"Liquid Assets" Memphis magazine March 2005

V o l u m e

Citizen Crump: The Life and Legend Volume xxix • Number 12 • March 2005 $3.50 www.memphismagazine.com

x x i x • N u m b e r 1 2 • M a r c h 2 0 0 5 M e m p h i s M a g a z i n e • w w w . m e m p h i s m a g a z i n e . c o m

Liquid Assets Our pure Memphis water may not always be so abundant and refreshing. Do dangers lurking beneath the surface threaten this natural treasure?

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March Contents 2/14/05 12:55 PM Page 1

Volume XXIX • Number 12 • 2005

[ contents ]

March Features

page 64

Departments page 33

40

Liquid Assets It’s always been clean, cheap, and plentiful. Now Memphis’ water is at risk.

What’s being done to protect our greatest natural treasure?

By Ward Archer Jr.

64

Citizen Crump: The Life and Legend More than 300 boxes of materials recently archived by the public library offer a fascinating glimpse into E.H. Crump and the city he loved.

By Michael Finger

8 From the Editor Journeys.

13 BackTalk From our readers.

14 City Lights

Columns

Calendar of events.

113 Books:

26 Ask Vance

For Real Johanna Edwards on the weighting game.

By Leonard Gill

The rambling Rex and Frulla Grocery.

28 Fabulous Finds Canine manners, whimsical table settings, and tasty salsa.

116

Music: Express Yourself And singer Susan Marshall does — with a new album that shows the range of her considerable talents.

By Chris Herrington

33 City Beat Help for the homeless, high tea, funeral food, and more.

121 City Dining The city’s most complete restaurant listings.

128 Enough Said

118

A conversation with Andy Kitsinger.

By Leonard Gill

Dining Out: That ’70s Restaurant With a new owner and a revitalized menu, La Montagne enters the twenty-first century.

By Nicky Robertshaw

Cover: Photograph

by Justin Burks

Special Sections 37 What’s Haute 77 Spring Travel Guide

page 118

Following page 80: United Way of the Mid-South

March Memphis •

7

Water

2/15/05 3:48 PM Page 2

Assets

It’s always been clean, cheap, and plentiful. Now Memphis’ water is at risk. What’s being done to protect one of our greatest natural treasures?

LEGENDARY

our water supply narrowly

reservoir, the Memphis Sands

escaped the catastrophic contam-

Aquifer, is already the envy of

ination of a 20-million-gallon

other American cities struggling

underground gasoline leak; how

to satisfy their growing thirst for

pure gasoline is still being

fresh water. But imagine pipe-

pumped from below Memphis;

lines built to pump our water to

how Arkansas and Mississippi are

other communities across the

hydraulically connected under-

country — science fiction? May-

ground to Memphis; and why sci-

be. Maybe not.

entists and local officials are ask-

OUR

CITY’S

More is now known about

ing for federal dollars to unravel

Memphis’ underground treasure

the remaining mysteries of the

than ever before. We now have

Memphis Sands Aquifer.

The story begins with a visit to

answers to questions that have been pondered for years. How does the water really get

a little-known body of water named Baker’s Pond.

down there? How much does the aquifer contain? How much is being pumped out? And how much is being

Editor’s Note: Contributing writer Ward Archer Jr. is a

replaced?

member of the board of directors of Contemporary Media,

It’s an intriguing — and vitally important — story: how

Inc., the parent company of Memphis magazine.

By Ward Archer Jr. P h o t o g r a p h s

40 •

March Memphis

b y

J u s t i n

B u r k s

Water

2/15/05 3:49 PM Page 3

On a winter’s day, Baker’s Pond (opposite and this page) seems deceptively ordinary. But its trickle of water (shown above) is the source of the Wolf River. At Baker’s Pond the Memphis Sands Aquifer rises to the surface from 350 feet below the city.

March Memphis •

41

Water

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of water below the ground) actually reaches the surface.

