Private wells in Idaho
In Idaho you don’t have to cut any red tape if you own a small well that supplies water to your home. That’s because a well like the one I have in my garage pumps no water at all in winter and very little on the few occasions when I water my lawn in the spring and summer. I’ve been using city water for my “domestic” use for more than a year and then filter it to take out the bad chlorine taste.
The problem is that we’ve developed acres and acres of land beyond the range of municipal water systems, and these “ranchettes” or “starter castles” obtain all of their water from individual or shared wells. There needs to be some sort of statewide oversight of domestic wells because of the risk of pollutants such as nitrates and because of the possibility of severe water shortages at some future time.
The Idaho Business Review reports on an address delivered by Barbara Cosens, University of Idaho law professor, to the Senate Resources and Environment Committee.
My comment:
Domestic wells also need more monitoring in areas where the water table is especially high as in the area immediately south and east of Caldwell. And we need to put the brakes on development of new, large subdivisions that plan to draw their water from wells.
We have a limited supply of groundwater in Idaho and an even more limited supply of clean water. We need to take better care of what we have before it’s too late.
This entry was posted on February 3, 2008 at 6:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: Barbara Cosens, domestic wells, Idaho's water, water
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