Greater Baton Rouge Business Report
The Water Institute of the Gulf is in the early stages of a study that will devise 50-year sustainable solutions for preventing saltwater intrusion into the Southern Hills Aquifer, a critical Baton Rouge-area water source. Over the years, saltwater has become a growing threat to the freshwater supply as usage has increased by consumers and industry.
Funded by the Capital Area Ground Water Conservation Commission, the $237,000 first phase is expected to take a year as a Water Institute team collects existing data about the aquifer to extrapolate a suite of possible solutions. The three-phased study could eventually result in a temporary fee hike of $10 per million gallons of usage, amounting to mere pennies for the average household.
Alyssa Dausman, vice president for science at the Water Institute, says most coastal cities need long-term strategies for managing groundwater resources to ensure a long-term, sustainable supply. She has experience with modeling groundwater systems and most recently worked on a similar effort in south Florida. “Even though people don’t think of Baton Rouge as a coastal city, when you get your resources from aquifers in the ground saltwater intrusion is a fairly common problem.”
The Water Institute plans to take a “structured decision making” approach by working closely with commission members to identify possible alternatives. Fortunately, the commission has already invested “in a lot of science and modeling through both the U.S. Geological Survey (which has numerous monitoring wells in the Baton Rouge area) and LSU,” Dausman says.
“We’re going to pull all of that science and information together and provide them with alternatives for long-term strategic planning. That could include looking at various conservation strategies, additional scavenger wells or possible alternative sources of water.”
Dausman says while Southern Hills Aquifer currently produces “pristine” drinking water, it is under constant threat from saltwater south of an underground fault line along Interstate 10. The freshwater aquifer is comprised of a series of pockets at elevations ranging from 800 to 2,800 feet deep that are separated by layers of clay. “As you remove freshwater from the aquifer system, that space has to be filled by something, so it gets filled by saltwater,” she adds. To date, scavenger wells have been successful in preventing saltwater intrusion, but that approach might not be sustainable as water consumption increases in the coming years.
Full article here.