[Photo from Wisconsin State Journal “The Yahara Lakes | Giants Among Us” series by Steve Verburg]
This article is part of a much longer piece and has many significant gaps. Most information is from local Madison newspapers (via newspaperarchive.com); very early city history is from David Mollenhoff’s book “Madison, A History of the Formative Years. Specific citations are removed. It you have questions, corrections and/or want source citations, please contact me at mariapowell@mejo.us.
**********
Madison, created on the former Ho-Chunk paradise known as De Jope, was blessed from its beginnings with stunningly beautiful, pristine lakes fed from above by rainwater and from below by springs gurgling up from a deep aquifer—itself made up of rainwater that fell on city over time and tricked down through soils and rocks.
As the Ho-Chunk had for thousands of years prior, Madison’s first European-American settlers, including my great-great grandparents who came here in 1851, could drink water straight from springs and lakes without fear of illness. Property-owners built cisterns to collect rainwater and dug shallow wells to tap into the shallow aquifer. In the city’s first few decades, the city’s artesian spring water was considered so pure that people flocked here to benefit from its healing powers.
Sadly, surface water in Lake Monona was visibly polluted with sewage by the late 1800s, and shallow drinking water wells were also quickly fouled. While wealthier people on Mansion Hill and the west side eventually sank deeper wells, people living in lower income areas of the city could only afford to dig very shallow drinking water wells that became contaminated with their own sewage—and diseases spread in these areas of the city.
After considering using Lake Mendota as a city drinking water source, the city eventually drilled a network of very deep artesian wells to supply residents with drinking water.
It took a much longer time for the growing city’s myriad wastes and industrial toxic contamination to reach these deep wells. But they eventually did.
Now, over 170 years later, all of Madison’s 23 wells are contaminated with pollution from industrial, military, and residential wastes. Several have been shut down over the years due to contamination, and others have expensive filtration systems on them. Our lakes, creeks and rivers are among the most polluted in the state, and some of that poisoned water is pulled into our drinking water wells.
We have no one to blame but ourselves. We fouled our own nest…and are now drinking it.
Should Madisonians drink lake or deep aquifer water?
In the first several decades of the city’s existence, as it grew rampantly, officials and residents debated whether drinking water should come from the lakes or deep aquifers beneath the city.
In the mid-1800s, the “Madison Hydraulic Company” proposed to “raise water from Lake Mendota…thus furnishing our citizens a full and certain supply, at all times, of pure fresh water.”
Apparently this never happened. Madison’s first public deep wells were installed in 1882, when it was becoming increasingly evident that city residents’ shallow private wells were being contaminated with organic matter, ammonia, nitrites and chlorides from human sewage—and causing disease.
But according to city historian David Mollenhoff, city residents (presumably privileged property owners) used so much water on their lawns during hot, dry summer weather that water pressure wasn’t sufficient for fire-fighting and “fire hoses could barely send a stream of water more than ten feet high.” So in 1902 the city water superintendent again suggested piping water from Lake Mendota during peak lawn-watering periods.
According to Mollenhoff, “citizens vehemently rejected the proposal on the grounds that Mendota water, though extremely pure compared to the sewage-saturated Lake Monona, was contaminated by decomposing plants, animals, several UW students whose drowned bodies had never been recovered, and by raw sewage from the State Insane Asylum.” So the city installed expensive pumps to increase water pressure during hot, dry periods.
Controversies about using lake water continued for some time. In 1910, human fecal matter and duckweed were found in a campus bubbler that was attributed to the fact that the university had extended an intake for fire-fighting water into Lake Mendota, and somehow this water got mixed up with the drinking water system that came from the deep artesian wells.
This problem was fixed, but in 1915 the city was growing so rapidly that officials were worried that the wells wouldn’t supply enough water. They hired “a group of nonlocal engineers,” who studied the problem and again proposed using Lake Mendota water. “Lake Mendota,” they proposed, “was in fact pure enough to drink and was a much cheaper source of water than drilling more artesian wells.” Further, Mendota water was soft and would save on soap and water softening costs.
