Expanded testing is already scheduled to happen in what’s being called the "Ag Corridor" in Wood and Juneau counties, an expanded area where additional contamination could have occurred that has not already been tested.