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Safe Drinking Water
Going Green
Going Green: Safe Drinking Water
Safe drinking water is a high priority and for most of us, our water comes through a filtration system but the City of Syracuse taps Skaneateles Lake and it's so pure no filtration system is needed.
“So that requires extremely high water quality and that requires a lot of vigilance to make sure that, that water quality is maintained. Building a treatment plant for filtration would be very, very expensive,” said Dr. Russell Briggs, SUNY ESF.
Dr. Russell Briggs is leading a study of the Skaneateles Lake watershed. It's a mix of mostly forest and agricultural land and the risk, he says, is from the agricultural land.
"Of course, forest land is the primary source of the purest water and agricultural practices have a potential to degrade water quality from fertilization and runoff and a variety of things,” said Briggs.
So researchers are comparing the quality of the water coming from forestland with water coming from agricultural land.
Thousands of samples are being collected and brought back to the lab where each is measured for nitrogen, nitrates, ammonia, phosphates, suspended sediments, electro-conductivity, and other components of water quality comparing the quality of water in the forest watershed to the agricultural watershed.
"At this time we see very little difference in water quality between the watersheds that are dominated by ag and those that were dominated by forest which suggests at least right now the system of best management practices is effective,” said Briggs.
Which means the water quality is good because farmers are using best management practices such as keeping contaminated water out of nearby streams, treating contaminated water before releasing it, and using vegetation like shrub willows to filter the water before it reaches the lake.
The lessons and techniques we've learned protecting the Skaneateles Lake watershed can be replicated around New York State using nature instead of expensive water treatment plants to produce pure water.
