Since March 1, 2002, new and replacement wells in northern Anne Arundel County must be installed to a minimum well depth and meet drinking water standards for radium. Radium in drinking water does not pose a health emergency and can be effectively removed by installing a deeper well or through water treatment.
A larger study, conducted by the Maryland Department of the Environment in 1998, confirmed the presence of naturally occurring radium in groundwater in northern Anne Arundel County. Environmental Protection Agency for public drinking water supplies. Fifteen of these wells exceeded the level established by the U.S. During the pilot study, naturally occurring radium was found in 22 wells in northern Anne Arundel County. This initial research has contributed to a further study that has been supported by WRI, one based in Fond du Lac.Hoja Informativa sobre la Presencia del Metal Radio en las Aguas de Pozo – En EspañolĪnne Arundel County conducted a pilot study of well water quality from September 1997 to March 1998. The Wisconsin Groundwater Research and Monitoring Program, of which the University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute (WRI) is a part, funded this work through another partner, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. That leads to the major take-home message from this research: water utility managers can reach better decisions about the radium in their source water, leading to quicker and clearer options to remedy the conditions.” “The mass spectrometry method for measuring radium in water,” Ginder-Vogel said, “offers a more reliable sense of the variability of radium concentrations over time. A comparative test of the same sample using radioactive decay counting was also conducted. Mass spectrometry was then used to measure radium. Operators shut down one of the city’s drinking water wells for nearly 11 days, then pumped from it continuously over 48 hours, enabling a collection that was deemed representative of the current aquifer conditions. The paper provides details on a short-term pumping test conducted in Madison. Geological Survey, published the findings in the May/June 2022 issue of the journal AWWA Water Sciences, The research team of Mathews, along with Matt Ginder-Vogel, Civil and Environmental Engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Sean Scott, scientist at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene and Randy Hunt, chief science officer at the Upper Midwest Water Science Center at U.S. Mathews and her research colleagues have demonstrated the benefits using mass spectrometry, which counts the mass composition of radium in a water sample, for analysis instead. The current EPA-approved method to test for radium is to count radioactive decay in samples. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates radium because long-term ingestion is associated with development of bone cancer and other diseases. Perhaps the best-known Wisconsin example of the impact from radium in drinking water is in Waukesha, where elevated levels and historic drawdown to the “older” more radium-heavy water in the aquifer has meant the municipality secured unprecedented and binationally approved permission to pump drinking water from Lake Michigan, even though the municipality lies outside of the Great Lakes basin. Madeleine Mathews checks on levels of naturally occurring radium in municipal water supply. “Although trends vary by location, some water managers are noticing combined radium levels in this aquifer, known as the Midwestern Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer system, generally increasing,” said Madeleine Mathews, a UW-Madison graduate now doing post-doctoral work at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.
In some instances, water managers had to consider drilling new wells. These conditions meant costly treatments. Increased use of more precise testing methods for the low levels of naturally occurring radium in public drinking water supplies as they relate to public health compliance will offer better understanding of long-term water withdrawal trends on the presence of the contaminant found in the aquifer system that underlies much of Wisconsin.įrom 2019 to 2020, radium levels that exceeded public health standards were noted in 116 of Wisconsin’s 611 municipal water systems.
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