Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER: Delta environmental consultants, dedicated to the preservation and improvement of our soil and water resources, is pleased to present MPR listeners with the following program.

SPEAKER: Poisoned waters, a documentary report on the growing threat to Minnesota's drinking water.

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK HEISTAD: The 800 block of Saint Paul's busy West 7th Street is a popular place among people looking for good drinking water. They come here to the Schmidt Brewery. They stand in line, even on a subzero February afternoon, so they can fill a few jugs from a water tap the brewery provides free to the public.

SPEAKER: OK, stop.

SPEAKER: All right, I'll tell you the reason I get the water because the city water smells and it stinks. Besides that, it tastes terrible. And I drink a gallon of water a day, and there's no way I can drink that city water. It might be pure and good for you, but bad news.

SPEAKER: How about this water? What's different about this water?

SPEAKER: Well, I tell you, there's no taste to this. This just tastes like water. This tastes like water.

SPEAKER: I believe I feel better. I'm not sure, but I believe I feel better about drinking in it because the other doesn't taste as good as this, out of the tap.

SPEAKER: Well, we live where there's pretty hard water, and we also have a water conditioner. So I just feel that this is better than drinking conditioned water.

MARK HEISTAD: Though these people probably don't know it, the water they're taking home from the brewery tap is somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 years old. Originally, this water fell to the ground in Northern Isanti County about 40 miles North Northwest of the Twin Cities.

Its long tenure in the ground, its slow movement through the ground has made this water about as pure as you'll find. The well that returns the water to the surface is 1,000 feet deep, deep enough to draw water from the Mount Simon Hinckley aquifer. The well actually passes through several other water bearing aquifers on the way down.

But it's just as well the brewery decided to dig this well so deep. Water in more and more of those shallower aquifers under the Twin Cities and around the state is becoming undrinkable. In the next 45 minutes, you'll hear about what's happened to communities and individuals across the state once they've learned their water is bad.

But first, a few facts. In Minnesota, 3/4 of the population relies on underground aquifers for drinking water. Though this is the land of 10,000 lakes and sky blue waters, in most of Minnesota, there is more water underground than on the surface, perhaps a trillion gallons in all.

But increasingly, our underground drinking water is being threatened. Already, there are hundreds of sites in the state where the groundwater is contaminated. More than 40% of farm wells tested contain levels of farm chemicals. In more than two dozen communities, the state has had to provide clean drinking water to some 200 households whose primary water supplies have been polluted.

Every indication is more communities will see this happen to them in the future. It happened two years ago in Lakeland, Minnesota. And even today, there are places in that community where drawing water from a tap can yield a fluid few people would knowingly drink.

GORDON CROSBY: This water right here is treated. This is right out of my wall, and there's a lot of benzenes and a lot of other chemicals in there. You can take a smell of that. I don't know if you can smell it.

MARK HEISTAD: Gordon Crosby lives in an 11-year-old house built into the side of a hill in Lakeland, about 17 miles East of Saint Paul near the Saint Croix River. The water that Crosby is drawing from a faucet in his garage contains high levels of the cancer-causing chemical benzene.

The maximum public health limit for benzene in drinking water is 7 parts per billion. Crosby's water contains 360 parts per billion, more than 50 times the level considered to be safe. Health officials have told him that even the fumes from this water are potentially dangerous to breathe. Crosby found out about his well water problem in May of 1987.

State health officials had discovered contaminated groundwater near the old Lakeland landfill. Because all of Lakeland's 2000 residents have private wells, investigators decided to expand their testing in neighborhood areas. They found pollution in two more wells, then four, soon 10.

Lakeland Mayor Craig Morris recalls the day state pollution officials told him about the problem.

CRAIG MORRIS: One Saturday in May, as I was attempting to build a deck and had a sister getting married and had the Memorial weekend coming up, we got a call from the information officer at PCA that they were going to issue a press release, which really took us by surprise. And when we found out what the information was in that release, it had very devastating consequences. It was kind of one of those things where it was a bad dream and all of a sudden, it came true.

MARK HEISTAD: Morris says the events of the next few days scared his community. The National Guard was called in to provide water. The press followed the action. Some citizens nearly panicked. Pollution and health officials received a flood of calls from concerned residents who wanted their own wells tested immediately. Nearly two years later, the testing is still going on.

RUTH ANN BRUNCKHORST: I have learned so much about aquifers and water tables and water levels and geological formation, things I don't even care to know about, but I've had to learn about them.

MARK HEISTAD: Lakeland city clerk Ruth Ann Brunckhorst keeps track of the water-test results in City Hall, where there is a map full of pushpins resting against the front window.

RUTH ANN BRUNCKHORST: The red pushpins indicate the contaminated wells, the green indicate trace levels, and the blue are the clean wells that have been tested, and not all the wells have been tested. But those that have, I think, we're over 400 wells now that have been tested. And this map is in the window, so anybody can view it whenever it's daylight and they can see it.

MARK HEISTAD: More than half those pushpins, the red ones and the green ones, indicate contamination. In terms of private wells, the total makes Lakeland the most widespread groundwater pollution problem in the state. More than 100 families are receiving bottled water for drinking and cooking through the state's Superfund program.

PCA investigators say Lakeland's problem is complex. They've identified three separate plumes of contamination. Most of the chemicals are solvents or petroleum-related products. A former filling station and an abandoned truck stop are two of the likely sources. Private septic systems may also have contributed to the problem.

