Water Quality - How to Start (Community Wide)
COMMUNITY
WIDE PROJECTS
HOW TO START:
Improving your water quality at home is a big step in keeping your family safe and healthy, but you can also take your project a step further and include your entire community. Here are some suggestions as to how to go about conducting a community wide water quality evaluation and improvement plan (keep in mind that many of these ideas are just suggestions and may not be applicable to your community):
- If you haven't done so already be sure to check if your community is served by a water system. If so you can find a copy of your annual water quality report before you test the water yourself and find out the level of contaminants already detected.
- If your community is not served by a water system or there are members in your community who have private wells or use ground water sources begin by locating all of the active public drinking water sources (wells and surface water). Some of the wells may be undocumented in your community, so it may be a good idea to talk to local residents as well as older Tribal members in order to locate all of the drinking water sources.
- Once you have located all of the drinking water sources in your community document their location so you can keep track of each water source.
At each water source evaluate and document the
possible sources of contamination that are nearby
(you won't be able to tell exactly what's going
on underground, but by looking to see what's nearby
you can get an idea of what could be contaminating
the groundwater) for example:
- Animal feed lot
- Burial areas
- Livestock waste disposal areas
- Crop areas or irrigation sites
- Chemical storage units/areas
- Farm machinery
- Homes, apartments, parks, schools, office buildings - any place with a lawn that might use fertilizers
- Landfills
- Recycling facilities
- Abandoned wells
- Or any area or building that might produce some sort of waste i.e. garbage, old supplies, human waste
- You can also talk to residents that live close to the wells or surface water areas to see if they know better any practices that may have caused contamination in the past.
- Once you have located all of the possible sources of contamination measure how far they are from the well (an estimation is fine). The closer the contaminant source the higher the risk of contamination.
TESTING
Once you have the idea that your water might be contaminated you can test your water to make sure. (See “Resources” for information on water quality testing kits).
back to top