Quality Control Drinking Water For 400,000 Could Easily Be Spoiled By Careless Actions

Pour used motor oil onto your gravel driveway and you may as well be pouring it into your next glass of water.

Dump furniture polish or even oven cleaner down the drain and you’re doing the same thing.

It’s so easy for contaminants to seep into the region’s sole source of drinking water — the Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer — that almost anything poured onto the ground on the Rathdrum Prairie eventually will seep through a thin layer of topsoil into the gravel and sand underneath containing the aquifer.

That’s why North Idaho legislators and health officials say it’s so vital to protect it. With a growing community dependent on a finite resource for its water needs, they’re keeping an eye on potential threats to water quality. And they’re trying to keep citizens well-informed about how their actions affect the aquifer.

“That’s all sand and gravel, and if you spill anything on it, it’ll filter through,” said Larry Belmont, former director of the Panhandle Health District.

This session, the Legislature allocated $98,000 to the Panhandle Health District for its aquifer protection plan. That’s $40,000 less than the health district requested, but it’s the first time the Legislature has given it any money.

“Without clean drinking water, what do you have?” asked Rep. Wayne Meyer, R-Rathdrum, who helped push for the funding.

The money will be used to:

Regulate facilities storing materials that could harm the aquifer or the areas from which it draws water.

Stop illegal disposal of non-domestic wastewater.

Update sewer management agreements with cities and sewer districts over the aquifer.

Sample water quality around the Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer.

The aquifer provides drinking water for more than 400,000 people in both states. If large portions of the aquifer were to become contaminated, the cost to treat water or to develop new water sources would be enormous.

In the mid-1970s, a Panhandle Health District study found that the water quality of the aquifer was deteriorating due to heavy use of septic tanks.

At that time, Coeur d’Alene was the only city in the county with a sewer system - and that system didn’t even serve the entire city. Allowing no more than one septic tank for every five acres of land doesn’t significantly deteriorate water quality, the study found.

That led the health district to make sewer management agreements with all of the cities in the county. Outside of the cities, people can have no more than one septic tank per five acres. Inside the cities’ limits, the sewer management agreements allowed more septic tanks than that, as long as the cities were working on establishing sewer systems.

The new policy wasn’t always popular, but it did channel growth into the cities, said both Belmont and Ken Lustig, the health district’s longtime aquifer specialist.

“That gave them more control over their growth,” Belmont said.

Now, most cities in the county have sewer systems. The aquifer’s quality has not deteriorated, even though the area has grown tremendously, said Brian Painter, an environmental hydrogeologist for the state Division of Environmental Quality.

The DEQ is completing a study examining aquifer protection programs. It found that if the sewer management agreements hadn’t been made in the 1970s, the amount of contaminants now in the aquifer would be double, Painter said.

With the community’s growth, some worry about “mining” the aquifer, using more water from it than nature refills. For now, that’s not happening.

But people are using more water per capita now than they did historically - due to conveniences like sprinkler systems and dishwashers. Water conservation will become increasingly important, health officials say. Otherwise, someday “if we’re not careful,” residents will use more water from the aquifer than nature refills, Belmont said.

Not all threats to the aquifer can be prevented. Catastrophes such as fires at buildings storing hazardous materials could cause dangerous contaminants to be exposed to the aquifer.

“Accidents and spills constitute a real threat,” Painter said. “Having an emergency response team is important.”

Fortunately, the area has one. It’s stationed at Kootenai County Fire Protection District No. 1 in Coeur d’Alene. When needed, it responds regionally to incidents involving hazardous materials, said Todd English, a member of the hazardous materials emergency response team.

The team works with the state Bureau of Hazardous Materials and any health agencies that might be affected by the incident to minimize damage to the environment. The team does things like using a minimal amount of water in fighting a fire. That way, the water carries fewer hazardous chemicals to the aquifer, Painter said.

People must recognize how their individual actions affect the aquifer, health officials say.

For example, 18,361 of the people with boats registered in Idaho listed Lake Coeur d’Alene as their primary area of use. The aquifer is charged in part by Lake Coeur d’Alene. If all of those owners and the other people they invite onto their boats dump things like beer, litter, excess fuel or human waste into the water, those pollutants will reach the aquifer, Belmont said.

People need to dispose of their household chemicals at transfer stations instead of dumping them on the ground or down their drains, health officials say. And people shouldn’t use too much fertilizer on their yards, Painter said. The excess fertilizer that isn’t sucked up by plant roots drains into the aquifer, he said.

Having an educated citizenry has helped.

“We are as a community very vigilant, especially at the citizen level,” Lustig said. “I’m always surprised that they recognize how vulnerable it is.”

For example, when the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad proposed putting a 2-million-gallon diesel storage tank over the aquifer, hundreds of residents flooded public meetings to voice their opposition. “That was totally grass roots,” Painter said.

For now, at least, the railroad has withdrawn the plan.

“That really impressed me,” Lustig said. “Here are ordinary citizens who have jobs who took their time to come and say, `We don’t think you should jeopardize our water supply.”’ Both the DEQ and the Panhandle Health District have had public education programs.

Protecting the aquifer “has to be integrated into the community as part of how they see themselves, that groundwater is considered as part of how the community grows,” Lustig said. “When the community starts to see itself as not contaminating, then we start to live that way.”

INFORMATION Aquifer care Things not to dump down the drain because they could contaminate the aquifer include furniture polish, motor oils, gasoline, oil-based paints, cleaning solvents, chemical spot removers, pesticides, anti freeze, and brake or transmission fluids.