I was told we were standing on one of the prime recharge areas for the Memphis Sands Aquifer. It was then that I came to understand where Memphis really got its water.

“When it rains in Memphis, most water flows away in storm drains that carry it to the Mississippi River,” explained Smith, who is now manager of Shelby County Environmental Programs. “What water is retained in the ground sinks into the shallow-water aquifer and never makes it through the Jackson Clays to the Memphis Sands Aquifer.”

“We look for large deposits of Memphis Sands . . . sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t. Today we’re finding it . . . this is going to be a productive well.”

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March Memphis

The Jackson Clays act as a watertight seal protecting and separating the deeper Memphis Sands Aquifer from the less pure shallow-water aquifer. Until recently, the Jackson Clays were thought to be impervious.

Wandering around the banks of the pond, we found the low point where the Wolf River actually starts flowing. The actual source is little more than a stream of water trickling over a log and spreading into a grassy field. As we waded through the field, I eventually saw more moving water, flowing into a vast expanse of wetlands, the beginnings of the forest that was ultimately saved from the loggers.

Water

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“It’s coming,” says Fox. “The day when water is going to be the most precious commodity in the world.”

Ted Fox (top), Shelby County public works director.

Above left, testing is conducted on water samples from a specific location; right, samples from all pumping stations are collected and tested daily.

Driving back from Baker’s Pond that day, I became more and more fascinated with the idea of naturally purified water lying deep below Memphis.

But how much is really down there?

“Enough water for 10 cities the size of New York” (1966) .Y “AQUIFER EDUCATION” BEGAN at the Ground Water Institute at the University of Memphis, where I met several times with its director, Dr. Jerry Anderson, and .research professor, Dr. Brian Waldron. The institute is filled with interesting maps and charts depicting the watery world below us. The more we talked, the bigger the subject grew. I quickly realized my challenge was to learn all I could without earning a master’s degree in hydrology (the study of water above and below the earth’s surface).

Baker’s Pond, I discovered, isn’t in the only recharge area for the Memphis Sands Aquifer. And the Memphis Sands isn’t the only aquifer, either. It begins at a depth of about 350 feet and continues to 1,100 feet, where another layer of protective clay called the Wilcox

M

Clays begins (see diagram on page 43). These clays form the bottom of the Memphis Sands Aquifer and separate it from the second, deeper aquifer, called the Fort Pillow Sands, which extend from about 1,350 to 1,500 feet in depth. The Fort Pillow Sands, although not as massive as the Memphis Sands, also are saturated with water.

Both of these aquifers are part of a mammoth geological formation called the “Mississippi Embayment” which begins at the southern tip of Illinois and extends about 200 miles south of Memphis. It extends westward under the Mississippi River to Little Rock and Texarkana, and eastward to Corinth, and southeastward to Tuscaloosa. The only known estimate of the amount of groundwater in this region was made in a 1966 United States Geological Survey (USGS) report that estimated the capacity to be enough to supply the “needs of 10 cities the size of New York” or roughly 12 billion gallons per day.

I was surprised to learn this study was 39 years old. In fact, it appears that the amount of new research being conducted on the Memphis Sands Aquifer is decreasing, rather than increasing.

This complex hydrological labyrinth most likely saw its beginnings 90 million years ago when — think about this for a second — the Gulf of Mexico’s beaches were in Illinois. The Memphis Sands March Memphis •

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Aquifer varies in thickness as it extends outwardly from Memphis.

But underneath the city, the sands swell to a massive thickness of 650 to 1,070 feet before coming to the surface for recharging in eastern Shelby County, Fayette County, northern Mississippi, and perhaps as far east as the rock formations at the Tennessee River. According to Jerry Anderson, director of the Ground Water Institute, “There is no other aquifer system quite like this in the United States.”

The Artesian Discovery he Memphis Sands Aquifer didn’t fill up with water in our lifetimes. It took tens of thousands of years.

Recharging (refilling) the aquifer with water is something that happens on an almost biblical timetable.

