"CHIPPEWA FALLS, Wisc. — Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount.
That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s 16,000 customers contained nitrates at concentrations less than 10 parts per million, the level deemed safe by federal law. It costs Chippewa Falls $200,000 a year to operate the system.
But what seemed to be a perfectly sensible move to protect public health turned out to be both an act of civic responsibility, and a capitulation. While city residents were supplied with water that met federal safety specifications, most of Chippewa County’s other 67,000 residents consume water from private wells supplied from aquifers contaminated with nitrates, some with concentrations well above the 10 parts per million limit.
Matthew Boos, who supervises Chippewa Falls’s water treatment plant, is intimately familiar with this city-county disconnect. His own home outside Chippewa Falls is supplied by a well that contains rising nitrate concentrations. “It was 10 when I got there,” he said. “Now it’s 20.”"
