"Water report nears completion"

By Amanda Cregan, Intelligencer, August 22, 2010:

As officials grapple with a declining supply, the goal is to translate complicated information into an understandable form.

After a decade of collecting and charting well water samples they say show a looming groundwater crisis in Upper Bucks, residents and local officials will soon have the information in hand.
Lehigh University graduate student Larissa Walker has been spending her summer working as a paid intern for Tinicum Township, where she's spent hours sifting through 10 years' worth of scientific charts, maps, graphs and reports collected by the Bridgeton-Nockamixon-Tinicum Groundwater Committee and compiling that data into a comprehensive monograph.

For years, Upper Bucks residents and local officials have relied on occasional updates from groundwater committee members as to the declining state of the region's aquifer.

Walker's report not only compiles the entire history of the committee's findings into one published report, but the data will now be in an easy-to-read format for the non-scientifically trained crowd.

Walker's work is funded through a $10,000 grant by the Woodtiger Fund, an Upper Black Eddy nonprofit.

Committee Co-chairman Bob Stanfield is impressed by Walker's project.

"I'm really, really pleased with what she's doing," he said. "She's done a marvelous job."

But the monograph's purpose goes beyond documentation. It's about motivation, said Walker.

"It's to encourage other townships, besides Tinicum Township, to hop on the bandwagon and start monitoring their own wells," said Walker, 23, a New York native.

Tinicum and surrounding municipalities might use the nearly 100-page study as a foundation for new or updated laws on groundwater use, she said.

"Its going to be determined if (supervisors) want to create new ordinances, use it as an informational source or present it to other townships," said Walker, who is studying Environmental Political Theory.

Over the past several years, communities like Tinicum and Nockamixon have been grappling with a declining groundwater system. There is no public sewer system in this region and more frequently residents are watching helplessly as their wells are running dry, forcing them to dig deeper for water or dig another well.

"These wells are old and are just drying up in a way we've never seen before," said Walker. "There have been reports of centuries-old wells going dry in Upper Bucks County after a development had just been built nearby," she said.

Though these communities' fates are tied to stubborn geology, development is an issue that stretches farther than rural Upper Bucks.

Stanfield and Walker hope the new report will be a catalyst for other Bucks County townships to strengthen their own groundwater ordinances before a crisis hits.

It's to alarm "other townships as to what could possibly happen if development could continue and drought continues," said Walker.

Tinicum supervisors are generally viewed as highly restrictive to development, but they are not anti-development, said Walker. They are pro-environment, she said.

"I think the most proactive thing Tinicum does is that they are aware of these groundwater issues," she said. "In my opinion, in Tinicum, they have a very cautious groundwater ordinance that affects their view on development. They're not anti-development in any way. They are just cautious in their approach to groundwater issues."

On Thursday, the team of scientists that make up the groundwater committee will meet to review a draft of Walker's report.