On:
In: Groundwater Coordinating Council, Jim Hurley, Jim Zellmer, PFAS, radium

Former director of the University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute (WRI), Jim Hurley, last week received a certificate of appreciation for his service on the State of Wisconsin’s Groundwater Coordinating Council (GCC).

Hurley spent 11 years as a member of the body that was created by the state legislature in 1984 to both facilitate interagency cooperation of those departments that have jurisdiction over water and foster research, monitoring and education around Wisconsin’s 1.2 quadrillion gallons of groundwater. Hurley was the GCC representative from the Universities of Wisconsin.

In highlighting his contributions, Jim Zellmer said Hurley was invaluable to “funding efforts, placement of postgraduate fellows and really supporting all of the research, education and outreach that has benefited the Groundwater Coordinating Council, the agencies that participate in the council and the state as a whole.”

Two people standing together and both holding a certificate.
Jim Hurley (left) received a certificate of recognition from Jim Zellmer, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, on behalf of the Groundwater Coordinating Council.

Zellmer chairs the GCC and is a deputy division administrator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), overseeing drinking water and groundwater and water quality programs, as well as the Office of Great Waters.

Hurley said the GCC is an amazing resource that brings entities together to solve problems. He said many other states look to Wisconsin as a model for cooperative groundwater study and ongoing monitoring.

In particular, he called out the research that led to better understanding the scope of naturally occurring radium compromising drinking water in Waukesha, Wisconsin. That work led to the unprecedented approval from Great Lakes governors and premiers to allow residents of this southeastern Wisconsin community outside of the basin to draw drinking water from Lake Michigan as a solution to protect public health.

Hurley also invoked a study about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that was released in early November. He complimented the research team for recognizing the value of drawing on both state and federal agency knowledge along with that of academia. The study presented an important picture of PFAS prevalence and levels in private drinking water wells across the state.

“It was great to see how quickly the state, and a little bit of the feds in there too, and universities responded to PFAS” in the groundwater, Hurley said.

In October, Hurley retired as the WRI director. During his years on the GCC, he managed a groundwater research competition that allows potential investigators to submit to several funding sources simultaneously. Then, the WRI arranges for peer review of all submitted proposals, easing funding decision-making for those providing the dollars for the eventual projects.

During Hurley’s tenure there were 82 research projects funded by the universities and the state of Wisconsin departments of Natural Resources, as well as Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP). The research topics were diverse but can be broadly characterized as addressing groundwater quantity, quality and management.

In addition to the DNR, DATCP and the universities, other GCC members include the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey and the state of Wisconsin departments of Safety and Professional Services, Health Services and Transportation.

The post Honor for former WRI director first appeared on WRI.

Original Article

News Release | WRI

News Release | WRI

https://www.wri.wisc.edu/news/honor-for-former-wri-director/

Moira Harrington

On:
In: Drinking Water, Geogenic contaminants, groundwater, Matt Ginder-Vogel, Midwest Cambrian Ordovician Aquifer System, radium

Pumped from the vast layers of bedrock beneath our feet, groundwater is the source of drinking water for two-thirds of people living in Wisconsin. According to geochemist Matt Ginder-Vogel, what’s in that water is largely influenced by what’s in the rock.

A headshot of Matt Ginder-Vogel
Matt Ginder-Vogel is researching geogenic contaminants in public wells across Wisconsin. Photo credit: UW–Madison Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

“Groundwater is not a lake underneath the ground. It’s water that’s in tiny pore spaces in the rock,” said Ginder-Vogel, an associate professor in the UW–Madison Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “So, it really interacts with the rocks around it.”

Under the right conditions, this interaction can cause naturally occurring or “geogenic” contaminants—like radium, arsenic, uranium and manganese—to leach from bedrock into groundwater.

Just where geogenic contamination is occurring in the state and how are the questions Ginder-Vogel and his team of graduate students are hoping to answer in new research funded by the University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute.

Savannah Finley and Juliet Ramey-Lariviere are both graduate students working on the project. They’re digging through drinking water quality data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to identify municipal wells with high levels of contaminants. The goal is to provide a snapshot of geogenic contamination across the state so that folks know what’s in their water.

“We want to give a health progress report of our overall aquifer and say—here’s what we have. Here are the contaminants that we’re looking at,” said Finley.

