Close to 75 percent of the county's residents have their own water well. And when they're finished with it, nearly all of them flush the water they've pumped from the ground out to their private septic system.
There are more than 16,000 wells in the valley. The number of septic systems is more than 15,000 and growing.
With that in mind, Ravalli County's environmental health department plans to put a pair of recently awarded state grants to work studying, testing and protecting groundwater in the Bitterroot Valley.
A $75,000 grant from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality will help implement an existing source water protection plan for the city of Hamilton.
The funds will pay for testing wells in the city's watershed on a voluntary basis.
And the monies will help the county develop an educational campaign focused on protection of the watershed. Those efforts include placing a dozen strategically placed signs around Hamilton to let people know the depth of the groundwater and disseminating information about proper care of septic systems, including some financial incentives.
The county will use an additional $15,000 DEQ grant to help keep all sorts of nasty household hazardous wastes out of the groundwater through a new collection program similar to Missoula's successful effort.
This spring, Ravalli County will likely host its first household hazardous materials collection, where residents can safely dispose of all that motor oil, paint, solvent and pesticide stored in the back corner of the garage. People will also be able to drop off their old batteries and mercury-containing products like fluorescent lightbulbs and thermometers.
Lea Jordan, the county's environmental health department director, said the county is working to put together the funding necessary to make the event happen.
The cost of the contractors alone is about $25,000. Jordan said the county will need another $5,000 or so for advertising.
“We want to have it in the spring, maybe May, but it all depends on the availability of funding,” Jordan said.
If it doesn't come together this spring, the collection event will be held in the fall.
“Right now, those kinds of materials are probably going down people's drains or being dumped out on the road. There's a good chance some of that is getting into our groundwater,” she said. “People just don't know what to do with it.”
Jordan's department will begin assembling a community task force in the next couple of weeks to help plan for the event.
The county's grant proposal was helped by support from a number of local government and private organizations.
“It's a proactive project focusing on community outreach and on-the-ground actions, and it will provide meaningful results in both the short term and long term,” she said.
A third $49,490 grant from the Montana Department of Natural Resources will help the county take a closer look at some of the risks to groundwater created by future development.
The Groundwater Vulnerability Mapping Project will pull together a variety of existing information about geography, soils, topography, population distribution and other data in an effort to generate maps that show where groundwater is more vulnerable to septic tank density and discharge.
Since Ravalli County doesn't have a system of groundwater monitoring wells placed strategically around the valley, Jordan said it's hard to know exactly what the cumulative impact is of all those septic systems.
Some preliminary information gathered as part of another surface water degradation study indicates the Bitterroot River already has elevated nutrient levels, some of which is likely caused by the large number of individual septic systems in the valley, she said.
The county hopes to hire consultants this winter to perform the study and have it completed by the end of July. Jordan said it's difficult to fully understand what's occurring with the county's groundwater without a testing program in place.
“We're really in desperate need of the kind of data that we could obtain through strategically placed groundwater monitoring wells,” she said.
Last June, county voters rejected a proposal to create a water quality district that would have paid for projects like the hazardous waste collection day and groundwater testing wells.
Jordan said many people misunderstood the proposal. Some thought the county was proposing to install meters on their wells or that they'd be required to submit to testing.
“It was about water quality, not water quantity,” she said. “We're interested in helping prevent contamination to our groundwater. If there had been any monitoring, it would have been done on our wells. It wouldn't have affected homeowners.”
In other water-related news, Ravalli County will work with six other entities to launch a multimedia campaign to increase awareness of the importance of native riparian vegetation.
The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded the entities $120,000 to put together the effort to educate people about the important protection riparian areas offer for both surface and groundwater.
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at pbackus@missoulian.com
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