Illinois State Water Survey - Water Quality, Focus on Illinois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A recent op-ed at the Washington Post website by Charles Fishman, author of “The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water,” discusses five prevalent myths about water: (1) We’re running out of water; (2) Bottled water is better than tap water; (3) The 21^st century will be a century of water wars; (4) America is using more water all the time; and (5) You need to drink eight glasses a day.

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Last August I wrote a post about bisphenol-A (BPA), an Endocrine Disrupting Chemical (EDC), which can mess with human and animal hormonal processes. Today on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, there was a report that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was about to decide whether to ban BPA from food packaging.

 

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An article in the February 23, 2012 edition of the The New York Times caught my eye. The title is "Mutated Trout Raise New Concerns Near Mine Sites." The article describes results of a study in southern Idaho monitoring creeks impacted by a phosphate mine. The pictures of mutated trout offspring are disturbing, to say the least:

 

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You may have heard that on Super Bowl Sunday, America's biggest secular holiday, wastewater systems throughout the country are put under almost unbearable pressure due to everyone going to the bathroom at halftime and flusing their toilets at the same time. Well, turns out this a fairly persistent urban myth. But some researchers have wondered if the Super Bowl may be having a different effect on our wastewater systems. Namely, does illicit drug use spike during the game, and if so, can we find proof in the wastewater?

 

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In my last post I presented some data showing increasing chloride concentrations in groundwater in the Chicago region. One of the interesting things was that concentrations and rates of increase were lower in Cook and Lake Counties, compared to counties west or south of Chicago. We believe there are several reasons for this. Read More >>

Being primarily a groundwater guy, my initial interest in road salt runoff was whether we could detect it in aquifers. The Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) has a groundwater quality database going back over 100 years, and since road salting started taking off around 1960, I figured we might be able to see increases in chloride and total dissolved solids (TDS) concentrations in well samples. Short answer: Yes we do. Read More >>

The final report 'Arsenic in Groundwater in the Tolono Region' by Walt Kelly and Tom Holm, Illinois State Water Survey Miscellaneous Report 196, is now available at the ISWS website: Read More >>

While lakes have been impacted by road salt runoff in the Chicago region (see my previous 2 posts), the impact on rivers and streams has probably been even more dramatic. Various agencies, including the USGS, Illinois EPA, and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC), have been monitoring was quality in many rivers and canals since at least the 1970s. Almost all of the rivers and streams monitored have had significant increases in chloride (Cl-) and sodium (Na) concentrations since that time. Read More >>

In my last post, I began talking about road salt and its environmental effects. In that post I showed a plot of increasing chloride in Lake Michigan due to road salt runoff. While the increase in the past 25 years was only 3 mg/L, that represents about 660,000 tons of chloride being added annually to the lake. Other lakes in northeastern Illinois have seen much larger increases in chloride concentrations. Read More >>

With winter just around the corner, I thought Id run a few posts on road salt, something Ive been studying for a while. Take a look at this figure, which shows the amount of road salt purchased annually for the past 70 years or so: Read More >>

Tom Holm and I presented the results from our study of arsenic in groundwater in the Tolono area at a public meeting this past Tuesday (October 4). The crowd was small but very interested in the topic, and asked a lot of good questions. In this post I thought Id post some of what Tom talked about regarding options for dealing with elevated arsenic in well water. Read More >>

My first arsenic post last March reported on the discovery that there were high arsenic levels in groundwater near Tolono, IL. We recently finished a small study of the area and are preparing a short report. Well be presenting the results at a public meeting at the Tolono Town Hall on Tuesday, October 4, 2011, at 7 PM. Read More >>

Ive been noticing a lot of stories about water pollution in China lately. Ive never been to China, but reports Ive read over the past couple of decades led me to believe that many water resources in China are heavily polluted, and the booming Chinese economy has been increasing the pressure on water resources. But there may be some good news as well. Read More >>

The award winning documentary Bag It will be shown at the Art Theater in downtown Champaign on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, at 7 PM. I have seen the film and highly recommend it. It starts out as a critical look at plastic bags, but ends up being a much broader examination of the effects of plastic on the environment and human society. Read More >>

In this past Sundays Chicago Tribune (August 7, 2011), the lead article was about high levels of hexavalent chromium in Chicagos drinking water. The article was titled Toxic metal stays in drinking water. Why is this news? After all, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a drinking water standard for total chromium (100 ppb), thus public water supplies are required to meet this standard. Read More >>

About 6 months ago I wrote a post reporting on decreasing nitrate concentrations in Danish groundwater. The other day I ran across some encouraging news from a study in Germany, on organic pollutants in rivers. Read More >>

Most people are familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint, the amount of carbon dioxide an individual or entity produces. Our transportation, food, manufacturing, building, and land use choices all affect the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere. Ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have had a major impact on the carbon cycle on Earth, resulting in climate change, accelerated melting of glaciers, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, etc. Another element whose cycle we have disrupted in a major way is nitrogen (N), and with impacts that may be similarly serious. Read More >>

I recently received in the mail the annual water quality report from our local water company, Illinois American Water. I usually only give them a quick glance, but this year I decided to take a closer look. Read More >>

Not so long ago, back in the 1990s or so, nobody really worried about what might happen if pharmaceutical drugs got released into the environment. In fact, we were advised to get rid of our unused drugs by flushing them down the toilet. What happened after that nobody really seemed to care about. If anything, it was assumed that the wastewater treatment processes would destroy them. Read More >>

With gasoline pushing up to and past $4 per gallon in Illinois, this is an opportune time to re-think our driving habits. But from an environmental perspective, it's always a good time to look at ways to use less gasoline. The less we use, the less the potential for pollution of water supplies from gasoline compounds. Read More >>

