Editorial: Restore confidence in local drinking water

In the richest nation on earth, in a state known for environmental stewardship, you should be able to draw a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and drink it with some confidence that it won't give you cancer or nerve disease.

But as the Star Tribune's David Shaffer documented this week in a troubling series called "The Longest Cleanup," thousands of residents in 35 Twin Cities communities do not have that luxury. Their water is tainted by solvents, petroleum residues and chemical compounds that have lingered underground for years and are now turning up in groundwater and wells. Minnesota needs to restore their peace of mind.

This is a story with no obvious villains. Many local companies appear to have behaved responsibly in treating and dumping their wastes, given the law and the science that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Legislature passed pioneering laws in 1980 and 1989, one regulating landfills and the other protecting groundwater.

Instead, this seems to be a problem that leapfrogged ahead of the scientists and the regulators as the Twin Cities sprawled rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s into exurbs that once had been industrial zones, and as pollution migrated invisibly in underground currents that no one quite understands.

But the state can't afford to remain behind the curve. The Twin Cities is projected to add nearly 1 million residents in the next 20 years, meaning more subdivisions and wells. Already, 1.6 million Twin Cities residents, more than half the region's population, draw their water from underground.

There's no obvious solution or perfect answer. But there are several steps the state should take:

• The Legislature should restore funding for the state Geological Survey, which prepares maps to track the location and movement of underground water. The survey has completed atlases for 17 percent of the state, but its staff has been cut almost by half.

• The Legislature should hold hearings to look at the big picture. It turns out that a well dug in one city can aggravate problems in the city next door; pumps installed by one agency can interfere with water cleanup by another. The region needs to take a "watershed" view, as Rep. Paul Gardner, DFL-Shoreview, points out.

• The Metropolitan Council should promote water fee structures that encourage conservation, not consumption, as Woodbury did recently. Excessive water consumption not only threatens a finite state resource; the act of drilling wells and running pumps can spread underground contaminants where they would not otherwise go.

Because they are underground, the contaminants described in "The Longest Cleanup" are harder to find and harder to remedy than surface water pollution. But that doesn't make them any less dangerous to Minnesota families.