DNR Investigates Well Contamination

Two water quality specialists with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources met with the family living at 3756 Maple Place in the Town of Egg Harbor about well contamination that sickened the family days after manure was spread close to the family’s home.

The family noticed that the farmer they lease their field to had been spreading manure on Sept. 8 and 9, and then it rained.

They had an odor coming from their well water on Sept. 10. That same day the oldest child in the family came down with stomach illness. A younger child came down with the same sickness on the 11th, and the parents experienced gastro-intestinal illness the weekend of Sept. 13-14.

Ed Culhane of the DNR said JaNelle Merry, DNR private water supply specialist, and Erin Hanson, DNR water management specialist, met with the family and took water samples from the well in order to conduct a microbial source tracking test that will determine if the well contamination is the result of human waste or grazing animals.

“We won’t have results for another 10 days,” Culhane said on Sept. 23.

The DNR will cover the cost of the $800 test.

“It takes two things to trigger the state to pay – brown, smelly water or sick people. They have both. That means we’re popping for the test.”

Culhane said the DNR is also gathering information from the farmer who spread the manure. The DNR investigators were looking at a sinkhole in the land where the manure was spread.

“It’s out in the field, not far from house and it’s down gradient,” Culhane said, adding that it is too early in the investigation to assign blame. “We don’t know yet happened. But it is geologically possible in the case of karst topography for these cracks to go for huge distances horizontally and vertically. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that it could go down that sinkhole.”