While testing and the studies continue, Mayor Morris says his community is struggling to cope with the problem. Many residents, says Morris, feel a certain amount of helplessness.

CRAIG MORRIS: What it really represents is a loss of control. I've lost control over my homestead. I've lost control over my life. There are very serious financial implications. There are significant psychological implications. It's a cloud that hangs over people's head.

MARK HEISTAD: Gordon Crosby, who quite likely has the most contaminated well in Minnesota blames the stress of the pollution for the breakup of his marriage. He wonders about his recent allergies, whether or not they're related to the water. He worries about the future health of his 10-year-old daughter. She has drunk the well water all her life.

Even though Crosby now has a sophisticated carbon filtration system to purify his water, he feels trapped in a house that will be difficult, if not impossible, to sell.

GORDON CROSBY: Well, your home is your-- it's the American dream. You want to have your home, and you want to have a safe home and provide for your family, raise a family. And when you're put in a situation where you've been doing things, you try to do your best, try to eat the right foods and everything, when you're drinking poisons, it's scary.

MARK HEISTAD: Other Lakeland residents share Crosby's anxieties. Some of those with clean wells fear the polluted groundwater may be moving in their direction may spoil their drinking water in the future. Mary Miller has seven different chemicals in her well. Each of them was detected in relatively low concentrations, but because no one knows how potentially unhealthy the chemicals may be in combination with one another, Miller is playing it safe.

MARY MILLER: I'm a real strong believer in gut feelings, and my gut feeling was that this is serious. There were a number of other people saying this isn't serious. You have to drink two liters of it for 70 years to increase your chances 1 in 100,000 of getting cancer. And I'm going, how do you know that for sure?

And the fact that I have four children, I don't know if it was a protective instinct or something, but it really bothered me.

MARK HEISTAD: Other parents are also bothered. They share Miller's skepticism about how much or how little the experts really know about the long-term health consequences of drinking contaminated water.

Steve Howell moved to nearby Lakeland shores in 1977 from New York City. He said he never, in his wildest dreams, expected to find pollution in the land of 10,000 lakes, especially not in a bedroom community with virtually no industry. In addition to his concerns about water quality, Howell said the situation in Lakeland has made him think about more basic issues of what's really important in life.

STEVE: It makes you just realize how precious life is, and you're not really here that long. And you should make the best of your daily life and the different things that you do. And I think with that on your mind, continually, the water problem, when are they going to get it resolved, how critical is it, all of those things make you probably start to think about your health more.

MARK HEISTAD: Not everyone in Lakeland and Lakeland shores is worried about the groundwater. Some families with clean or untested wells are indifferent to the situation. Others resent the fact that their community has been stigmatized, that property values have declined. Dan Eichten does not have a well problem, but he's been unable to sell his home for the past 2 and 1/2 years, even though he's dropped the asking price by $20,000.

DAN EICHTEN: When a problem does come up, you have a certain percentage of people. They can become very paranoid. They can make a lot of noise and yet the majority does not get always represented in the issue. And I think that's what's happened here. I really feel the whole thing has really blown out of proportion and the bystanding people have been hurt.

MARK HEISTAD: Those kinds of comments will be heard increasingly in Lakeland in the near future, as the community debates what to do next. Some citizens believe all that's needed is a handful of carbon filters on the most polluted wells. Others say a few neighborhood wells in the most contaminated areas would be sufficient. Still, others contend that Lakeland, and perhaps eventually several other communities along the Saint Croix River, need to develop a municipal water system.

One of the problems will be cost. How much money is needed to solve the water problem? Where will it come from? And how much can reasonably be expected of residents, especially those whose wells are clean?

The costs and complexity of the situation raises another issue. Is Lakeland an isolated example or would extensive tests in other communities reveal that they, too, have similar problems? Is Lakeland unique or might it be all too typical? Lakeland mayor, Craig Morris.

CRAIG MORRIS: We don't think this is a unique situation. Lakeland is just one of many communities that today, have to face the realization that the water comes from the ground. And historically, we haven't taken good care of our environment.

MARK HEISTAD: Care for the environment is on the minds of many Lakeland residents. Although the more immediate concerns of health effects and property values still remain, the shock of having contaminated water has caused some residents to think in broader terms about what they, as individuals, have done to cause part of the problem. Mary Miller.

MARY MILLER: I'm to the point now where we have some obligation to protect it because we do have-- other people are going to live here after us. We have to leave something behind that is-- we can't say, I'm not going to take care of it, let the next generation takes care of it. I feel we have a vested interest in it.

MARK HEISTAD: As Lakeland residents try to out what to do next, they're also looking at the world through new eyes. Even though he plays down Lakeland's troubles Dan Eichten says the issue is very serious. More education, he says, is needed to prevent future problems in other communities.

DAN EICHTEN: Somebody who goes out and rinses out the radiator of their vehicle or their car out in the ground and just lets the antifreeze go on running aground. Even though they've diluted it, if that gets down into the well system and down into the aquifer, it's going to pollute a vast area of water. So we aren't paying good attention.

The people need an education on, hey, guys, this is for real. Don't do this stuff. Its impact is going to be traumatic on you down the road. But we do need to start educating people in everyday things.

