Video Provides Private Well Owners with Tips To Protect Their Water
by Bob Montgomery
The Ausable Bayfield Maitland Valley Drinking Water Source Protection Committee has released a video called “Your Well, Your Responsibility”, to help private well owners protect their water.
Source Water Protection Chair Matt Pearson says over the years source water protection was focused entirely on municipal water supplies and every municipality in Ontario had a source water protection plan. And he says they're now going back to look at those plans to see if they need to be updated. But Pearson says in between people had started asking about private water supplies but that wasn't a mandate from the province. He says they are now starting to look at that and Huron County has a lot of private water supplies.
Pearson says they've already made ten or eleven videos on Source Water Protection at the local level to see what they can do to help people protect their private water supplies. He says a lot of people don't really know much about the quality of their water and he says if someone has a good well and it's installed correctly and it's not allowing water from the surface to flow into their well, chances are the water quality is good. But he says most people don't test it, they just take it for granted. Pearson says testing is free so people should test their water once in a while just to be sure.
Pearson says threats to water could include a well that's not secure to the land, so it's too shallow and it's picking up interference from surface water allowing surface water to run down into the well, bringing things like chemicals or farm run-off into the well. Pearson says if the well wasn't installed correctly or it's simply getting old and the steel casings are starting to deteriorate, that could also be compromising the water. The new Your Well, Your Responsibility video can be found below.
