educational event in order to explore potential solutions to the water supply challenges that we face we must first understand the problem in order to understand what those possible solutions would be experts are here from the formation because before we can discuss solutions there will be an opportunity to explore solutions at a future at that is very important here because this is a first in a series this is to get the base information i guess what i'd like to do then is first of all to say thank you for being engaged residence and being willing to spend your evening this beautiful evening learning about our region's water supply and for your interest in finding a solution to the challenges that we all  hassan he manages the water supply planning department of the metropolitan council and he'll be the second presenter and will focus specifically on groundwater in the twin cities metro area and then last but not least kerry jones need to know about how roger underground so we're going to get started here this week there we go first off what groundwater grown water's water the underground to simple is that pumps like this but before we talk more about grow op or i want to talk about surface water why because we understand surface water when we see the stream is low we say while the stream is low we see the lake is flooding we say the lake is flooded we see the groundwater well do you see the ground water can you tell what the groundwater is doing in this picture no it's underground it's out of sight it's out of mind so how do we know what groundwater is doing to see groundwater we use wells in this case a well like this you can tell right away that it's not as obvious as what the surface waters when i look at a lake and you've been there for a while you see if it's been up and down i can't tell with what's going on in the well so wells are only clue to what's going on the ground water they are limited in based on the geology they may be representative of an area for one hundred feet around it may be representative of a mile or so wells are necessary they're only real tool but they are limited in what they can tell now we're going to step even further back and talk about water in general how does water move through our environment this is the hydrologic cycle than if you probably very familiar with us briefly water falls from the sk runs in the lakes or streams or soaks into the ground the water the talks into the ground continues to soak in and eventually it becomes brown water water also comes out of the lakes and streams so exclude the soils and become the ground water for the ground water also moves up into the lakes and streams and it gives evaporated back up in the the whole cycle starts over over and the thing about growing water and surface water is if it can move even the course of a stream you can have water moving from the ground water into the stream and further down the stream you can have water moving from the stream back into the groundwater likewise with lakes and that can even happen over a year it can shift how it's moving so it's not a simple straight forward it's always going into the river or there's always a spring feeding in the lake it changes over time and how the conditions are so what is an opera for i've been talking about ground water but offers are what ground water is in and as a simple solution an aco for business but if you can think of it like that you're doing really well and the reason we want to call the sponge is because a sponge has holes it soaks up water if you squeeze it the water comes out it's very similar to what an op an opera for a will do it will hold water it will water will come out that's important because an opera for that can supply enough water for a house may not supply enough water for a city so in a in appreciable amount it can supply the house it can supply the city so you have to know how that does not contain water or does not release it in appreciable amounts in clay is an excellent example of something that would be a confining layer water just doesn't move through a very a well what is a well a well as a hole or ships like into the ground to obtain water in the state of minnesota for at least the past twenty years it's going to be a steel or p v c pipe open at the bottom in the article for that you're looking to get water  the ground maybe coming out of streams and rivers and finally withdrawal is removing water from so these are kind of our basic turns as we're going through this as we're talking tonight as you're visiting the different tables these are kind of what we're trying to get across when we talk about these terms now we get into the fun part aka for types we have two basic arkell for types of water table aco for in a confined aqua for the water table is usually the first awkward for that we encounter when we go into the ground it is anywhere in minnesota it's anywhere from one foot to two hundred feet down depending on geology water table wells are typically most affected by rainwater and drought immediately affected by either one of those water comes up and goes down it can go down very easily you can see that is representative of the water in the water table meaning that's the level that's where the water is in the soils in the rock around our well now down below it is a confined aqua for in a confined aqua for is an aqua for usually well that is kind of compressed either by the weight of the material above it or maybe the water coming in from the far end is being recharged and it pressurizes the water in that offer so that when we put a well into it the water level rises and rises do the potential metrics i love that word is fun to say the potential metric surface is the level that the water in that opera for wants to go to this is an art well the top the offer is the water level that we measure in the well but in our artesian well the water level has risen quite a ways up and that's indicative of a confined system now you look over here to our flowing artesian well and flowing out of the pipe automatically just on its own the the reason you don't build the pipe to make it stay in there is because in some places it could be a twenty foot high on top of the ground and nobody wants to use a these are to go for types and how the water is in those the water reacts differently when we pump it when rain water comes into it when water moves through it another way to think of an aqua for is as a savings account you have that your balance in your bank account which would be similar to the water level that we measure in the office we are preferred can store a certain amount of water withdrawals are just pumping what we take out of the off recharge would be like in income a savings deposit you put money into the account we can know pretty well what the withdrawals are if we can measure the pump and we have the d for big wells we are