The Memphis artesian well system, now owned and operated by Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW), is one of the largest in the world. It had its beginnings after the yellow fever epidemics began to subside in 1878 and the public’s demand for a new fresh water supply and sewer system grew.

In 1886, in spite of the formation of a Memphis Water Company, much of the experimental well drilling searching for a clean water supply appears to have been done independently by a superintendent of the Bohlen-Huse Ice Company named Richard C. Graves.

In 1886 he drilled the first two deep wells in Memphis and struck water. But on March 17, 1887, near Fourth Street and Court Avenue, Graves caught the public’s attention by sinking a 354-foot well that penetrated the Jackson Clays and produced a five-foot gusher of

T

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Ed Beasley

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clean artesian water from the Memphis Sands Aquifer. Within one year, Memphis switched from drinking water piped from the Wolf River in Raleigh to using artesian wells that tapped the Memphis Sands Aquifer. Artesian well water, because it’s under high pressure, comes to the surface on its own without being pumped. That’s the way it was in 1887.

Today there are 175 MLGW wells throughout Shelby County that deliver water to 10 pumping stations. There are also 565 private industrial wells that are permitted by the health department, but are not metered. According to MLGW’s published reports, each of its wells pumps from 1.5 to 2.5 million gallons of water per day.

According to the USGS, MLGW reported a 26 million gallon per day increase from 1988 to 2000, and the total average withdrawal rate for Memphis and its neighboring municipalities was 233 million gallons per day in 2000. Or, put another way, more than 2,500 Olympic-size swimming pools of water are pumped out of the ground each day.

When I first read those numbers, I thought of the trickling pace of the water at Baker’s Pond and couldn’t help but wonder if we are pumping out more than is being recharged.

The “Dewatering” of Arkansas

I

would later learn that these volumes are just the beginning of how much water is being pumped from the ground in this region, which researchers now know is hydraulically interconnected. Neighboring areas also consume vast amounts of water, but mainly for agricultural use. The state of Mississippi

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March Memphis

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PHOTOGRAPH BY WARD ARCHER JR.

Water 6

Irrigation keeps Arkansas farmland green; almost 95 percent of the water pumped in the state is used for irrigation and livestock.

pumps a total of more than 2.5 billion gallons of water per day. Most of that water — some 77 percent — is used for irrigation and livestock. Arkansas pumps 5.4 billion gallons per day and almost 95 percent is used for irrigation and livestock.

In contrast, Tennessee pumps 435 million gallons per day, with only 7.1 percent used for irrigation and livestock. At least seven counties in rural eastern Arkansas each pump more water from the ground than Shelby County. For example, because of agricultural demands, Poinsett County and Arkansas County pump at a rate more than twice that of Shelby County.

On a recent drive along Highway 64 in eastern Arkansas, I was

taken aback by the endless fields of green extending to the horizons.

It appeared as though every field was irrigated.

Much of this agricultural pumping is occurring in the shallowwater aquifers of Arkansas and Mississippi. One by one, however, these aquifers are being “dewatered” — hydrology-speak for going dry. Some portions of the shallow-water aquifer in three Arkansas counties — Arkansas, Lonoke, and Prairie — could be dry by as early as 2009, according to a 2003 USGS report. By 2009, about 100 square miles of eastern Arkansas will be without underground water.

That land area would double by 2019.

The culprit is rice farming, which uses an average of 975,000 gallons of water to irrigate one acre of rice. The Corps of Engineers is now working on a plan to divert river water for irrigation, but, ironically, environmental groups have filed suit to stop the project and it appears to be at a standstill. The other alternative is to drill deeper and tap the Memphis Sands Aquifer (known as the Sparta Aquifer in Arkansas) and Fort Pillow Aquifers.

It’s already started. According to the USGS office in Little Rock, the Sparta Aquifer is now being pumped in Jefferson and Arkansas counties in Arkansas to irrigate rice farms with pure drinking water.

