Why Ottawa County is short on water and what's being done about it
OLIVE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — Ottawa County is running out of water.
'We have residents that are literally running out of water. People don't necessarily believe it,' Paul Sachs, director of strategic impact for Ottawa County, said. 'That has been one of the biggest challenges that we are dealing with: the general public understanding of what is happening.'
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You may have wondered how it's possible. With streams, inland lakes and of course Lake Michigan, it seems like the seventh largest county in Michigan should be overflowing with water. But with 306,575 people, Ottawa County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. In rural areas, farms, businesses and new homes are dependent on water drawn from wells.
'About 3 billion gallons of water a year are used in Ottawa County to simply irrigate turf grass,' Sachs said. 'We are one of the top agriculture producer counties in the state, if not the country.'
For years, Sachs has been trying to inform and educate people in Ottawa County about what's happening below their feet.
'Does it have to get worse for it to get better? And that's what we need to get in front of,' he said.
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There are two ways people in Ottawa County get their water: through municipal systems, which use water from Lake Michigan; or from private wells, drawing water from underground aquifers. Because there are a lot of rural areas, most people use well systems. Many of them get their water from the glacial aquifer, which refills itself naturally from the rain. In some places, the glacial aquifer is too shallow, so wells have to be drilled deeper, reaching into the Marshall aquifer, which is separate from Lake Michigan and takes a very long time to refill.
Ottawa County has 15 well monitoring sites that collect data and materials to see what's happening with the water system.
'When it rains; how is the Marshall charging; when we're pumping water, what does that do with the static water levels? And we can start to do scenario planning,' Sachs said.
As demand continues to rise, the water is drying up. Wells need to be drilled deeper, reaching lower into the Marshall aquifer, where mineral content is high. The deeper you go, the more gravel you get. Then at 250 feet, you reach all rock.
'That is impermeable. Water can't get through that. And look at the depth, this is a very large clay lens preventing water from getting any deeper,' Sachs said.
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Steve Hecksel, owner of Hecksel Brothers Well Drilling near Coopersville, knows what's going on below. His company has received plenty of calls over the years from people having water problems.
'The typical call we get is somebody calls up (and says), 'Yeah, our water was working fine yesterday, but (we) woke up this morning and we don't have any water,'' Hecksel said.
Hecksel said his company has already had to return to some wells it drilled in the last 10 years and place pumps deeper.
'A lot of those areas where we see a lot of development, new homes,' he said.
He showed News 8 how it works on one recent call.
'We are trying to reconstruct this well to make it more useable, and hopefully spring rains and everything brings back the table up to where it should be,' Hecksel said.
There are solutions, Sachs said, like turning more to the big lake:
'We have access to fresh water. Lake Michigan is a few miles to the west from us. We could extend municipal supply to residents that need it, and as new developments rise, we could connect them to municipal water supply,' he said.
The problem is that extending infrastructure is costly.
'In order for local governments to pay for that infrastructure, you have to have more and more connection on it,' he said.
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The county is urging residents to be more water wise as it searches for a large-scale solution that makes sense.
Sachs said the county is leading by example on landscape design. At its Fillmore Street Complex, it removed a majority of the turf grass and planted native grasses and plants.
'We have saved, just in our landscape project in the county, 227,000 gallons of water. We've also saved $6,000 in landscape maintenance,' he said.
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