Pesticides in Your Drinking Water
What can you do to reduce pesticide levels in your water?
In Portage County, groundwater supplies 100% of drinking water for both private and public water systems.
Municipal or Public Water Supply
If you receive municipal water, then your municipality is required by law to regularly test and keep regulated pesticide levels below the MCL for the public water supply. Municipality's choices to reduce pesticide levels usually include the first three actions discussed in the "Reactive Actions" section below.
To view your municipality's water test results, visit the DNR's Drinking Water Systems: Public Water Supply web page. Fill in the first form blank with the name of the community, and then click "find". In the table that results, click on the far right link, "CCR," which stands for consumer confidence report. On the CCR report, look for "other (non-bacteriological) samples," then scroll down to the "Synthetic Orgamics" table and locate the pesticide(s).
If your private well water tests reveal a detection or exceedance of the Drinking Water Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL), then you may want to take action to reduce pesticide levels in your water. These actions could either be reactive actions or preventative actions. Some preventative actions could take several years for the results to show up as improved well water quality. For example, changing your lawn care practices is important, but probably will not result in immediate well water quality changes.
Before you take action, you should try and figure out what is causing pesticide to be in your groundwater. The following steps will help guide you in determining this.
1. Learn the direction of groundwater flow for your neighborhood or area.
2. Learn what kinds of land use and land practices occur in your neighborhood or area. Concentrate on the area upgradient from your well, those areas from which groundwater flows toward your well. (Municipalities should look at the recharge area for the municipal wells.)
3. Gather information on the depth and construction details of your well. This information can be found on the DNR's website under "Drinking Water System Well Construction Data" or by requesting a well constructor's report through the mail from the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (WGNHS).
4. Draw a schematic map of your property layout. Where are your house, septic system, and well located and what are the distances between them? Your septic system should be located downgradient from your well. Your well should be a minimum of 25 feet from the septic tank and minimum 50 feet from the absorption field or mound.
5. Analyze or question your findings. Is your well old or improperly constructed? How close are your neighbors? Do you or your neighbors use pesticides?
6. Based on your answers to the above questions, see if you can change something. There are a few actions you could take to help reduce the amount of pesticides entering the groundwater. These actions could either be reactive actions or preventative actions. However, sometimes the source of the problem is not under your control. Then, working together to help educate and motivate others can help. Educating and motivating citizens about groundwater issues is one of the major tasks of the PCGCAC, the PIE subcommittee, and Portage County Groundwater Guardians.
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A few immediate fixes to pesticides in your water include:
You also have the choice to do nothing. However, before making that decision you may want to consider the health risks. Lastly, you may also want to check out the preventative actions that could help reduce pesticide levels in the groundwater supply over the long run. |
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(Italicized words defined in the glossary.)
Pesticide: sources | PC ag pesticides | PC pesticide levels | explanation | impacts | testing | preventative actions | fact sheets
goals and strategies | nitrate | pesticides | quantity
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