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Man calls on Grey County to act on local groundwater threat
The article was also reprinted in the Ontario Farmer:
Furthermore, the Walkerton Herald wrote an article about a presentation by the Bruce County Federation of Agriculture to the Bruce County Council. This delegation was likely a response to Thorsten’s earlier delegation on the confluence threat.
Given the dire situation of local residents whose groundwater source was contaminated, the recommendation to private landowners (“simple things like mounding up soil around the well”) feels like an insult. It shifts responsibility to the private landowner (who is indeed responsible for keeping the well up to code), whereas the groundwater aquifer itself is a public good, a common that is managed by the entire community. The responsibility for protecting this common lays with public agencies – the county, the municipality, and the ministries of the Province. Right now, landowners feel abandoned by government agencies who are not enforcing existing regulations and are not ensuring that our extremely vulnerable aquifers are protected from inappropriate management. Do farm organizations really feel comfortable protecting grossly negligent behavior of a few bad apples?!?
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