The concern is: Can a huge aquifer system like this ever be overpumped?

Consider the story of the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest stores of groundwater. The Ogallala covers 225,000 square miles beneath parts of eight U.S. states, from Texas to South Dakota, and feeds a fifth of the nation’s irrigated lands. The Ogallala Aquifer has few recharge areas left because many of its tributaries and runoff

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U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) introduced a bill in 2003 seeking federal funds to study the aquifer. In his remarks, Brownback said, “For years many people thought the Aquifer was bottomless. Today we are being faced with the reality that the Aquifer supply is limited.

There are some estimates that parts of the Ogallala Aquifer could be completely dry in less than 25 years.”

Brownback and Bingaman’s bill has passed the Senate without objection and is awaiting House approval. .

The only other U.S. city using more groundwater than Memphis is San Antonio, which taps the Edwards Aquifer. This aquifer is now so threatened with over-pumping that the Edwards Aquifer Authority has been authorized by the state legislature of neighboring New Mexico to develop, implement, and enforce a “Critical Management Plan.”

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n February 2004, leaders from Shelby County and the Ground Water Institute at the University of Memphis announced plans to ask Congress for $7.5 million to fund a multiyear water study, beginning with the Memphis Sands Aquifer.

Ted Fox, public works director for Shelby County, commented about the project in a Commercial Appeal story covering the announcement, “It’s not a study just to get statistics. . . . It’s a study to . . . determine the mechanics of the system — how it’s being recharged and at what rate. We know how much we’re taking out, but we don’t know how much is going into the system.”

In Fox’s official groundwater white paper, or government report, he states that “the continued sustainability of fresh groundwater and maintenance of its quality has become a major concern among state and federal officials and academic scientists.”

That was the white paper. In person, I found Fox, a 25-year veteran of the Corps of Engineers, to be the most colorful and outspoken official I encountered. The floor of his office in the Shelby County Building is covered with files relating to a seemingly endless number of active county projects.

“It’s coming,” he tells me. “The day when water is going to be the most precious com-

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modity in the world.”

Fox doesn’t want Memphis to join the ranks of cities that have endangered or depleted their pure groundwater. He is leading the effort to organize Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi in an effort to convince federal officials to help. Both Tennessee Senators Bill Frist and Lamar Alexander are supportive of the effort, but the project appears no closer to being funded. The plan calls for collaboration among the University of Memphis’ Ground Water Institute, the University of Mississippi, and Arkansas State University to map the hydrology of the region, develop computer models of groundwater use, and identify “best practices” for groundwater management.

At MLGW, water engineering falls under the watchful eye of Charlie Pickel, a 44-year veteran of the utility. Pickel knows the location of every well in this area, along with its depth and volume. He doesn’t control the Memphis Sands Aquifer, but he does control the pumping. His colleagues say nobody does it better. But even though Pickel believes we have plenty of water for now, he concedes, “We all agree, this can’t go on forever.”

He arranged for me to visit a test well being drilled for a future MLGW well field several miles east of Memphis near Lakeland.

Arriving at the site in a truck, design engineer Fred Von Hofe drove me a mile or so into the woods, where we came upon what looked like an oil rig. Three strong men covered in mud were working the rig. “We’re looking for Memphis Sands,” said Von Hofe. As we studied piles of sand samples taken every 30 feet, I could see how the texture of the sand changed with its depth.

“Memphis Sands is coarse sand that allows water to pass through it,” explained Von Hofe.

“Finer sand is harder to pump. We look for large deposits of Memphis Sands . . . sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t. Today we’re finding it . . . this is going to be a productive well.”

I left with a sample bag of authentic Memphis Sands from 371 feet.

The Dropping Water Table “cone of depression” is a hydrology speak for the area around a well where the water has been pumped out. Cones of depression have formed around most MLGW wells in Shelby Country. Not surprisingly, the entire Mallory well field, one of the oldest, is the largest cone of depression. These cones are not visible from the surface, but underground they resemble an ice cream cone —

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The Big Leak Uncovered n discussing the health of the aquifer with experts, another threat looms that will probably occur before we ever run out of water — contamination.