MARK HEISTAD: The contamination in Lakeland was caused, in part, by petroleum products that somehow got into the ground. Often, that happens where buried petroleum tanks are present. That's a situation about as common in Minnesota as our service stations.

Many of those tanks were buried years ago, and state officials are finding more and more of them are leaking. Steve Lee is the head of the pollution control agency's spills unit.

STEVE LEE: Two years ago, we were receiving reports, new reports of leaks at a rate of about 200 a year. In the middle of last year, the rate was about 500 per year. And today, the rate is about 1,000 a year.

So we're getting a lot of reports of leaks and the rate is increasing. As tank owners replace their old tanks with new tanks, they oftentimes discover contamination at that point.

MARK HEISTAD: Lee says the 900 or so sites his agency now knows about is just a small fraction of those actually in need of attention. Cleaning up all those spills is expensive, costing, on average, $100,000 to $150,000 each. Scientists most often measure groundwater pollution in parts per million or parts per billion using something called a mass spectrometer. Lee and his crew can measure most petroleum spills with a ruler.

STEVE LEE: The effects of leaking above or below ground petroleum tank can often be very dramatic near that site. Oftentimes, we're dealing with very contaminated groundwater, but also, oftentimes, we're dealing with actual petroleum product floating on the top of the groundwater or present within the soil, sometimes measured-- often measured in inches, sometimes measured in actual feet of petroleum floating on the top of the ground water below the ground surface.

MARK HEISTAD: Steve Lee, head of the pollution control agency's spills unit. In Lakeland, it was petroleum. In the Beltrami County Community of Northern Township, it was a very different but just as toxic pollutant that followed the water. The results were pretty much the same.

Northern Township is a suburban and rural community of several hundred people just adjacent to Bemidji. Like many other small towns, each home and business in the Township has its own individual well and septic system. In the summer of 1984, routine testing showed a problem with water in a monitoring well near the town landfill.

Mass testing followed. Initially, 80 wells showed elevated levels of contamination. In time, more than 200 homes and businesses were told they needed new water supplies. The news came as a shock to Tom and Linda Tappy. Just seven years before, when the Tappys were considering buying a home in the township, they had the well tested. They were told the water was good, so the Tappys bought the house.

TOM: And, of course, being naive about water testing, we had the normal bacteria test, and it came back fine. There was no problem there. We didn't realize there was a special test that had to be run for toxics.

MARK HEISTAD: In 1984, after contamination showed up in the monitoring well, the Tappys had their water tested again this time, for toxics. The results were difficult to comprehend.

LINDA: We were given an 8 and 1/2 by 11 sheet of all the things that were in our water. They wouldn't say necessarily what an acceptable or unacceptable ever was or what was close to that line. If it was definitely not safe to drink, you got a telephone call. Otherwise, we were advised that if it were me, I wouldn't drink the water.

MARK HEISTAD: With both a two-year-old and a three-year-old in the house, the Tappies stopped drinking their well water. They stopped cooking with it. For 3 and 1/2 years, they carried water, on average 8 gallons a week, from the city tap in Bemidji. The disruptions to their lives were both big and small.

LINDA: Our favorite story is, our children love macaroni and cheese, OK? And it's their favorite meal. If they could have it every day, all day long, they'd have it. We had it maybe once every two weeks because macaroni and cheese takes a lot of water, OK?

It takes a lot of water to boil it, then you rinse off the macaroni. There's a whole little process involved, and it just-- needless to say, they got a lot of macaroni and cheese, what they wanted, after we got our water in.

MARK HEISTAD: The Tappies and everyone else in Northern Township got their water in from an extension of the Bemidji municipal system. The residents will split the cost with the Federal Superfund, with the government picking up the bulk of the tab.

The source of the contamination, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, was the local landfill, Kummer landfill. Though the owners, Ruth and Chuck Kummer closed down after the contamination appeared, they steadfastly denied their landfill was to blame.

CHUCK KUMMER: They had to blame it on somebody, and we were the most likely ones. They couldn't hardly blame it on the people cesspools in Cedar Lane. If they do that, they don't get no Superfund money. This way, they can blame it on the landfill, and they put in a whole new water system for everybody around in the area.

MARK HEISTAD: The Kummers have had a stormy relationship with state regulators over the years. They were cited numerous times for violations of state landfill regulations, including allowing some industrial garbage into what was supposed to be a landfill only for household wastes.

The pollution control officials say there is no evidence that the industrial garbage contributed at all to the northern Township contamination. And on this score, the Kummers and the regulators agree. The contamination came from everyday household garbage.

CHUCK KUMMER: Everything they found in their water samples that we have seen is stuff, and they said the same thing, is stuff that came out from under the sink. It's anything you can find under your sink, that's what they found in the water, which would come from a neighbor's cesspool or from the landfill. It could come from either place.

SPEAKER: Either way, it's kind of frightening to think that what we throw away in the course of every week could be coming right back to us.

CHUCK KUMMER: Well, sure it is, but that's what happens. It depends on where you throw it.

MARK HEISTAD: For Linda Tappy and many other Northern Township residents, the possibility that household waste could cause such widespread contamination was inconceivable.

LINDA: No, because I've lived in a town all my life. And when you have a public utility system, that just never enters your mind that it is going somewhere.

MARK HEISTAD: Later this year, the last Northern Township resident whose well is threatened will be hooked up to the Bemidji city water system. The total cost of getting good water to these people is estimated at $2.1 million. Gail Skare represents northern Township on the Beltrami County Board of Commissioners. She says that's just the beginning.