 

A headshot of Juliet Ramey-Lariviere
Juliet Ramey-Lariviere. Submitted photo.
A headshot of Savannah Finley.
Savannah Finley. Submitted photo.

She and Ramey-Lariviere are working on a map that will show contaminant hotspots and the underlying bedrock in those locations to determine if there is a relationship between the two.

“The hope is, once we have this data, to lay it all out on top of one another and look at the different bedrock formations and hopefully try to tie in the bedrock formation with the different contaminants that we’re seeing,” said Finley.

The team is focused on public wells in the Midwestern Cambrian Ordovician Aquifer System, a horseshoe-shaped region that roughly occupies the southern two-thirds of Wisconsin. Once wells are identified, they’ll collect both water and rock samples and begin experiments in the lab, which will reveal the amount of contamination leaching from the samples and how fast it’s occurring.

“We’ll be taking rock sections and grinding them up and looking to see what comes off the rocks,” said Ginder-Vogel. “You expose them to water and see what partitions into the water. Then you can manipulate the conditions of water to release other contaminants.”

The team will then use these findings to create a model that identifies hotspots around the state prone to geogenic contamination. Ginder-Vogel hopes the model will raise awareness of the problem even if water utilities aren’t currently experiencing issues. Concentrations of naturally occurring contaminants can change over time. Take, for example, the city of Waukesha.

“[Waukesha] didn’t always have troubles with radium. But when they started pumping more groundwater—and the Chicago suburbs were also pumping more groundwater and were changing the flow path of the water—[Waukesha] started to have more and more trouble with radium,” said Ginder-Vogel.

A map of Wisconsin showing wells tested for radium and those that exceed drinking water standards. Wells that exceed standards are concentrated in the eastern half of the state.
A map of Wisconsin showing wells tested for radium and those with drinking water that exceeds the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) standard set by the EPA. Wells exceeding MCL are concentrated in eastern Wisconsin. Image credit: Savannah Finley and Juliet Ramey-Lariviere

“Once you’ve seen that, you can’t help but ask, is it happening with other things, other naturally occurring contaminants like arsenic?”

Ginder-Vogel said increased water use is what’s driving the changing concentrations. Pumping more water pulls groundwater through the aquifer in different ways and allows water to interact with bedrock it hadn’t before, picking up new contaminants.

“People who think about groundwater often think about it being this unchanging pool beneath the ground, but with all the water that we use and the way we move water around right now, there’s the possibility for lots of change,” he said.

Unfortunately for water utilities dealing with high levels of geogenic contaminants, the solution isn’t an easy or cheap one. Geogenic contaminants don’t biodegrade or go away. “They’re metals,” said Ginder-Vogel. “You can’t destroy them and remediate them. You can only move them from one place to another.”

One solution is to install treatment systems that remove contaminants from drinking water. It’s an expensive option, however, and small municipalities may not have the resources to support such an endeavor. Water utilities may also choose to rebuild a well in such a way that it avoids rock formations with high amounts of contaminants.

Ginder-Vogel’s hope is that the team’s research helps municipalities develop a plan before geogenic contamination becomes a problem. While they can’t change the bedrock, they can be strategic about how they pump water.

Said Ginder-Vogel, “We’re trying to be smart about our water resources.”

The post Groundwater on the rocks: WRI-funded research will map naturally occurring contaminants in public wells across Wisconsin first appeared on WRI.

Original Article

News Release | WRI

News Release | WRI

https://www.wri.wisc.edu/news/groundwater-on-the-rocks-wri-funded-research-will-map-naturally-occurring-contaminants-in-public-wells-across-wisconsin/

Jenna Mertz

On:
In: Amy Plechacek, Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer System, Fond du Lac, Lake Winnebago, Matt Ginder-Vogel, radium, Ripon, sample, Sean Scott, strontium, Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene
Photo credit: Michael Tavrionov, Pixabay

You take a seat at the table for a meal in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and may have a glass of water to accompany the entrée.

If you are University of Wisconsin-Madison Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Matt Ginder-Vogel and graduate student Amy Plechacek, each with your tumbler full of water, you are turning to a different kind of table than a dinner table. You are at the periodic table of elements. You want to understand what’s in your glass; how the interactions between water and rock in Fond du Lac County might result in naturally occurring contamination of public drinking water wells and nearby private wells.