But Madisonians were not convinced. They knew that sewage from Mendota Hospital (as the State Insane Asylum was re-named) and lakeshore residents still went into Lake Mendota. So the water utility decided to spend the money to sink more artesian wells rather than “endure the wrath of angry Madisonians” and according to Mollenhoff “[n]ever again did water officials seriously suggest that Madisonians drink Lake Mendota water.”
But in fact the debate wasn’t closed. In 1930, L.A. Smith, superintendent of the city water department, testified on the necessity of the city eventually securing its water supply from Lake Mendota. As reported in The Capital Times, he argued that well water levels were “gradually being lowered indicating that the flow of subterranean water is not sufficient to supply the city in the future” so the city would be “forced to drill 11 more wells to supply the demand, with ten placed beyond the city limits and at greater distance from the city.” At that time, the wells were required to be at least one mile apart.
The proposal to use Mendota water was apparently again rejected. Instead, to facilitate industrial and city growth, Madison continued to sink more very deep wells, from 500 to 1,100 feet down.
Local industries also demanded increasing volumes of consistent, pure water—and city officials rushed to help them, anxious to prevent them from locating elsewhere.
For instance, in 1903, eager to keep Mason Kipp (later re-named Madison-Kipp) here, city officials worked with Kipp to drill a deep well to supply water for factory processes. In 1922, Oscar Mayer sank its own well–also presumably with the assistance of the water utility. Company officials publicly bragged that this well was over 2000 feet deep (though this wasn’t true—it was around 750 feet deep).[1] The meat-packing company used huge quantities of water for meat processing, and also had begun manufacturing its own ice for refrigerating meat products. Company officials bragged that this well had the capacity to supply 20,000 gallons of water per hour with the “highest degree of purity.” Oscar Mayer sank several more deep wells on the factory site in coming decades as its production grew, and it eventually developed a thriving ice business.
Even in the midst of the depression, Madison grew, industries thrived, and water utility pumping of deep wells increased. At the end of 1935, a large banner title in The Capital Times blared “Local Building Tops Million Dollars First Time Since 1931.” Beneath it was an article titled “1935 Construction is Double that of 1934; Many New Homes, Stores, Apartments Erected.”
In an adjacent article, “City Water Department Reflects Business Rise,” the water utility superintendent L. A. Smith breathlessly touted the increasing amounts of water the city was using– 200,000 gallons per day more than the previous year—about 2 ½ billion gallons for the year. Water utility customers doubled that year compared to the previous three years. “If we were to conceive the entire capitol park to be a huge reservoir with walls at the curb line on the capitol side,” Smith said, “these walls would have to be 500 feet high to hold the quantity of water pumped last year, and the statue of Forward on top of the capitol would be submerged in over 200 feet of water.”
New Deal money also began to pour into the city, helping to fund construction of new drinking water infrastructure to support this growth. New Deal funds helped the utility to construct a new well, new reservoir, new pump house and new air compressor in 1935. Explaining its expansion in production, the utility mentioned the “larger building program” in the city and also said it gave “particular consideration…to the large increase in water consumption which will be brought about during the next five years due to water being used in air conditioning.”
What’s on the surface is eventually drawn down
As Madison grew, residential and industrial wastes also increased and many were dumped into the city’s wetland areas, to fill them in before homes and business were built. A number of formerly open dumping and burning areas, including some along the lakeshore, were eventually designated as official city landfills. A plethora of residential, industrial, military, research, and other wastes were dumped (and sometimes burned) in these landfills.
Even as more water was pumped up into city’s deep wells, drawing the water downward, city officials seemed to believe that the aquifer and drinking water wells would be protected contamination seeping down from these landfills and other polluting activities on the surface.
This was a pipe dream. Over time, the heavy well pumping reversed the area’s hydrology so that springs no longer fed the lakes—instead the lakes were drawn downward, into the groundwater.
A 1970 dissertation titled “Hydrogeology of Solid Waste Sites in Madison, Wisconsin” by R. J. Kaufman, a geology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin whose work was contracted by the city. Kaufman’s research in the late 1960s focused on the flow patterns between the upper and lower aquifers, in particular in the Truax Field area on the north side. His results indicated that the reversal of the natural groundwater flow in this area was caused by the heavy pumping of Oscar Mayer and municipal wells.