GAIL SKARE: They're talking about $7 to $12 million now just to cap the landfill. That $7 to $12 million, if we were to begin to clean it up, actually filtering out that water and trying to clean it, it would be multi-million dollars.

MARK HEISTAD: For the people of Northern Township, Kummer landfill has been an education, an expensive education. But Gail Skare says the people here are determined to make sure they don't cause a similar problem for some other community in the future.

GAIL SKARE: I think everybody is more sensitive now to what you put in the ground might end up in your groundwater, and back a few years ago, we weren't feeling that way. I know even as a Township clerk, I had people calling me saying that there was somebody dumping used oil on the road or something like that. That was a very common practice back a few years ago.

Now, people have become aware that you have to be very careful how you treat your soil. And I guess maybe that would be the outlying. It's been a learning process. I think they've seen what happened at Kummers and realizing what goes into the ground is probably going to show up in the water.

MARK HEISTAD: If Kummer landfill were only an isolated problem, that would be one thing. But Kummer is not unique. Pollution control officials say one-third of the landfills in Minnesota are leaking into the groundwater. They agree with this bleak assessment from Diane Jensen of the Clean Water action project about how many more of those landfills will leak in the future.

DIANE JENSEN: It will be complete. We anticipate that close to 100% of the landfills we have out there, the older landfills, will be in need of cleanup over time. There is no way that you can put the combination of household hazardous wastes, garbage, agricultural pesticides, whatever it is that we have been all throwing into landfills, and not anticipate that it's going to get into groundwater. We combined it into one big stew and now we have polluted soup.

MARK HEISTAD: Already, there are more than 50 former landfills on the state superfund list, with an estimated cleanup cost of between $8 and $12 million a piece. Even if cleaning up each of the rest of the landfills costs just a fraction of that figure, the total amount will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Taxpayers are certain to pay a substantial amount of that money.

But since 1983, taxpayers have been able to share the costs of cleaning up environmental problems with the corporations and individuals who created those problems in the first place. The State Superfund law has brought about a number of spectacularly expensive cleanup projects funded almost entirely by big industry.

Reilly Tar and Chemical, a former creosote treatment plant in Saint Louis Park, the FMC corporation in Fridley, 3M, and others in Oakdale all have spent millions of dollars to undo some of the environmental damage they caused, whether on purpose or not. The single most expensive cleanup effort so far in Minnesota is at the Twin Cities army ammunition plant in the northern Twin Cities suburb of Arden Hills.

TCAAP, as it's called, opened in 1942. The army and its contractors manufactured ammunition and conducted research there during parts of the past four decades.

JIM JAKES: No one would dispute the fact that the dumping practices at the Twin Cities arsenal were extremely inappropriate, knowing what we know now.

MARK HEISTAD: Jim Jakes works for the army at TCAAP as an environmental engineer. Jakes does not defend what the army did there, but he does put the army's actions in their historical context.

JIM JAKES: In the setting of the early 1950s and early 1960s, when most of this was done, it was a fairly common practice, the dumping of all kinds of material basically anywhere, in this case, in a sandy area, in other cases, swamps. Most of the major corporations, government itself, obviously, as is the case in the Twin Cities arsenal, found this to be a cheap and easy way to dispose of waste.

MARK HEISTAD: But what was cheap and easy in the past has proved to have expensive and complicated consequences. Jake says the army and Honeywell, one of its main contractors in the property, have spent $35 million on the project so far just to study the extent of the pollution and try to stop it from spreading. Jake says the actual cleanup will take at least 30 years, and he says it will be very expensive.

JIM JAKES: The total could reach $100 million before we're done. It's very hard to say because eventually, all of the remedial actions will be in place, the pump-out systems and whatever else comes along. I would say in the next four or five years, those will all be in place, but nobody can predict when we can stop using them.

MARK HEISTAD: The task ahead for the army is to pump up billions of gallons of contaminated water that's now 200 to 300 feet underground. The water will have to be treated or filtered to remove the various industrial solvents that have contaminated approximately 20 square miles of water beneath portions of three cities.

One of those affected communities is New Brighton. The mayor there is Bob Benke. He is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to his community's experience with groundwater troubles.

BOB: The aquifer that was contaminated is used by about 75% of the people who drink groundwater in the Metropolitan region. Yes, there's only a small part of that aquifer that's contaminated in our case, but it's covering a pretty large area.

MARK HEISTAD: Initially, the army refused to take responsibility for the contamination. Then last year, Mayor Benke signed the documents to finalize an $18 million out-of-court settlement with the army. Half of that money will reimburse the city for legal costs and the expense of digging new and deeper wells. The other half will finance carbon filtration systems on existing wells.

Benke says he's pleased with the legal outcome, but he says the psychological impacts of the past have not been resolved. The community's reputation has been tarnished, and it will take more than money and purification equipment to end the lingering suspicion and false rumor that somehow, the city's drinking water is still not safe.

BOB: We don't know how many people who might have wanted to live in the city were scared away by that or maybe in the future by some ignorant person saying that. We don't know how much economic development we may have lost because of that rumor. It's going to take a long time to eliminate those misperceptions, and I don't know that we ever, ever will.