In the early 1990s, MLGW, then under the leadership of William Crawford, made a startling discovery. Test wells were drilled around the Mapco Refinery (now Premcor), just

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like no other ™

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larger at a higher elevation and narrowing as they go deeper. Inside the cone, the water table has been lowered by pumping. According to Fox, “In some areas it’s dropped 125 feet in the past 100 years . . . and with the steady increase in pumping from 1940 on, you can see where we are headed.”

This drop in the water table suggests that as water is pumped out, more water is not rushing in to replace it. And there is a good reason why it’s not. According to Jerry Anderson of the Ground Water Institute, recharge water travels though the aquifer sands at an average velocity of 1.2 inches per day. At this rate, recharging the Memphis Sands Aquifer from areas like Baker’s Pond cannot keep up with 175 wells pumping out 208 million gallons per day. If the Memphis Sands Aquifer performs like other aquifer systems that are heavily pumped, traditional recharge doesn’t match the amount of withdrawal.

In other cities around the world, cones of depression have led to subsidence or sinking of the ground level. In Houston, intensive groundwater pumping has lowered parts of the city by 10 feet, leading the city to plan a conversion to a surface (or river) water system by 2020. According to Ted Fox, “If Memphis converts to surface water as our primary water source, it will cost at least $18 million more per year for extra water treatment” because of the extra filtration required.

Sinking also has occurred in such disparate parts of the country as New Orleans and California’s Santa Clara County. In Mexico City, certain areas drop as much as a foot a year, and in Beijing, ground levels are dropping at a rate of about four inches a year. In coastal areas where pumping has lowered water tables, salt water has contaminated fresh-water aquifers in Florida, India, and in Palestine's Gaza Strip. In Gaza, which relies almost entirely on groundwater, saltwater intrusion from the Mediterranean Sea has been detected as far as a mile inland and the aquifer is expected to eventually become totally salinized.

So far, local officials have no reports of any sinking in the Memphis area.

AVE

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south of Martin Luther King-Riverside Park.

According to Crawford, what came gushing out of the well wasn’t water, but gasoline.

“Refined gasoline, gasoline you could put right into your car, was pumped directly from the shallow-water aquifer,” he said. Samples were stored in vials, and occasionally (as legend has it) officials would pour a few drops into an ash tray and ignite it — to prove their point to any skeptical government officials.

What was initially thought to be a leak of 10,000 to 20,000 gallons turned out to be 15 to 20 million gallons of refined gasoline, which was actually pumped out and sold at retail.

According to Helen Keith, an environmental lawyer and then-acting technical manager of the pollution control program at the Shelby County Health Department, “We were lucky that the gasoline was just floating on top of the water table and not any deeper.

Trichloroethylene [a gasoline component] goes through clay like it isn’t there.”

The refinery has changed hands many times over the years. Apparently the storage tanks had been leaking since the refinery opened more than 50 years ago and, despite the voluminous spill, the problem went undetected or ignored. Each new owner has complied with a mandate to continue to clean up the area. According to Greg Parker, supervisor of water programs for the Health Depart-ment, 12 recovery and monitoring pumps are still operating today in an area around the refinery and continue to pump out contaminated water for treatment. One pumping area still yields 12 gallons per minute of pure gasoline. Much of the leaky underground piping is now above ground and, so far, no evidence has been found that any of the gasoline actually made its way through the Jackson Clays to the Memphis Sands Aquifer.

It has long been believed that the Jackson Clays protect the Memphis Sands Aquifer from such contamination of the shallowwater aquifer. The shallow-water aquifer is recharged mainly from rainfall and runoff water from storm drains. It’s not tapped for drinking water.