As part of a currently funded project through the University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute, the pair has looked at municipal and well drinking water pumped from the Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer System underlying parts of the Midwest, including this region of Wisconsin. In some locations it contains elevated Ra and Sr and can be affected by salinity, due to high concentrations of ions such as Ca, CI and SO42-.

For those us of who just want to tuck into that dinner in Fond du Lac and not strain to recall what’s on the periodic table, those initials stand for radium (Ra) and strontium (Sr). The Ca is calcium, CI is chloride and SO42- is sulfate.

Radium is regulated in drinking water by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because long-term ingestion is associated with development of bone cancer. Strontium is on the U.S. EPA Contaminant Candidate List 3 and may be regulated in the future. Known health effects of elevated strontium consumption include tooth mottling and “strontium rickets,” a musculoskeletal disease.

“There’s a general background concentration of radium, then, depending on specific and unique factors at individual sites, you can end up above the maximum contaminant level for radium,” Ginder-Vogel said. Photo credit: UW-Madison College of Engineering, Dept. of Civil Environmental Engineering

Why Fond du Lac? Ginder-Vogel explained, “They have really interestinggeology in their aquifer. The very bottom surface of the aquifer is really uneven and parts of it are very deep where people get water, while other parts are much more shallow where they get water, so there’s just a lot of interesting natural variability.”

He continued, “It’s kind of perfect. It’s like someone set up an experiment for us already. We have all these variations in where the water comes from out of the aquifer and the environments where the water is coming from. So it lets us start to get a handle on all the factors that control naturally occurring contaminants in the water.”

Ginder-Vogel said he’s conducted radium-groundwater research for six years and has come to the realization that there’s often a small amount of radium in most of the Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer System. “There’s a general background concentration of radium, then, depending on specific and unique factors at individual sites, you can end up above the maximum contaminant level for radium,” he said. “When we, Madeline Gotkowitz (formerly with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey) and I, got started on this we expected there to be an answer for Wisconsin at least. But really, what we’re discovering, is that it’s an incredibly variable system and really dependent on both well construction and also local structures in the aquifer systems.”

So, understanding one system—Fond du Lac’s—could inform other managers about water conditions and recommendations for where to drill in their own parts of the Badger State based on that comparison and contrast with this county near Lake Winnebago.

When Plechacek joined the effort to understand how the radium and strontium levels change with the geology in Fond du Lac, she also brought another critically important thing—a skill at engaging community members.

Researcher Amy Plechacek said the study was exciting because it identified one county’s zones of water chemistry. Contributed photo.

Plechacek composed a water-sampling request letter and distributed it to 40 or so well-owners, eliciting a positive response from about half of the people. Those who agreed were private homeowners or folks managing places like parks, gas stations or hotels.

She termed it an “awesome” experience that enabled her “look at some shallower wells as of a contrasting type of groundwater to these deep municipal wells.” The municipal well samples were collected through collaboration with the Ripon and Fond du Lac water utilities.

Plus, local enthusiasm for the project continued to run high. Even after she had completed her sampling rounds, Plechacek kept hearing from those with the shallower wells who wanted to volunteer to help.

Through an analysis of the samples—pioneered by Sean Scott, assistant scientist at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene and a person who Ginder-Vogel described as “incredibly critical” to the project—the team could get quite precise results from the different locations. Scott’s method uses smaller-quantity water samples, allowing for less variability in results, providing a clearer picture of groundwater flow and geochemical conditions at the site.

The team ended up characterizing, Plechacek said, “Three distinct water chemistries. That’s one of the things that water utilities have to consider, the pros and cons of using shallow versus deep groundwater. There’s some contaminants that are likelier to be in shallower water, like nitrate is a big issue. But then with the deeper waters you tend to have more problems with things like radium. There’s a lot of tradeoffs. But I think the study was exciting because it identified the zones of water chemistry in that area.”

Water managers and private owners now have plenty of food for thought. The research will help determine how best to site wells to put the best possible glass of water on Fond du Lac tables, and will offer insights on how to minimize these contaminants in drinking water throughout the state.

 

The post Radium and strontium researchers take a seat at the table first appeared on WRI.

Original Article

News Release | WRI

News Release | WRI

https://www.wri.wisc.edu/news/radium-and-strontium-researchers-take-a-seat-at-the-table/

Moira Harrington