MARK HEISTAD: This case is not over for the army, either. In addition to the millions of dollars yet to be spent on further study and cleanup, TCAAP officials still face two lawsuits, one from the city of St. Anthony, the other from 15 families in Arden Hills and New Brighton.

What is quite likely the most pervasive groundwater pollution problem in Minnesota is not found in urban industrialized areas like New Brighton. Rather, it's in the countryside, beneath the farms and small towns in the wells of rural Minnesota. More and more of those wells are being contaminated by agricultural chemicals, and those chemicals are making some people sick.

Janice Tessing farms with her husband Chuck in Southeast Minnesota's Winona County. She first started feeling sick back in 1984.

JANICE: It was shortly after I lost a baby, a full term pregnancy. And I started having unusual symptoms like numbness and tingling in the extremities and headaches, diarrhea, a whole raft of things that I sought help for.

MARK HEISTAD: Janice says her circulation was bad. She was cold all the time. The Tessing saw a number of local doctors.

JANICE: I went from clinic to clinic, trying to uncover some organic cause of the symptoms and really, they were getting worse and worse, and I was losing weight. And at one point, a technician at the Mayo Clinic suggested that we have our water tested.

MARK HEISTAD: So the Tessings ordered the test. It showed the family had been drinking water containing more than twice the health department's recommended limit for nitrate, a common farm well pollutant. The test results were not particularly surprising, nor were what the Tessings wanted to hear.

JANICE: Actually, I didn't really want to know either. When it was suggested, I thought, what if? Then we'll have to change our whole pattern around here. We'll have to get a distiller or buy distilled water, and that was kind of an overwhelming thought. Yeah, I was pretty disappointed to find out that we were going to have to do something about the water.

MARK HEISTAD: Just the same, the Tessings stopped drinking their well water.

JANICE: Eventually, we got a water distiller and the symptoms cleared. I can't say that I'm positive that it was the drinking water, but I sure feel better now.

MARK HEISTAD: Since that first test, the Tessings have continued to monitor their well. It has never tested any lower than twice the health standard for nitrates. It's tested as high as 4 and 1/2 times the limit.

Nitrate contamination is not a new problem in rural Minnesota. It's been known about for more than 40 years. The contamination often results from heavy use of nitrogen fertilizers, but it's also a byproduct of animal and human wastes.

The most serious nitrate-related illness is a condition called blue baby syndrome. In infants under six months of age, high levels of nitrates in the water can be fatal. The most recent blue baby death in the upper Midwest was a two-month-old child in South Dakota in 1986.

That the Tessings should encounter nitrate problems on their farm doesn't quite seem fair. In 1979, fully five years before Janice got sick, the Tessings had stopped using all chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Their decision was a product of both economics, they figured not buying the chemicals would save them money, and a concern about what the chemicals seemed to do to their fields.

CHUCK KUMMER: We were finding that we had way more weed problems than we should have had. And it took a lot of power to work the soil. And it didn't retain the moisture it should.

JANICE: And then there is that quality about the soil that you can't really describe. It's just a feeling of life. And we walked out in our fields, and they were like concrete. You know that there was nothing living in that top part. It was all cracked and really hard. And we knew there was something wrong.

MARK HEISTAD: Janice and Chuck Tessing are thoughtful people. Their conversation about groundwater ranges widely from geology to hydrology, chemistry to economics. These are unconventional farmers. Most other farmers in the state do use chemicals.

In fact, Minnesota is third in the nation in farm pesticide use. Nitrogen fertilizer use is common, as well. The Tessings say it's time other farmers reevaluate what they're putting on the land.

CHUCK KUMMER: We can see we're probably on a road here with our industrialized farming system of short-term gain and long-term loss. I mean, we're already seeing that it's going to be hard to turn the land over to future generations if contamination levels are such that they can't eat the food from it or drink the water from it, which we're already suffering from that.

Then we have to look at some other models of farming systems that have been farmed for a long time and food's been produced and produced economically.

MARK HEISTAD: In many, if not most agricultural circles, talk like that would be considered heretical at best, but that sort of talk is becoming more and more common. The Minnesota Department of agriculture, for example, is funding research in sustainable agriculture, the movement pushing to minimize, if not reduce, farm chemical use.

And in the testing zone in Winona County, the federal government is spending more than $2 million to get farmers to cut down on their chemical use. Charlie Radich is with the agricultural extension service in Winona County. He says farmers are increasingly receptive to his message.

CHARLIE: Generally, they're quite willing to change because economics have made less profits, so they're looking for ways to cut costs. But also, they're drinking that water. And, in fact, they're the only ones, their family is the only ones drinking the water from their particular wells. So besides the economics of it, they're very interested in their family's health, and so that makes them responsive to what we're recommending.

MARK HEISTAD: Since 1983, Radich has been working with something called the Garvin Brook Watershed Project. That's the federal program to clean up the water in Winona County. Actually, the whole thing got started because of a trout stream.

[WATER RUNNING]

Garvin Brook is a relatively small spring-fed meandering stream that over the years, has gained a reputation for pretty good trout fishing. Then some years ago, officials started noticing higher levels of nitrates in the Brook. They became concerned the fishing would suffer, hence the Garvin Brook watershed project.

Authorities figured the problem was animal waste, nitrates from manure, so they launched a program to teach farmers how to keep their manure out of the stream. But Garvin Brook stayed contaminated. As the government soon learned, the geology of Southeast Minnesota, it's called karst geology, was working against them.