“Young Water” n 1986, the USGS published a report, Potential for Leakage among Principal Aquifers in the Memphis Area, which suggested there was, in fact, leakage between the shallow-water aquifer and the Memphis Sands Aquifer. In some areas of Shelby County, notably the eastern part of Memphis along the Wolf River and in the

I 56 •

March Memphis

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southeastern part along Nonconnah Creek, the protective Jackson Clays are “thin or absent.” In other words, there are places where pollutants and “young water,” which hasn’t gone through the 1,000-year purification process from areas like Baker’s Pond, can enter the Memphis Sands directly and without obstruction. Several officials now say they believe the Jackson Clays formation looks more like Swiss cheese.

One such “Swiss cheese” example is adjacent to the now-completed landfill at Shelby Farms. As time would tell, this landfill could not have been located on a site more threatening to the Memphis Sands Aquifer. Operated as an unregulated landfill from 1968 to 1972, most anything could be dumped there, including hazardous materials.

In 1970 I had a summer job driving a dump truck and I made many trips to the landfill carrying trash from construction sites. My loads included more than I’d like to admit — everything from roofing materials, fiberglass, paint, glue . . . the works. From 1972 to 1988 the site was operated as a regulated, limiteduse landfill. It has no protective liner as required in modern landfills. Testing has revealed that not only are the Memphis Sands close to the surface around the landfill, but according to Brian Waldron of the Ground Water Institute, the Jackson Clays are absent completely at two locations, leaving the Memphis Sands Aquifer in direct contact with contaminants that are leaching out of that landfill.

According to Helen Keith, the landfill leakage is exacerbated when the Wolf River rises and its waters seep into the landfill. When the Wolf falls, it takes some contaminants with it, washing them downstream. The Wolf River is known to recharge the Memphis Sands Aquifer in a few areas of Memphis. In addition, the resulting wet landfill produces methane gas that must be burned off 24/7 on the site. The burner is enclosed so as not to alarm neighbors and the nearby Walnut Grove motorists. And there is plenty of methane to burn. According to Ted Fox, “We’ll be burning methane off there for 20 years.”

The 1986 USGS report goes on to suggest that intense pumping in the Memphis area is causing a massive cone of depression. That growing cone is encouraging recharging of the Memphis Sands Aquifer with “young” water that is flowing downward from the shallow-water aquifer wherever it can find a break in the Jackson Clays. Although there is enough traditional recharge water available from areas like Baker’s Pond, it cannot reach the areas around the wells fast enough, leav-

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ing cones of depression around the well fields. These cones invite water from the shallow-water aquifer to seep down.

The presence of “young” water is evidenced by the presence of tritium, a radioactive hydrogen ion introduced into the atmosphere during the testing of thermonuclear weapons some 50 years ago. (Tritium is commonly used in the scientific community as a dating device along with Helium -3, another radio-active tracer and other carbon-dating techniques.)

Further USGS testing revealed that groundwater temperatures around active Memphis pumping wells are abnormally high when compared with temperatures in controlled areas and around less active or non-operational wells. This further suggests that warmer, surface water is, in fact, seeping into the Memphis Sands Aquifer.

This type of recharging is much faster than the normal recharge process, which at a flow of 1.2 inches per day would take 144 years to travel a mile. Natural recharge areas in eastern Shelby County, Fayette County, and north Mississippi aren’t just 10 miles away, they’re over 1,000 years away!

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The Threat of Superfund Hazardous Waste Sites hese breaks in the Jackson Clays can act like drains, according to Jordan English of the Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation (TDEC). “We have a situation right now at the old Defense Depot, where we have contaminants in the shallow-water aquifer that are being pulled toward a known break in the Jackson Clays,” said English. If the plume (hydrology-speak for the blob of contaminants) reaches the break, it will be pulled down into the Memphis Sands Aquifer. English’s Superfund Hazardous Waste Site cleanup operation has installed wells to reverse the flow of groundwater from the break in the Jackson Clays. So far, so good.