we get that data from them from the people that pump the wells every year the recharge is hard because we have to know what the rainfall is in the area we have to know how much it soaks through the ground we have to know how fast it goes through the ground and then you've got some other competing problems like water the groundwater is going to move through the opera for on its own so it's coming from here and going to there so there's a few more things going in and we can the recharge as i said is a little harder for us to measure and we're working on trying to develop ways to better understand that so we know all of the balance is how things are moving throughout the  one other thing to remember about grown waters as water flows downhill simple as that now this diagram again has got a lot going on but it's it's a good one because you can see how our water kind of moves through the article for systems i've been talking about the recharge so water say rain comes down and falls over near the stream and in a couple of days it might move through the water the op the water table are preferred and get into that stream where it might take a couple of years likewise over here it might come out in a couple of days and that pump well might take a couple of years in the center there if the water falls kind of there and it makes its way down through the water to boil the water table arkell for excuse through the confining lair into that deep or the first confined and then it can move through there and that could take centuries to get and then maybe it continues to move downward and goes into that the confined layer and that can take millennia in the month simon awkward for here in the twin cities areas we have what we have measured the age of the water from ten to thirty thousand years old so it takes a long time to get  now what happens when we pump these this is an example of the two different well types and what we pump the water table well we've got one there and one on the other side of the stream the water's going to go into the well because what happens the pump basically draws the water down because it's taking it out in the water level drops so the water's going to want to flow downhill so at this point the pump is the lowest point and it flows down hill so if it's coming from that way it's going that way it's going to the pump but it's no longer going to the stream so if the pump was not pumping the water in the water table would probably go past it into the stre likewise on the other one on the far edge when that's pumping that may be drawing water from the stream and that's just the properties of the water moving through the system now down below and are confined aco for kind of the same thing is happening it's collecting water capturing the water that's coming and going in that direction but it's also starting to pull water back to the gradient flow of the natural flow would be to that direction but with the pump going the water's going to come back also you can see it's coming down through the water table our preferred through our confining layer of our aqua tart and into the confined system so that may not be happening if that pump was not home or it may be happening much slower than it is and we're influencing the way the water's moving under the ground kind of a close up of that downward movement this is called the cone of depression because once a pump fires up this is how the water in in the soils in the rock tends to go and goes down to the bottom of that  now in this situation most the the dotted line would be what we call a static water flow if nothing was going on there was no pumping going on that's where the water would be and in that case the domestic wellwood would be in the water and if they they probably wouldn't affect the system that great and they'd continue to have water that's why the put the well there now in this case somebody came in with a high volume pumping oil an irrigation w well in a dust real well and they're pumping a lot more water ok but they've drawn the whole water level down and it's now drawn down so far that the domestic well as out of water in situations like this the person that has the high volume pumping well is responsible for making sure that that domestic homeowner that domestic well has drinking water minnesota everyone has can take on water everyone it's a shared resource and everyone has access to it but we also have a series of priorities on what is the most important aspect you know who is the most important user of our growing water and the domestic use is our most important it's whether it's an individual private homeowners well if it's a municipal well the the water that's going to the households for drinking water in basic use is the most important priority so there it is grow out of basics everything you need to know right if you remember a couple of things ground water flows downhill just like regular water we have two types of aqua for systems of water table and a confined and they both react differently when we pump them if you think of awkward as a sponge you get the basic feel for how water's going to move through that remember as we can take water out we can put water in we can keep water there the bank balance is just a general good idea of how how the system so now i have five minutes to go through minnesota grown water we've been talking in general and we're going to focus later the other speakers are going to focus in on the metro area and then on this area in specific but in the across the state of minnesota we have six groundwater provinces in those provinces are determined by geology basin one of them one of the soils there what is the bedrock there and throughout central and southern southeastern minnesota the the aqua for the bedrock especially bedrock ockers are pretty much the same and and all you will be bit about that so i'm going to jump us over to the west side of the state the western province goes from canada to iowa right along the dakota borders the groundwater here the bedrock in this area just not conducive to having offers at all you might get a little bit of water out of them but it's really not very good in people don't typically the opposite are available or in these soils above it and they're limited they're small and they're isolated as an example these are the major are preferred near morehead the blue blobs there you'll notice they aren't connected there long and they're oh they're relatively deep but they're still limited the city morehead used to get their water out of the buffalo locker for which is the one closest to morehead there they noticed as they were pumping that the levels were going down and in some places and sometimes rather dramatically and they knew that if they continued to pump that they would they could run them off or dry and then they would be out of water completely so they shifted and