An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
That is the message Megan Lehman and Mark Stephens brought to a gathering Wednesday of Lycoming County borough officials regarding the protection of water sources from pollution.
Lehman, who is a Lycoming County environmental planner, and Stephens, a state Department of Environmental Protection hydrologist, have been instrumental in forming a coalition of local water supplier devoted to protecting drinking water supplies.
There are many reasons for developing a comprehensive plan to protect drinking water supplies, Lehman said, among them to improve the public health, improve raw water quality and to plan for future community water needs.
Preventing pollution also is less costly than cleaning it up, she said.
"Typically, it costs more to clean something up than prevent it from being polluted to begin with," Lehman said, adding that some cleanups can cost up to 200 times more than what it would have cost to prevent pollution from occurring.
Lehman discussed potential sources of water contamination. Those sources include private dumps, transportation corridors, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers in stormwater runoff, residential, commercial and industrial discharges and natural gas drilling fluids.
Although there are serious concerns regarding how natural gas development will impact water supplies, it is important to remember there have been potential threats to those supplies long before shale gas development occurred in this area, Lehman said.
"We want to make a point that a lot of people are concerned with the Marcellus Shale, but we don't want the other things to get lost," she said. "We don't want to focus on just one (potential hazard)."
According to Stephens, all human activity impacts the quality of drinking water.
"What we do in this valley - we're going to experience it in our drinking water," he said.
Stephens said concentrated farming activities can cause problems with groundwater, especially if manure is not managed in a way that prevents nutrients from entering the aquifer.
He also discussed the wisdom of communities developing source water plans that designate protective zones for water supply sources.
He questioned the wisdom, however, of long-time practices such as placing fuel storage tanks underground.
Pollution caused by petroleum leaking into an aquifer is so hard to remove, any water source so polluted is decommissioned forever, he said.
Other sources of groundwater pollution can have long-term impacts, as well, he said.
"It's never as it was," he said. "It's never as pristine as it was."
Stephens said the natural gas activity is "causing headaches" to water system operators concerned with how gas drilling will impact their water sources.
The Williamsport Municipal Water Authority is partnering with the U.S. Geological Survey to do a baseline study of the Lycoming Creek watershed, which recharges the authority's wells that serve the Williamsport area.
The study will help provide a snapshot of the watershed so that changes to it can be more easily identified, he said.
Regarding water sources that have been impacted by drilling, the "key component" has been gas wells that have been poorly cased in the upper sections of the well, he said.
Lehman discussed county Conservation District efforts to promote agricultural best management practices.
She added that there are hopes that future generations of farmers will better embrace conservation practices that prevent water pollution.