[WATER BUBBLING]

Here, in Winona County, the water almost bubbles up from underground aquifers feeding Garvin Brook and dozens of other streams like it. The water may start on the surface, go underground, and then pop up on top again several miles away. Or it may start underground, move up to the surface and go down again. Either way, contamination on one level will probably find its way to the other.

Back in 1943, this interplay of water from surface to aquifer in Southeast Minnesota was blamed with spreading typhoid fever from one farm well to another. Today, the water is carrying farm chemicals, depositing them in more and more of the area's wells. Charlie Radich.

CHARLIE: We have quite a few wells that are testing above the health recommendation standard, which is 10 parts per million. Percentage-wise, I think it's about 37% of the wells we test are above that standard.

MARK HEISTAD: For several years now, Radich has been showing Winona County farmers how they can cut back on chemicals, especially nitrogen fertilizer, and still grow their crops economically. After five years work, the river is cleaner. There is no improvement in the well water.

CHARLIE: Well, we know that the use of nitrogen fertilizer has been reduced. It doesn't show up yet in improved water quality. And we've raised the awareness of people so that they aren't dumping into sinkholes as much and using less chemicals than they did.

MARK HEISTAD: That raised awareness may be best seen on the farm of Bob Kelnice. He runs a dairy operation just a few miles north and west of Janice and Chuck Tessing. In most ways, this is a typical commercial dairy farm. If anything, it's a bit more sophisticated than most.

In the milking parlor, there are eight automated milking machines that allow one farmer to milk more than 100 cows.

BOB: What they do is sense when the cow is done milking, it'll take the unit off the cow when she's done. You'll see it in a minute here. When one's done, it'll just come right out of there.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

BOB: It takes the brains out of milking. Any idiot can milk. I mean, really, it does. Basically, you don't have to worry about whether she's done or-- and it cuts down the amount of people that have to be in here to milk.

[MACHINE RUNNING]

MARK HEISTAD: Bob Kelnice actually works three different farms. He owns two and rents a third. All told, he cultivates 400 acres of corn, oats, and hay. Like most dairy farmers, he puts pesticides on his fields. And like most farmers in Winona County, he's concerned about his water.

BOB: I know this farm that we live on is good, but then the other farm we own, the nitrates are high in that water. And that's only half a mile down the road.

MARK HEISTAD: You worry about drinking the water over there?

BOB: Yeah. I mean, we lived there for six, seven years and drank it. We never tested the water until after we had left, and then, well, then it's too late. You drank it, I mean. And I don't know if they were high the whole time we lived there or not.

MARK HEISTAD: I suppose for you, water is a little bit bigger deal because these cows have to take a whole lot of water and all this equipment I'm looking at, which has to be spotless clean.

BOB: Yeah. Yeah, we go through a lot of water. And if you've got nitrates in your water, the cows are going to be drinking it, they're not going to be-- I've heard that herds with nitrates in their water really got a mess because it really goofs things up. I mean, it'll kill them. If the levels are high enough, they just get so run down, they'll just die.

MARK HEISTAD: Bob Kelnice is concerned enough about nitrate contamination that he stopped using nitrogen fertilizer altogether. Manure and nitrogen fixing crops now provide all the fertilizer he needs. Kelnice would like to stop using pesticides, too, but doesn't think it's practical just yet.

BOB: Last year, we tried a small test plot without herbicide, but with the dry year, and we did enough things wrong, it didn't. It got pretty weedy. But I don't think the yield was reduced because of the weeds. I mean, there was as good a yield there as the next field that had herbicide on it. Just it was so terrible weedy.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

MARK HEISTAD: What's the financial risk of not using the herbicide and the pesticide? Is it mostly the financial risk that keeps you from just dropping it all?

BOB: Yeah. I mean, we raise basically just enough corn to feed the cattle. We really never have any extra to sell. And so needless to say, if you don't get a corn crop, you'll be buying it, and that's the risk part. But I'm positive it can be done.

I mean, people did it years ago, and there's a lot of farmers doing it now. It's just a matter of getting your technique down for your farm.

MARK HEISTAD: Bob Kelnice comes by his concern for the environment naturally. His father Gene Kelnice is on the local soil and water conservation board, chairman for the past eight years. Gene Kelnice is recognized in this region as an advocate for ecologically sound farming. And more and more, he's becoming concerned about the issue of groundwater pollution.

SPEAKER: Whatever you put on the land isn't too far from-- generally too far from going into the groundwater because of the way-- with these rock outs, you go out to end of the knoll and there's a rock sticking out there. Well, there probably ain't-- you get out there far enough, there probably in 3 feet of ground above that bedrock.

All it has to do is soak through that layer of ground and into the [INAUDIBLE] topography, the limestone and the [INAUDIBLE] trickle right down into the groundwater. If you go to Lacrosse on Highway 61, you can see that.

MARK HEISTAD: That's got to be a concern, then, given the amount of pesticide and herbicide and nitrogen that we put on the ground these days.

SPEAKER: Definitely. We took how many years to get it polluted? It's going to take that long, if not longer, to get it cleaned up.

MARK HEISTAD: How do we clean it? What's your sense of that?

SPEAKER: The younger generation takes over. They can see it. They keep telling us we polluted it. Now, they're going to have to clean it up. Well, I agree I helped with it, helped polluting it, but I turned the tables. I ain't going to do it.

