An environmental researcher is calling on Bruce County to work proactively to protect local residents from the risk of contaminated well water.
Dr. Thorsten Arnold made a presentation to council on September 5th to talk about the risks of shallow wells that are too close to agricultural land.
In his presentation, he outlined that Grey and Bruce counties are built on top of karst – bedrock that has softer rock dissolve over time, which then causes sinkholes and leads to groundwater getting contaminated.
The contamination comes from fecal matter from nearby livestock.
He says that the risk increases with more additional dwelling units being put onto agricultural properties, and because Grey County is more lenient with property severances, that can be bad news for residents of Bruce County.
“Groundwater moves from east to west, and Grey County groundwater impacts you guys here,” he told the council. “In the long term, we do need to work on better provincial regulations because currently we have a policy gap.”
Warden Chris Peabody says that Bruce County is much more strict about land severances.
“In Bruce County we don’t allow as many severances. Once you cross the county line you can see there’s a lot more severances. They [Grey County] have a lot more rural zoned land versus prime ag, which we have in Bruce.”
Arnold noted that another part of the issue was that there was very little overburden, or soil that is on top of the bedrock. In some places, it’s only 0.6m deep. According to his research, that makes it very easy for contamination and bacteria such as E. coli to permeate the soil and bedrock to end up in local aquifers.
He says that the counties should form a task force to protect the drinking water sources from rural citizens, who are protected under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights. He also thinks that all of the risks for groundwater contamination are perceived or real, and proactive action should be taken to avoid future issues.
Arnold also said that if a drinking water well on a property were to be contaminated by farm waste, then the costs to the property owner could be troublesome – he said that it would be expensive to drill another well for a property, and it could even reduce the value of that property by 25%. He added that if a location for a new well couldn’t be found, it would be an even bigger problem for the landowner.
Peabody assured that it was important for rural landowners to continue to proactively have their well water tested to avoid issues.
“We have seen the water testing almost eliminated, and our local source water protection committee and Grey County fought to preserve that so we’ve got to double down on our efforts to make sure people know the benefits of the free water testing,” says Peabody. “Councillor [Luke] Charbonneau, for example, he was really pushing to get more testing in his area [of Saugeen Shores] because [the provincial government] were going to have maybe just one drop-off for water testing in all of Bruce County, and then people wouldn’t have used it. Definitely, down there in Toronto, there’s not an appreciation of this issue.”