In 1978, the United States Geological Survey and the City of Madison Water Utility produced a report drawing in part from Kaufman’s research. The report, “Water Level Declines in the Madison Area, Dane County, Wisconsin,” highlighted “the dramatic drop in the lower aquifer levels due to municipal and industrial pumping in the aquifer.” The significant drop in the former Truax Landfill and Burke sewage plant area near Starkweather Creek, was attributed to the fact that it “surrounded by eight wells which pump about 8 million gallons of water per day from the lower sandstone aquifer.”[1] Five of these were Oscar Mayer wells and the rest were municipal wells.
The naïve belief that our deep wells would be protected from wastes and toxic pollution on the surface was also eventually shattered by reality.
Not unexpectedly, the pulling of water from the upper to the lower aquifer also draws contaminants in shallower groundwater downward. “One of the worst areas in the City for the channelization of flow from the upper to the lower aquifers,” the U.S.G.S. report noted, “is at the Truax Landfill area,” just northeast of Oscar Mayer. “The leachate from the Truax Landfill and the sludge beds will be drawn more quickly towards the adjacent water wells as the lower groundwater table drops,” the report said. Later studies by the city and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers indicated that groundwater under the landfill was contaminated.
While U.S.G.S. and the water utility knew that high-capacity municipal wells were profoundly altering the hydrogeological cycle here, and that toxic contamination from the former Truax Landfill and Burke sewage plants were being drawn downward and toward our drinking water wells, this troubling reality stayed out of the public eye for the most part—and remains so today.
The truth begins to surface publicly: Oops, we may be drinking our lakes after all!
In 1978, environmental journalist Daniel Allegretti with The Capital Times wrote “Madison area residents…can point to having some of the purest, cleanest drinking water in the nation,” mainly because it gets water from underground rather than from rivers or lakes “that may be polluted from sources upstream and beyond local control.”
But by that point, Madison’s proud drinking water narrative was already crumbling a bit. Allegretti cited “recent studies that show Madison’s water to be free of all the worst contaminants,” while admitting that “man’s effect on the environment has begun to take its toll here.”
Officials already knew then that salt (chloride) from the streets was ending up in our drinking water wells. Allegretti reported that some of Madison’s 27 wells already had chloride levels “close to the danger level set by the American Heart Association for persons on salt restricted diets.”
“What concerns water utility officials most about the chloride contamination is what it portends,” he wrote. “It means that in all likelihood, surface water is beginning to be drawn down into the underground water table.”
Though it had likely been happening for decades by then, Allegretti reported that this was happening more recently “because of the incredible amounts of water that have been pumped out of the ground in recent years. The Madison Water Utility alone pumps out some 12 billion gallons a year, roughly equivalent to the amount of water in Lake Waubesa.[2] The more water that is pumped out, the more that is naturally drawn down from the surface to take its place.” Water from lakes and streams, he noted, “is not a suitable additive to the drinking water supply.”
(Zoom forward 28 years. In 2006, Wisconsin State Journal reporter Ron Seely interviewed Wisconsin Geological & Natural History Survey hydrogeologist Ken Bradbury. Seely wrote: “It used to be that the Madison lakes were replenished by groundwater. Now that cycle has been reversed with municipal wells near the lakes deriving significant quantities of water—roughly 25 percent of the water they draw—from downward leakage from the lakes themselves.” “What we do now, “Bradbury said, “may come back to haunt us in years or in decades.” See more on this in Part II)
Cleaning up surface water is “our first line of defense” says Water Utility
Back to 1978. The Madison Water Utility told Allegretti it was “paying particularly close attention to …protecting the quality of the drinking water by preventing contamination from polluted surface water.” Larry Russell, the Madison Water Utility manager, said “cleaning up surface water—area lakes and streams—is “our first line of defense” in protecting drinking water supplies…If the concentrations (of pollutants) are building in the lake water they could be in the groundwater in the next 10 years or so,” he said.
“If that happens, he pointed out, Madison and Dane County residents will have no one to blame but themselves. Whereas years ago geologists thought underground water supplies came from long distances, they now believe the recharge is localized. In Madison’s case, the vast majority of drinking water comes from rain that at one time fell in the Yahara River basin.”
Clearly, some surface pollutants, such as chloride, had already made it into Madison’s deep wells. Were they the only toxic pollutants there by then? No. But we didn’t know.