they have now gotten some of their water from the red river and they use the red river and the buffalo walk over in combination to ensure that they have a water supply morehead is lucky because it has that surface water source other cities in western minnesota and south western minnesota don't have that option so they have to go further afield to get water and they have to buy it from a neighbor they may have to use water that's not as good quality so that's part of when we talk about for systems and solutions of problems we can't think of one solution fits all across the state because our water provinces are so different and the abilities and the problems in them are different and so we have to kind of focus on what there is what is there what we start with some background information as of twenty ten we have three million people or about three million people living in the metropolitan area the want to use for the thirty million people is about four hundred fifteen million gallons a day to put that in perspective that's about two and a half metrodome field was walked in one day so what are the sources for this water supply how are supplying this demand in the metro area we have two sources the first one is our groundwater the second one is our surface water the current use shows that we are using about the ratio of surface water used to ground water in the metro area the green surface water the ground somewhere in the end at the end of the seventy's beginning close to the mississippi river and that's where they built all the system on surface and that's how they utilized all of that until the eighty's when we started developing outside the course it is spreading out to the suburbs and where we're starting there lot being physically far away from the river and the only solution for us is groundwater has easy access of will and lets  but that increase reliance on groundwater has different impacts on our resources looking into our app verse which is might talk about the different first we are having in the state of minnesota as well as the metropolitan area and i have mike mentioned in the in his presentation that the only way we look into groundwater is through wells the department of natural resources have monitoring wells around the you can see clearly there is the seasonal change between summer and winter when you have summer people pumping brown water goes down when you stop pumping around with recovers that but if you look in the long talking about productivity and talking about many other characteristics and each one of those aquifers so we are dealing with variability on those characteristics in the middle as well as in the greater minnesota have sixty thousand of private wells and most of those wells fifty five thousand of them are mainly domestic wells we have about ten percent of th the highlighted communities the doctor who communities in this map they are the communities that use the bird as the only source of water supply in the mediterranean and some of those  growing and expected to grow further in the future in the m so looking into the future and for us as a planning agency looking to the future and we looked into our projected population by twenty three in the metro area we are expecting about three point five million another half a million people are expected to move to the metro area are projected to move into the metro area that will result in increase of water demand and instead of we are  water or ground with a model that will help us understand what will be the impact of change in different scenarios in the future what will be as example of the impact of those half a million people moving to the metro a getting ourselves into big trouble we have to change course this is a good time to do that and that's end of my presentation thank you hello my name is perry jones i paul then over to shore view and then over to the big marine lake in grand township so with this presentation and hoping to address three questions  one is where does our water come from the water we drink where is it coming from and then where does the ground water the wall or the wild water we pump come from and then finally why do we see in some lakes in the northeast natural we see the war levels low long other lakes they're high you'll see any impact whereas the water we use are coming from the northeast natural most of the water we're using is coming from growing water there too dark different see the ninety nine percent of that water is coming from wells or groundwater where is one percent is comes from lakes or nearby rivers when we're looking at the lower capacity users these are typically domestic wells private  wells small commercial operations these we don't have as good a handle on where the water's use is coming from because they don't keep records of the where that the pumping conditions because they're typically less than a million young three year but from just looking at and they are and we have a feeling that it's approximately one hundred percent is from groundwater now where's the groundwater coming from and again i think what we have to do is to look and see what the situation is to basically take a knife and slice through an area in the northeast materially and i picked an area at white bear lake because as we've recently done our studies so we take just slice through and through down and look what th posited by the glaciers when they came through this area but below that are some bedrock first rock first of sandstone limestone and a variety of other sentiment turn rocks that are much colder than the glacier material and in the area directly below the glacial tills we have in lot of areas we see the st peter sandstone and then below that we have what's called the pershing group and the jordan sandstone of those two units make up a trying to get aquifers that that provide a lot of water and typically the jordan in the persian provides a lot of water if it's for a domestic purpose for a house well or something you may look at putting into a glacial material some of the surface even though it's fairly deep here maybe three hundred feet in this area you can actually see it exposed in athens t park st peter sandstone you can see this is block material that that you can see along when you drive through st or for that there are just as many wells taking water from st peter's sandstone aquifer and even some better taking water from the glacial arc thumbs from above so it's kind of a mixed picture now why are the lake fact there are certain physical characteristics of lakes thinking can result that can can result in the lake level changes and also you can look at the lake you have to look at the water balance components what's what the sources and one of the sinks for water for a lake system but then there's also human induced factors things like people can pump water into lakes of people pump water