Introduction

Drinkable water quality is one of the most important features in today’s world. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides data and information about each area’s water quality. The Borough of Madison NJ commissions an annual report on water quality, with the goal of providing information on safe drinking water for public consumers.

Data

Monitoring wellhead protection areas ensures we are not consuming contaminated water that’s available to us as well as properly maintaining the areas the wells are getting their water from. The data that has been used here is provided by The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to ensure care is taken of our resource areas.

Results

This data shows the land area of water pumped, tracked by the NJDEP Division of Water Supply, in different parts of Madison, NJ. The wells have been built between 1952-1967. There are a  total of 5 well facilities. Well C pumps 45% of Madison’s water per year, and well D pumps 0.6% between 1993-98. There are mostly located in the east part of the Madison.  Locations: 2 in north, 3 in east.  The maximum capacity of these facilities are between 750-1500 Gallons Per Minute (GPM), which is the maximum rate at which water can be drawn from the well. Well Head Protection sites are broken into three tiers. In the yellow 1st tier it takes 2 years for pollutants in groundwater to reach a well. It takes five years for the second orange tier, and twelve for the third, green tier.

Conclusion

Madison is one of many towns that receive water from the Buried Valley Aquifer System. In Ordinance-56-210 a number of regulations are imposed to ensure the land area from which the water being deposited to is uncontaminated.  Understanding wellhead protection allows us to be informed of where our water is coming from, and what could potentially be contained in the water we drink, shower in, and provide for our pets. Being knowledgeable about the land that surface water flows from could help us maintain clean and  unpolluted landscapes, and support legislation that goes toward protection of these land areas.

About the Data

Madison Wellhead Protection Areas (WHPA) were developed to comply with  the Safe Water Drinking Act of 1986 and 1996. New Jersey got their Wellhead Protection program approved in 1991, with approval coming from the United States Environmental Protection Agency.  Current WHPA’s are made using a Python-based creation feature script, and this is able to produce an ArcGIS geodata base feature.

Figure one: Well head sites of Madison, NJ (Colored dots) and Wellhead protection areas (Orange, yellow and green spaces), 2018

Link to presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QpcbRhRH68J0i_pGybCAjwrYVvJuid4t0PZWf8wPpOU/edit#slide=id.p1