VOCs found in west side wells
In 1983, a Capital Times article by David Blaska, “Well woes: Pollutants puzzle city,” reported that two west side wells (in the university area) were contaminated with three carcinogenic volatile organic chemicals (VOCs)–trichloroetheylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and chloroform. “Nobody knows” where the chemicals came from, the paper reported, but the water utility was “looking for the cause.” DNR assured that the risks were “negligible.”
Unfortunately for the people who were drinking that water, these assurances, though “accurate” based on standards at that time, are incorrect now. More recent science has shown that PCE and TCE are more toxic and carcinogenic than previously understood, and standards have been lowered. Some scientists believe that even current standards are not protective enough, especially for developing fetuses.[3][4]
The DNR, the article said, was “miffed that the water utility had not notified its customers of the contamination” and encouraged public disclosure “as soon as possible.” Graham said he sent a report to all the alders, the mayor, and the Water Commission. As for the public, he said “if it was something people would have to be notified about immediately because there was some kind of danger, I would have notified the media.”
“We’re trying to figure out where (the pollutants) came from,” he continued, because “the DNR is telling us we ought to be concerned about doing something. He said the utility was exploring whether “dumping or storing by industry” was occurring, and filtration strategies were being explored.
The water utility eventually decided to deepen Well 4—but unfortunately found VOC contamination there too. In 1985, another west side well near Lake Wingra shut down due to high VOC levels. Levels found were not reported.
“Water, water, everywhere…but is it safe to drink?” “It was safe, until fairly recently”
Seven years later, in 1990, Allegretti wrote another collection of articles on the state of Madison’s groundwater and drinking water.
The front page centerpiece, “Water, water, everywhere…but is it safe to drink?” began: “Virtually all the water used for drinking in Madison and the rest of Dane County comes from deep underground, where it was long thought to be safe from contamination. It was safe, until fairly recently.”
“Just 10 years ago, the Madison Water Utility could boast of providing possibly the purest drinking water of any municipality in the United States,” another piece began. “The city draws its water from the bottom of a deep aquifer, 1,000 feet underground, and officials were satisfied that pollution could never reach down that far. No longer can anyone express that kind of confidence.”
But by 1990, eight of the city’s 24 wells had “detectable levels of volatile organic chemicals, and others are in danger of contamination,” Allegretti reported.
He highlighted a very critical issue—that the pollution “may have been there for many years and gone undetected simply because the technology did not exist until the past decade to detect VOCs at the minute levels, in factions of parts per billions…”
But he downplayed any risks from these “minute levels.” He assured readers that “even though they “set off concern and even state regulatory action” the levels were “very low, well below the threshold for human health concern.” Unfortunately, he didn’t report what these “very low” levels were, so we can’t compare them with current standards.
This three-decades old news story raises many questions. Where did these VOCs come from? How long had Madisonians been drinking them unknowingly? What other toxic contaminants were there but unmeasured? What have government agencies done (or not done) about contaminants getting into our lakes, creeks, and groundwater?
(Sadly, Daniel Allegretti died of cancer in 1993, at age 45).
To be continued (though it may be a while)…
*********
[1] The first one was installed in 1918-1920 (1983 DCRCP says 1918) for the company’s ice business, which operated for decades, and four (or five?) more were installed in the next several decades.
[2] In a later article, Allegretti wrote this amount was equivalent to Lake Wingra, which is more likely to be accurate.
[3] Well #6 had 9.5 ug/L PCE, 2 ug/L TCE, and 1.9 ug/L chloroform. At the time, PCE was used in dry cleaning, metal degreasing, textile processing and in pesticides. Chloroform was used as a refrigerant, aerosol propellant, industrial solvent, in pesticides, and as an anesthetic through 1976. TCE was used as a degreaser, in dry cleaning, and as a disinfectant in surgery. These chemicals are still used for many of these processes today (with some exceptions).
[4] PCE and TCE enforcement standards are currently 5 ug/L (with preventive action limits one-tenth of this or 0.5 ug/L). Based on the most recent science, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services recently recommended that TCE standards be lowered even further, to 0.5 ug/L, because it has been shown to have carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic effects.
