Aquifer Task Force Report

The Mahomet Aquifer Task Force issued a final report this week including recommendations to improve the safety and protect our regional source for drinking water. Here's a quick blurb from the News-Gazette earlier this week:

$19.8M plan: Map water using helicopters
The latest tool for protecting our area’s source of drinking water: helicopters.

An advisory group of local elected officials and community members has recommended the state commit $19.8 million to the UI’s Prairie Research Institute for helicopterbased time-domain electromagnetics, or H-TEM technology, to better map the Mahomet Aquifer.

Doing so will “give us a much clearer view of what’s underground,” said state Sen. Chapin Rose, RMahomet, a member of the Mahomet Aquifer Task Force, which has spent

months studying issues concerning the primary source of drinking water for 500,000 central Illinoisans.

Among the group’s other recommendations, which now go to state lawmakers:

➜ Establish a public body to manage the aquifer long-term.

➜ If the aquifer is contaminated, there should be trust-fund money available to start clean-up right away.

➜ Inspectors should be trained to better detect problem areas like erosion, landslides and seeps.

So far the final report appears to have been given to the legislature and governor's office, but only the draft version is available online at the task force webpage. I'll update with links once I find a copy of the final report. NowDecatur had a more expansive highlight of the final report:

Highlights from the report include recommending the General Assembly provide $19.8 million to the Prairie Research Institute to use helicopter-based time-domain electromagnetics (HTEM technology) to more accurately map and characterize the Mahomet Aquifer to aid in identifying the connections with other aquifers and surface waters.

“That’ll give us a much clearer view of what’s underground, providing detailed data of what’s in and around the Mahomet Aquifer,” Rose said. “For example, if any old landfills above the Aquifer have failed and run the risk of contaminating the water. Also, the laser study can potentially help us find where the natural gas bubble is from the Peoples Gas natural gas leak. The data from this technology will help us deal with all sorts of issues and identity other potential threats to the Aquifer.”

The Task Force also recommends that a public body be established to manage the Aquifer long-term. This body would be responsible for responding to future issues, among other duties, and the report made a number of suggestions for future study for such a body...

Other recommendations include:

• Establishing a trust fund to cover the cost of remediation in the event of a significant environmental incident so immediate remediation can begin;
     
• Requiring companies storing natural gas underground to consult with third-party environmental experts in the event of a significant environmental incident to certify corrective plans and conduct oversight of the cleanup;
     
• Training inspectors to use the detailed terrain model templates and instruct staff on how to annotate these images with defects such as depressions, erosion, landslides, barren areas, leachate seeps, trees, and vegetation anomalies;
     
• Implementing the recommendations listed and providing additional funding ($1 million for one-time equipment purchase and additional $2.3 million annually) to PRI to deploy state-of-the-art monitoring networks and create the analytical capability to identify emerging contaminants of concern.

More at the full article here.