My son is a great conservationist. He won't put up with it. He says, you guys polluted it, now we got to clean it up.

MARK HEISTAD: Southeast Minnesota, because of its geology, has been identified as one of the state's most sensitive areas to groundwater pollution. The sand plains of Central Minnesota is another. In 1985, the Minnesota Departments of Health and Agriculture tested 500 wells, mostly in the sensitive areas.

The results, 40% of the private wells tested above the health standard for nitrates. More than 1/3 of the private wells and more than a quarter of the public wells showed pesticides, though often at very low levels. The results have presented farmers with a very difficult situation. Minnesota agriculture Commissioner, Jim Nichols.

JIM NICHOLS: Well, it's fair to say that groundwater quality is a problem. I think farmers are very concerned about it because when we have a problem with herbicides and the fertilizers that we use, farmers are the first to end up drinking the water or eating the food from that land.

However, we must recognize that herbicides and fertilizers are tools that the US farmers have used to make us the most productive farmers in the world. We cannot unilaterally take away those tools from these farmers. We must, however, learn to use these tools more wisely.

MARK HEISTAD: The assumption that applying farm chemicals on fields leads to farm chemicals in the ground is not universally accepted. There are conflicting studies. No one disputes the fact that agricultural chemicals are getting into the water. The question is how.

Craig Sandstrom is executive director of the Minnesota plant food and chemical association. That's the trade group for agricultural chemical dealers. He says reducing chemical use is not the answer. He contends the contamination is coming from chemical spills.

CRAIG: Cutting back is obviously the easiest thing to say. The idea, of course, the logic behind it would be if chemical A, B, C is found in the water, let's cut back the usage, and so then it will no longer get in the water. The problem with that analogy is that we don't know when it was there.

And so the problems we may be seeing today are 10 or 15 or 5 years old already. And so just by curtailing or cutting back or cutting in one half or whatever may not solve the problem.

MARK HEISTAD: However, the accepted wisdom among many of the scientists who study groundwater is that both field application and past chemical spills contribute to the pollution. Where they differ is which source they think is more to blame. Agriculture Commissioner Jim Nichols says he's not at all comfortable with the current state of scientific information about the problem.

JIM NICHOLS: We don't know a lot. Frankly, we don't know a lot about the geology. We don't know what happens to that water when it disappears in a sinkhole in Southeast Minnesota, for example. And I think we cannot pinpoint the problem until we have greater knowledge, and we cannot begin to solve the problem until we actually know what the problem is. So we need a lot more knowledge.

MARK HEISTAD: University of Minnesota hydrogeologist Calvin Alexander has been trying to collect that knowledge for nearly a decade now. He was one of the first researchers in Minnesota to look into the problem. He says researchers do now have a fundamental understanding of how groundwater works.

CALVIN: In a lot of Minnesota, the time period between the time the rain falls out of the sky and the time it comes out and sinks through the soil and the time it comes out somebody's well is often as short as a few years. It may be as short as a few months.

That means that anything that anybody does on the surface will be in people's wells a few months or a few years later, and that's not going to change. I mean, that's just fundamentally how the system operates.

MARK HEISTAD: What that means for the farmers of Southeast Minnesota is clear. More and more have concluded that to keep the chemicals out of the water, they have to keep them off the ground. Chuck and Janice Tessing say they're seeing more and more of their neighbors looking for ways to do just that.

CHUCK KUMMER: I don't think there's any farmer around who hasn't, in some way, thought about cutting back. And some have started. Some have developed grandiose plans to cut back. I mean, good plans to cut back and even quit.

JANICE: I heard something very touching a couple of weeks ago. One of our neighbors was saying that for the first time this year, he has grown corn without chemicals. He said it wasn't a great stand, but he was satisfied.

But he brought the whole groundwater contamination issue home, I think, for a lot of people when he said that he takes a shower with his little daughter. And he holds her there and the water is running down on them and he knows that they're getting washed with atrazine and lasso and it's a frightening, very frightening thought for him.

And he is taking the steps that he needs to on his own place not to contribute that, knowing that he's been and we all have been polluters in the past. But it isn't just someone else's problem that Lasso and atrazine is coming down on all our heads.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MARK HEISTAD: In room 212 of the Minnesota State Capitol, an ad hoc committee of the state Senate prepares for a public hearing on groundwater pollution. Only six of the legislators are in attendance, but dozens of other people fill the available public seating. They represent citizens groups, state agencies, and other organizations who have a stake in the issue before the lawmakers. One by one, the concerned parties take to the podium to testify.

JOHN: For the record, my name is John Wells. I'm with the estate planning agency, and I am coordinator of the EQB water Resources Committee.

SPEAKER: Mr. Chairman and members of the committee I am Hal Christopherson. I'm president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau.

LINDA: My name is Linda Brummer. I'm with the Division of Groundwater and Solid Waste for the Pollution Control Agency, and I just have a few comments I'd like to make, reiterating a few of the points that Mr. Wells just said.

MARK HEISTAD: What brings these speakers to the hearing is a proposal for Minnesota's first attempt at groundwater legislation, a legislation only three or four other states have passed. In recent months, the organizations these speakers represent have quietly pushed this issue of groundwater to the top of this year's legislative agenda. Ron Nargang is director of the Water division of the Minnesota Department of natural resources.

