When you have a well at home
I have a well in my house in space beneath the old house and my garage, totally enclosed from the outdoors and powered by my own pump. I’ve never used well water for drinking because the people who rented this place for a short time after my parents died got sick and claimed it was because of polluted water.
For years I bought drinking water at the grocery store or boiled my own. It was nice having all my other water, for bathroom use and watering the lawn, from my well. Except for electricity running the pump, it was free, or I considered it so. Now I pay $12 or so for city water and run it through a filter for drinking water. I am also paying several hundred dollars to set up the city line from my house all the way to the sidewalk running next to my property. But I’m glad to have drinking water quality at every faucet in the house.
And glad to have my well for all of my outdoor needs.
So are thousands of other Idaho folks. Apparently nobody knows how many. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, DEQ, just says “many,” and the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, says that 15 percent of Americans rely on private drinking water supplies, but doesn’t give data for Idaho. The Idaho Department of Water Resources, IDWR, offers datasets with ESRA shape-file, whatever that might be. It was easier to find out that Idaho had one oil well in 1963, an unsuccessful one. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is concerned about nitrates and arsenic in our drinking water.
One of my favorite agencies, the US Geological Survey (USGS), states that southern Idaho boasts 1,300 wells, and they provide irrigation water as well as drinking water. The water, the USGS adds, comes from our state’s generous aquefer, an underground river of water that is the envy of most other states. I called the USGS and spoke briefly with Annette Campbell, who told me that the agency most likely to have those statistics was the Idaho Department of Water Resources.
Chad at the IDWR told me that was a logical assumption. He talked to me for several minutes about water issues from the agency’s perspective. They issue permits for wells, he said, so they “should” know how many wells there are. The problem is that there are wells that have been working for years before permits were required. And they don’t keep track of permits by region, although it wouldn’t be that hard to derive that information from the raw data. IDWR’s concern is the construction of wells and the permitting process, not the quality of the water. That’s up to the DEQ.
The short answer is that nobody knows how many wells we have in Idaho. IDWR could tell me how many permits they’ve issued year by year since 1955, but I’m not sure how readily available that number isI did learn from Chad that there is no limit on digging wells for water in Idaho. Anybody can dig a well on privately owned property and use the water for any purpose. You don’t need a permit unless you’re using more than 13,000 gallons of water a day, and then you need a permit for 1/2 acre or more of irrigating and other use. You don’t have to check the well for water quality.
Tags: CDC, DEQ, Idaho water, IDWR, USGS
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