PRIVATE WELL BANNED IN CAMBRIDGE

Hoo boy I'm not buying for one second what I read in the Waterloo Region Record's article today. The story is titled "OMB upholds municipal ban on private water well in Cambridge". Allegedly a Condominium Board had drilled a well on their property to supply water for landscaping purposes on their property. Well the City and the Region both objected and it went to the Ontario Municipal Board who ruled against the Condo Board. They rather correctly couldn't understand why they should pay for expensive, treated to drinking water standards, water when all they wanted was to water grass, trees and shrubs etc.. Not so fast said the two levels of governmnet.

First off the Condo is located on George St. abutting the Grand River. Secondly the regional government claims that the Condo Board's well could "disrupt" contamination already there in the ground. Disrupting contamination is sheer nonsense and gibberish. The claim that it could send soil contamination deeper into the municipal drinking water aquifer is however a little different. I suppose that some contaminated soil might possibly get introduced through the well's borehole into a deeper aquifer although precautions are supposed to be taken to isolate one aquifer from another and avoid breaching somewhat less permeable layers between them.

Keep in mind that a new well isn't likely to contaminate anything. Possibly if the well driller takes short cuts there could be a chance of cross contamination from a shallower aquifer into a deeper one. Remote but possible. It seems to me what is probably going on here is that the Region and City have knowledge of significant pre-existing soil contamination that they don't wish to share with the public. That would be a more likely explanation for what is going on. This could be a non-issue if local governments cleaned up contamination as they find it or if they had stopped major industrial, urban polluters decades ago.