RON NARGANG: I think a large part of it is public awareness. If you look at the state level, we've had our first good overview, if you will, of groundwater contamination, a study conducted jointly by the Department of Health and Department of Agriculture. Came up with some rather alarming figures on the level of contaminants that we're seeing.

Again, not threatening health standards, but the fact that they're even in the aquifer systems is surprising in a lot of cases. And then I think very bluntly, this summer, the drought heightened everyone's awareness about the fact that although we're considered a water rich state, it's not a limitless supply, and we need to pay attention and manage what we've got.

MARK HEISTAD: There is surprising consensus among the groups interested in groundwater, not only that the state has to do something, but in a general way, what that something is. Clean water action project state director Diane Jensen.

DIANE JENSEN: The only practicable approach to groundwater is to do prevention. There is no other course of action that works. Cleanup is ridiculously expensive if it's technically possible at all. So what's practicable? Prevention is the only thing we can do.

MARK HEISTAD: Two different groundwater protection bills have been introduced this year at the legislature. Both would set aside money, an extra $25 to $30 million a year, to seal abandoned wells, identify sensitive areas in the state, and encourage farmers to cut down on farm chemicals.

Both bills would also establish the goal of non-degradation, that is, to try and prevent groundwater from becoming any more contaminated than it already is. State Senator Stephen Morris is chief sponsor of one of the bills. He says the time has come for action.

STEPHEN MORRIS: My frustration has been that we sit around and twiddle our fingers and say we need to develop more data, more research, and we don't do anything. There are a lot of things we can do right now. We know that there are problems in sensitive areas.

We know that there are problems where there are sinkholes, and you're putting farm chemicals right on top of the soil, and they're washing into the sinkholes. We know we have problems with abandoned wells. We know some agricultural practices that should be implemented that will reduce use of pesticides.

So there are a lot of things we can do. Do we know all the answers? Absolutely not.

MARK HEISTAD: Pollution control Agency Commissioner Gerald Willett says the chances are good the legislature will pass a groundwater bill. But he warns against taking a shotgun approach to the problem. Instead, Willett says the state needs to target specific problems, especially farm pesticides.

GERALD: Atrazine is one that showed up in some areas. We need to work with them to try to find substitutes to minimize. And in some cases, where there isn't any atrazine in some of those cases, they just have to quit using it. Those are the things you're going to find that are going to come together rather quickly.

And as you identify those pollutants, you need to look at how you can get away from that pollutant and use some other alternative that will still allow the economy the reasonable amount of growth that we all expect it to have.

MARK HEISTAD: The groundwater debate in Minnesota is about how, not whether to prevent further pollution. It's a debate about how to prevent pollution without causing undue economic hardship on farmers, and there are disagreements, for example, about which state agencies should be the regulators and enforcers.

The House Bill, championed by the governor and sponsored by representative Willard Munger, would give many new duties to the PCA. Morris's Senate Bill gives the authority to the Agriculture Department. But no matter what the legislature passes this year, it will not be enough to solve a complicated problem. Southeast Minnesota farmer Chuck Tessing is skeptical that much will change until public attitudes change.

CHUCK KUMMER: Ultimately, the groundwater legislation probably isn't going to work all that well anyway, unless people are already doing it. It's just like a stop sign law. It works because people stop at the stop sign. And that's the way with most of our laws.

MARK HEISTAD: But others say government needs to lead the way and that the people are ready to follow. Many who've had trouble with their groundwater have already learned they must act to protect the water themselves. They focus on the need to get others to change, as well.

Lakeland's Mary Miller says she now feels a more personal responsibility towards the environment.

MARY MILLER: What bothered me ultimately was we're supposed to be stewards here. And all of a sudden, here's this problem, and we're just getting symptoms of it. And what have I done to contribute to this problem?

Then it got around to, OK, what are some of the moral issues here? What should I be doing? And I don't know if that's-- we're real recyclers now. We've always done papers, but we've never done tin cans and glass. We knew that we could do it, but we just never did it. We're paying attention more to what we're doing, and it's still not enough.

MARK HEISTAD: As discussions about groundwater continue, hydrogeologist Calvin Alexander has a warning to citizens and lawmakers alike.

CALVIN: Beware of simple solutions. Beware of general statements. Beware of people who say, now if you'll just do this, we're going to solve the problem. The problem is going to require conscious management on the part of the people who drink the water from now on.

That's all there is to it. This is not something that we're going to solve, that we're going to pass a bill in 1989 and then everybody can get on with their life and never have to think about groundwater again. It isn't going to work that way.

MARK HEISTAD: Most communities who've run into trouble with their water never saw it coming. So long as the water is good, there seems little reason to worry about it. But there are warning signs all around us that the dark, quiet, and hidden resource below the ground is being affected, and in some cases, endangered by many everyday activities.

Lakeland, Northern Township, New Brighton, and many other Minnesota communities know all too well the anguish, expense, and disruption that comes when the water is bad.

SPEAKER: Poisoned waters was written and produced by Tom Meersman and Mark Heistad; Executive producer, George Bouzy; Technical director, Jeff Walker. Publicity, Joanne Wagner. The producers also wish to thank Kate Moos and Scott Yankus for making this program possible.

SPEAKER: Delta environmental consultants, dedicated to the preservation and improvement of our soil and water resources, has been pleased to present MPR listeners with poisoned waters, a documentary on groundwater contamination.