I recently received a newsletter that talked about something that has bothered me from time to time. I cant tell you how often I hear knowledgeable people, environmentalists and journalists usually, say that were running out of water. Were not running out of water. We cant run out of water. For all intents and purposes, we have a constant amount of water on this planet; we cant destroy water or make new water (at least in amounts that would make any kind of difference). The hydrologic cycle is a closed loop. Its one of the primary differences between the energy crisis and the water crisis; when we use oil or coal or natural gas, we really do use it up, ultimately converting it to carbon dioxide and water, and we really are running out of fossil fuels. Read More >>

Arsenic is one of the most common natural contaminants of groundwater in Illinois, and weve done several studies on it, so I anticipate Ill be writing a lot of posts about it on this blog. I was prompted to write one today because of the recent discovery of a high arsenic area near Champaign. As was reported in our local paper, The News Gazette, Sunday February 28, 2011, a domestic well in Tolono that was recently sampled had an arsenic concentration of about 300 ug/L, about 30 times the drinking water standard of 10 ug/L (equivalent to 10 ppb), and the highest arsenic level Ive ever seen in Illinois. By 50%! Read More >>

A couple of months ago I posted about the cholera outbreak in Haiti, and how we in the U.S. dont have to worry much about that and other water-borne diseases due to our sanitation. A recent letter to the journal Nature makes the point that a disconnect between the medical community and hydrogeologists and other water experts will not be a long-term solution for Haiti. Read More >>

A recent article in our local paper caught my eye; it reported that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was recommending lowering the amount of fluoride in drinking water. The reason is that many of us are getting additional fluoride from other dental products (toothpaste, mouthwash), and too much fluoride is not a good thing. Read More >>

A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference dedicated to sinkholes held in St. Louis. About 100 engineers and geoscientists from a total of 14 or 15 countries gathered to discuss issues related to sinkholes in various geologic settings, but primarily limestone karst. Read More >>

With the possible exception of arsenic, nitrate is the most widespread pollutant of groundwater. Unlike arsenic, which is primarily a naturally occurring contaminant, elevated nitrate concentrations are almost always due to human activities, primarily in agricultural settings. Tilling of soil, application of synthetic fertilizers, and livestock manure are the primary sources of nitrate. As all residents of Illinois surely know, there is a lot of agricultural activity in the state, mainly corn and soybeans. And because of this, there are surface water and shallow groundwater resources in Illinois that suffer from excess nitrate (and other forms of nitrogen). Read More >>

One of the major advances in water quality studies is the improvement in analytical techniques, both in the lab and the field, but especially in the lab. When I first started in this field, detection limits were usually in the low parts per million (ppm), but parts per billion (ppb) detection limits were starting to become typical for many ions and compounds. Now for some analyses detection limits are being reported in parts per trillion (ppt) with regularity, an increase in detection of 1000 times or more in just a couple of decades. Were finding things in water we were unable to detect before, such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). Something new to worry about! But what does it mean to be detecting compounds at those levels? Read More >>

The recent outbreak of cholera in Haiti is a serious health crisis, infecting more than 70,000 people and resulting in the deaths of more than 1600 as of December 1, 2010. Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholera, and causes severe diarrhea. If detected quickly, it is easily treatable. The cause of the outbreak is still unknown, although it has been linked to Nepalese soldiers who are part of the relief forces for the massive earthquake in January of this year. The ultimate cause is poor sanitation leading to contaminated water supplies, because people get cholera from ingesting contaminated water or food. Read More >>

Mountain top removal, i.e., stripping off the tops of mountains to mine coal, is not an issue in Illinois, but I grew up in Kentucky and its been a big controversy there and other Appalachian states for a long time. Its hard to believe that there was ever any doubt that mountain top removal polluted surface waters, but thats what some mining industry groups would have us believe. Recent studies put to bed those doubts. Read More >>

At the recent Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting in Denver, Mike Hochella, a geochemist at Virginia Tech, gave a couple of talks about nano-particles, an area of research he thinks is the next big thing in the geosciences. In fact, he thinks understanding them is a key to understanding the workings of many major Earth systems in a fundamental way. Read More >>

When I was an undergraduate, which really wasnt that long ago--okay, 30 years ago--the prevailing wisdom was that there wasnt life below the soil zone. The idea was that since all life was based on energy from the sun (another assumption thats no longer valid), you couldnt have life too far away from the suns reach. Well, we have found microbes pretty much everywhere weve looked, and the question now is where will we NOT find life. Read More >>

The only reason to buy bottled water is for the convenience (and possibly taste). In Illinois, homeowners who have their own wells often buy drinking water due to quality problems with their well water. But if you get your drinking water from a public water supply, that water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has developed drinking water standards for more than 100 contaminants. Bottled water, on the other hand, has been defined as food and is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), using different standards than EPA. FDA's regulations are defined as Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMPs), such as using sanitary conditions, protecting water sources, and analyzing for a smaller set of contaminants than EPA requires. This is not to say that bottled water is unsafe, but its quality is no better than tap water. Read More >>

This seems like an obvious question. We need to understand water quality in order to protect our health, and also the health of ecosystems. Those, of course, are the main reasons we are interested in water quality, so that we make sure our drinking water is safe and we are not damaging the environment. Read More >>

Last week (October 6-7, 2010) was the biennial Illinois Water conference, hosted by the Illinois Water Resources Center at UI. There were sessions covering a large variety of issues important to Illinois, from green infrastructure to climate change to Asian Carp. There were a few sessions on water quality. I gave a talk on chloride in Illinois waters on October 7. Read More >>

Water quality is a critical component of water for all of its uses. My goal for this blog is to provide a forum for discussing water quality issues, primarily as they apply to Illinois. Read More >>