out of leaves and those are all factors that have to consider when looking at why a link levels going up or liquids going down now some of the physical characteristics the area the size that you're in volume of the legs lake center larger sometimes they tend to hold more water and can withstand larger changes in the system where's also you have to look at times they'll talk about the watershed area versus the lake area for for the lake system for bald eagle lake the watershed here into link here ratio is about ten to one wears white there is only two to one so it's a much smaller watershed for white purely to get water from where foley was much larger other factors include our rivers streams and ditches are they connected to lakes because lake said to have those can also stand up can away but then you also have plant transpiration these are plants that are actually a lot of plants that are within the lakes is lake itself or ones that are all along in the shorelines that can take water off the system and and those all have to be seeping in a longish lower shoreline and you can see some of it looks like a rust color to the system and the reason why is that to grow more of this coming in actually has dissolved form of higher that's in the when the water and the reason why it stays in there is because there's very little oxygen in the water but once that water discharges along the shoreline oxygen becomes available and the iron falls on the solution and so you'll see these iron seeps you can also see that by looking at people looking at temperature differences and i know several people have talked with talked about swimming in white fairly well and this is common with other links to will feel cold water in the summertime really cool water various and we have just completed a study on white bear lake and one of the results we found was is that we could see through water chemistry that wells there nearby went very way actually have a mixture of surface water and groundwater coming into lanes are going into the wells excuse me and so what we've seen is that water along the shores are discharging into white fairly but then there's also water that's flowing from the lake seeping down by wells and when those wells take in that water we're seeing from the chemistry signature in those the well water that it's a mixture of water surface water and brown water why this is important is that pumping in the area from since one thousand has doubled and so we're increasing amount of water we're taking from that the aquifer and some of this flow is natural so we'll get a natural flo may be coming down into the not from the lake into the aquifer but when we stress the aco for pulling out more water we're dropping the water little's we're increasing the model water that may be leaving early so these are factors we all have to consider when we're looking at the lake well i thought that we're going to receive questions about the the technical part of this but it looks like everyone is asking questions about solutions and we know that you want us to you want to steal your thunder from the next presentations which is grown mainly about the solution is going to come very soon so i was as of today and this is just i'm just mentioning this as of today there is a bill in the house just warning the old lake augmentation wells those particular ones and included a number of them we were able to convert over to observation wells for the dinars observation well network and the reason we like those is because they're very deep in the world we didn't have to drill them and pay to drill them but they were still available to us so a number of them were sealed over the years and on hennepin county the seal the lot of them you know that these but the ones that we were able to get into our network we were able to keep continue to measure water levels from so it's a combination of they've either been sealed or they've been converted over to an observation eagle that showed a surface water component and when we did we when we looked at the data we also looked at the war levels which were even directions the water was flowing in the glacial at first as well as the period you change your not what we saw was is that believe what plans do twin cities mayors met council u s g s minnesota d n r have to work together to create water use policies and implement conservation measures and in what timeframe will they accomplish the a five i think tonight's meeting is a good start for that we have been working in the metropolitan council as all the agencies and actually this this workshop is there as a result of hard work from so many and i was really impressed with the concerned citizens who started all of this work together putting together the first group to tackle the problem of the lake and then then looking beyond that believe they have implemented water conservation programs for the last five ten years and that's starting to start of see some improvement in the water use in the area other cities around the metro area was thought to seeing them implementing plans of ation programs one of the things i would like to tell you that they were that is going to be one of the those serious that we are going to conduct in the future is going to be a mandate about conservation and best going to be targeted to municipalities as well as private citizens where they how to learn how i can reduce my water bill in my house in addition how the city kind of fix some of the problems that can lead understanding that they are have or are soon to be making recommendations for conservation some short term interim and longer term of course conservation is a part of all of that and that that should be coming relatively soon hundred fifty in the metro area of various doctors and that is available those levels are available on our website the work that we've been doing if you looked at the map over here in conjunction or even in continuation of what kerry worked on is a report that's going to be worked on and we don't have any of it available now because we're just still continuing to collect data but i'm i'm hoping we get a report out on kind of what we found on the water levels that we've been measuring in our mass measurements are synoptics but for long term aqua for information the d n r is web site the observation well network will show you where our wells are and then you can look at the water levels anywhere from some of them are six years seven years worth of data  well it all depends on how much water is entering act for how much water is present in the gulf it's sometimes pollution is the solution then you say sometimes you don't get enough water in the octal for that's present so that when lake water seeping through it you don't notice a difference in the water quality but it can be significant just depends on how much water is seeping in and how much of a difference