Town of Erin benefits from Source Water Protection Funding

For Immediate Release:
Monday, February 19, 2007

The Town of Erin together with Credit Valley Conservation(CVC) as the Lead, applied for and was successful in receiving funding to help protect its local drinking water sources. The funding will help the Town of Erin get an accurate picture of its water supply, determine how it replenishes itself and what threatens the quality of water in order to take action to reduce or eliminate these threats.

This money will help in the ground work needed to support the development of the source protection plans required by the new Clean Water Act. Work is already underway across the province as a result of previously committed government assistance. Close to $10 million in grants went to municipalities and conservation authorities for technical studies last year.

The Clean Water Act received Royal Assent on October 19, 2006. It ensures that communities are able to protect their municipal drinking water supplies through developing collaborative, locally driven, science-based source protection plans.

For Erin, this funding will go towards studies on each municipal well in order to assess the size of the groundwater capture area around each well, over a given time, as well as associated flow pathways (preferential) and distances, the geology and hydrogeology of subsurface material of capture area and qualitative and quantitative determination of how land use and surface-based activity could potentially impact quality and quantity of supply (ie sustainability), given the subsurface geology, hydrogeology, and preferential pathways within the WHPAs.

A glossary of terms:

• WHPA’s - Well Head Protection Area: A delineated land surface area around a wellhead (location where water is taken from aquifers), within which water is captured (from rainfall, streamflow etc). Water in the WHPAs infiltrates below the land and is stored within aquifer systems. This water eventually travels towards a municipal supply well and becomes drinking water.

• The time assignment (ex. 25-year WHPA) ; Studies/investigations performed to gain an understanding of the points of capture (and overall contribution area) of water ( recharge points) and how this water travels ( preferential flow pathways) underground over a defined time period towards individual municipal supply wells.

• Threats - Describes how land-based activities and uses may potentially impact groundwater management and supply. A correlative study will be performed to understand how land use, geology, and hydrogeology may interact within a WHPA to impact the quality and quantity (sustainability) of water entering each municipal well. The study assesses the potential of land-based contaminants inter-acting with groundwater within the WHPA around each municipal supply well.

• Vulnerability - Investigations to determine the likelihood of contamination occurring, based on current land use and activities. Hazard ratings have been derived from the statistical work done in these studies, and basically provide an indication of the empirical likelihood that the water quantity and /or quality (sustainability) of a given supply well could be impacted by surface activities/land use.

Conservation Authorities are a provincial/ municipal partnership. The CVC was established by an Act of the province in 1954 with a mandate to protect all natural resources other than minerals in the area drained by the Credit River. We have been working for over 50 years with our partner municipalities and stakeholders to protect and enhance the natural environment of the Credit River Watershed for present and future generations.