The disturbing news is that the 1986 USGS report repeatedly refers to pumping from the Memphis Sands as “intensive,” especially in the Sheahan well field which delivers water to the Sheahan pumping station located east of the University of Memphis. The report states that the water table in the Memphis Sands Aquifer has been dropping almost continuously since pumping began, encouraging downward vertical leakage from the shallowwater aquifer into the Memphis Sands.

How much leakage is taking place? To find out, I queried Dr. Van Brahana, a respected hydrologist who has studied the Memphis

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Sands Aquifer extensively. He is a 28-year veteran of the USGS and now teaches at the University of Arkansas. According to Brahana, “Today, as much as 30 percent of the recharge water for the Memphis Sands Aquifer is pulled downward from the shallow-water aquifer. Depending on the time of year, it may be as high as 40 percent.”

To many Memphis officials, that number is a shocker. It would, however, explain why the water table around Memphis wells has not been dropping as rapidly as in years past.

So what’s the potential for contaminating the Memphis Sands Aquifer?

A 1997 USGS report that collected data from 32 area monitor wells made clear that pollution is widespread in the shallow-water

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This apparatus, called a “pipetter,” introduces a solution into a water sample to determine its flouride content.

aquifer. Pesticide compounds were detected (at lower than dangerous levels) in 24 of the 32 wells. Volatile organic compounds (human-made chemicals used in, among other things, paints and refrigerants) were also detected in water from 31 of the 32 monitor wells. This same study dated water from the wells and found it ranged in age from only 10 to 43 years old. Two public water wells in Collierville were recently shut down indefinitely because of contamination by chromium, a toxic metal commonly used in industry. The contamination has been attributed to a 40-year-old manufacturing site now occupied by Piper Farm Products Inc. Clearly the contaminants in our shallowwater aquifer are headed for the Memphis Sands Aquifer. According to the TDEC’s English, he is now working 21 Superfund Hazardous Waste Sites in Shelby County. He (continued on p. 76)

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Liquid Assets (continued from p. 62) expects that number to get larger, not smaller.

Who’s In Charge of the Memphis Sands Aquifer? erhaps our best hope for protecting our natural treasure lies with the Ground Water Quality Control Board. This is a policy-making board formed in 1986 and made up of representatives of MLGW, the health department, the Ground Water Institute, Collierville, Arlington, Germantown, Millington, Bartlett, Memphis, and Shelby County. The board has the power to enact regulations affecting the health of the Memphis Sands Aquifer and has already created some of the strictest private well regulations in the state of Tennessee. Privately, several officials expressed their desire to see the board have even more power.

But it’s time for the public to face the facts.

Most officials, including Charlie Pickel, are quick to admit that our water is no longer under artesian conditions. We are pumping it out with a network of high-powered, 20-inch wells that continue to lower the water table.

We may not be running out of water today, but we are creating an underground vacuum that is sucking down less pure surface water into the Memphis Sands Aquifer. The more we pump, the stronger it gets. And with 21 Superfund Hazardous Waste Sites as well as hundreds of other suspected contaminated sites, we’ve just been lucky so far.

When contamination does get through, Torrence Myers, who manages MLGW’s watertesting lab, will be the first to know. Daily samples are taken from each of the 10 pumping stations and analyzed for contamination.

“So far, with one exception, we’ve had little to worry about — sort of like the Maytag repairman,” said Myers. That one exception was in 1998 when traces of benzene were found near the Allen well field. The benzene came from the old American Resource Recovery Facility. Several wells were shut down as a precaution and the benzene was prevented from entering the water supply.

Myers explained that Memphis drinking water still undergoes less treatment than most any other American city. Although threatened, our water is still the best there is. After looking at a glowing “chemistry” analysis of our drinking water posted on the lab wall, I asked Myers if he used a water filter (as I do) at home. “No,” he said. “why would I? There are lots of good minerals in there.”

M For directions to Baker’s Pond, see the Memphis magazine Web site, memphismagazine.com

P

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