there is in the chemistry that's like water versus what's in the outflow itself i think for most part we looked at the water chemistry in white bear lake and compared to the praising george knack for and they were quite similar there wasn't a large number of differences however the hat are the pros and cons to taking more water out of the rivers i think you guys are asking about solutions at this point i'm still on the game you know you are you're taking from our presentation for the next series that i was struck saying some stuff about the reality of some background information about how much  water we have and the metro area we have to be manned reverse those three men reverse runabout about four trillion dollars a year currently the minneapolis system the sample system  opportunity to go by you have water available you service what water when it's available groundwater for the drought time and that's that's the rule in many places in california that they have been using some of the issues we have our ground water systems or currently the misspelt is that using ground water systems they built their system so that you have your well and then you built from the well your distribution system this is different in the surface with surface water they bring them to certain man surface water that we have here they have already big man lines and then people take from those near lines for us in cities like around the area here who are using water you have six wells and then you can think about them are six individual distribution systems where all of those people are living in this area and you know this well i'm going to be connected to that well so there's going to be a lot of water treatment is a big big factor here and many places here around the metro area we don't treat ground and most of the treatment happened i do your home you have a softener and that take care of most of the treatment you are having some of the cities they first structure wise also for surface water if you are to want to expand it for long distances you have to tap into the reverse and then it's just going to be extra cost so in general one of the biggest issues we're dealing with  cost and time i think that's what prevents a lot of the community of taking surface water and actually the minnesota geological survey is doing a study right now on the st lawrence unit which is considered an awkward confining larry aqua card and they're finding that maybe it's not as as we thought the water can get through it easier than we thought and that may be true we've never really studied it so they're starting to study with different systems have different physical characteristics they even depend across the current of the length of the system so yes they do intact with the city which would show that which meanest wells may be impacting the lake more than others and what we did with our first study was really collect a lot of information that we can use to develop a growing water flow little more than others and that's something we're hoping to do get some funding along through the state to actually continue that wor ok the next question is for ali and i think you're going to see a common theme here is that the folks in this room really are looking for solutions and and i do want to point out that  folks coming here tonight some had a lot of information and some had very little and wanted to we wanted to give a basis i said at the very beginning we wanted to give a base of education to figure out ok now that you've got that what are the possible solutions they are being worked on i just w of that we have things going on at the lake resolution committee within the community within the chamber of commerce i know that they're looking at getting businesses involved but we will be coming back and trying to really get that those things as well so that we can get get us to the next step so with all the complex components involved with water levels is there a starting point with how to resolve the issues of water shortage and in conjunction with that have other states run into this problem and if so have their solutions to this problem then examined as to what they're used toward solutions for minnesota will stop was the second question i can from working in minnesota and new mexico and california so we have seen a lot of worse than this problem we have seen problems where apple first went down well so when dry and  cing them for a long time the only difference is that for a long time they realize the limitations of the resource and i think that's what we need to start realizing here we have limited resources  were lucky that we have abundant abundance of lower ground water but still it's a limited resource and if you go in different parts of the metro area you see that some places they have more productive apple first than other places and so individual level and this is i think for a long time coming from outside of this they learn if i first started in minnesota here i start to see and people are paying more attention to the quality the quality of our water the quality of our lakes and all of that but sooner we found out that the quantity is another problem and for a long time want to do was not the issue that we were doing was a mistake so i think question first question is where do  keep you could please speak to the impact if any of us have geothermal on the arc of her systems water quality water levels that really doesn't need much of an impact because a lot of the geothermal systems that are abused older what they call a closed loop so it's just kind of anti freeze cycle you through the well within the well and would you consider researching the san antonio texas model and implementing it here it will be more than happy to see how they have done that we're looking at all the other cities that have more similarity to like what we have here in the midwest sometimes south of the cities in the west western united states they have programs even within the state of minnesota there's a lot of cities well being implementing but a successful programs and that's gonna be seen in their what many use will be more than happy to look into that and see how they have done that mike how does fracking affect aquifers to do i draw like fracking and we have a sample of it the jordan sandstone is what they're mining here and the impacts to aqua first from the mining activities are just like what you would typically expect from the sand and gravel or any other type well we're getting the signals from the back here that we have to wrap this up and so i would just like to talk a little bit about what is to come we have we plan to have two more meetings in this series we're hoping to hold our next meeting and i'm fairly confident although not totally that we won't have at that time we will do our best with that and i would like to thank all of you for coming and have