Water Water Everywhere?

During this week a meeting was held in the Twin Cities by the Sensible Land Institute, a group that is at the forefront of working smartly with the development and re-development in the TwinCities area.

The discussion surrounded what many of us take for granted everyday, Water. More specifically clean and abundant water.

Many of us in the East metro have been thinking about water and our aquifers for several years now, stemming from the lake level in White Bear Lake, and the different groups trying to pinpoint or figure out the reason for the huge drop in the most notable lakes in the East metro. 

Fact: A contributor from the DNR stated that 1% of the water used in the twin cities is drawn from one of 3 major rivers going through the metro. 

Met Council: A water expert said, that if we were to start looking at the rivers as larger provider of the metros water, we could avoid draining our aquifers. 

Fact: Of all wells used in the metro to supply our drinking water, 50% of those have the aquifer dropping over the past 30 years. if we allow the aquifers to be drawn down too far, it can significantly effect the future of that water source.

i am not an alarmist, and I think we have plenty of water now and we will have plenty into the future, but I also believe that as a market, with 3 significant rivers passing thorough, we should start working on ways to tap that huge resource.

The three rivers, Minnesota, Mississippi, and the St Croix have over 5 Trillion gallons of water passing by us every year. If we increased our usage of that resource to say 5%, it would make a dramatic difference in the drawn down of our aquifers, and potentially allowing the ground water that feeds lakes like White Bear to recharge and come back to a more normal level naturally.