Some drinking water from the Great Lakes may be pumped underground to help communities get through dry spells and save on construction costs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach explains:
Transcript
Some drinking water from the Great Lakes may be pumped underground, to
help communities get through dry spells and save on construction costs. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
The system is known as aquifer storage recovery. Treated drinking water is injected into underground aquifers and brought back up during peak demand times or dry spells.
Communities can save money by avoiding the costs of building new water towers or
expanding water treatment plants. Wisconsin will be the first state in the region to try
the concept. Jill Jonas of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources acknowledges underground contaminants like arsenic could spoil the treated drinking water.
So, she says Wisconsin will closely analyze each proposal.
“So if there’s an area that has problems with arsenic, we have to look on a case by case basis to see if the injected water actually creates more of a resource problem than was originally there.”
Illinois and Pennsylvania are also looking into aquifer storage recovery. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.