Friday, September 28, 2012

issues of Heavy metals and bacteria

This is not about well water...
Recent investigations have turned up significant levels of arsenic in rice, particularly high in brown rice and so much that the FDA is begining to act (Chemical and engineering news, Sept 25, p 25).
Further information showed significant levels of arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead in chocolate, the highest levels found in dark chocolate (Released as an application note from Spectoscopy magazine)
In the news, you hear of salmonella, again, in natural, ORGANIC peanut butter.

All of these things are suppose to be good for you.
In my lack of information, i have wanted wells to be tested for arsenic, but the levels i have found in the wells pales in comparison the these reports.
It is scary.
As i llok of my database, of the 7,900 tests for bacteria in well water that i have performed since recording the ingfo in 1985, over  1,000 or 13% have not met the standards for bacteriological potability.
This is still the biggest, easily correctable issue a well can have.
enough said

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

transforming old farms into housing with wells is a bad idea.


more on pesticides
I have been tearing apart the data we have collected from all the well testing,
there are things i "see" as the data goes in that i have to prove by sorting and compiling the data.
That is part of why the Nitrate post was important, because the supposed link between Nitrate levels and pesticides is in the very fabric of current State of Connecticut thinking.
However, this does not mean the reason why that thinking exists is wrong.
The idea that old agricultural areas are to blame, i believe still holds water.
There are many old farm areas that have now become suburbs and this is what i address today.
Data was collected (as best that we could) on past uses of a property.
The entire dataset now has close to 1000 test results,
the dataset of property that used to be on farm land is smaller, but over my own designated limit of 50 wells.
Of all the wells tested, 19.1% of the wells have some pesticide present,
7.74% have pesticides over action limit
From homes that were built in areas that were farms:
26.23% of these wells have some pesticide present
14.75% have pesticides over the action limit.
When looking at the GIS map of this information, it should be noted that only a portion of the old farm area is effected, most of the area is not.
This would indicate that a significant portion (not the only) is from old farm dump sites.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The Pesticide Nitrate relation

The State DEEP has been saying for a long time that if a well had Nitrate nitrogen over 5.0 mg/L, the well should be tested for pesticides.
A while back i said that it did not look as if it was so, but was waiting to study it.
Here is the data

343 wells tested for both pesticides and Nitrate-nitrogen.
66 showed pesticides at some level.
45 showed Nitrate Nitrogen > 5.0 mg/L
11 wells with high Nitrate-nitrogen showed pesticides
55 did not.

Lets put the nails in the coffin, this does not correlate!