Episode 141: Well, Well, Well…

Water affects every part of our life, especially when it comes to our supply where we live. Mike Dietz is director of the Connecticut Institute of Water Resources, which is part of the UConn Extension. Among the services offered by the institute of testing of home well water, which is recommend to be performed every other year, but seldom is by homeowners. Mike tells us about what owning a home with a well is like and the differences in using a municipal supply. He also explains other issues facing our state and country in terms of water and how he first became interested in this topic as a youngster. Mike even gives Izzy some tips about drinking water safety for her upcoming trip to the Canary Islands!

Link to Episode 141 on Podbeam

Mike: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Hello, Izzy.

Izzy: Hey, Mike.

Mike: It’s late June, summer’s kind of moving along, dare I say.

Izzy: I know, and something weird is going on today because I’m seeing double.

Mike: Two Mikes.

Izzy: I know.

Mike: Since we’ve taken over the podcast about a year ago, we’ve never had another Mike, so you’re in trouble.

Izzy: I, I don’t know how I feel about this.

Mike D: Sorry, Izzy.

Izzy: Double the trouble?

Mike: Well, our guest Mike today is a really important person on campus. I’ve always said, you know, the university has a bunch of front doors where maybe people who aren’t exposed to the direct taking of classes or direct academics,
but we’ve got front doors like, obviously, athletics and Jorgensen Auditorium, and a dairy bar. But the UConn Extension, perhaps more than any of them, really reaches out to people and affects people that don’t have a stake in the day-to-day academics and university per se. So, our guest is Mike Dietz. He’s the director of the Connecticut Institute of Water Resources, which is part of the UConn Extension. This summer, we’re going to have a few UConn Extension guests on, and it’s really news you can use. The mission of the Connecticut Institute of Water Resources is to collaborate with all colleges and universities in the state to resolve water issues and water-related problems.
But really, it’s a great resource for municipalities. It’s a great resource, like I said, for the colleges, but it’s a great resource for homeowners who, you know, when you own a home, inevitably there’s a problem. And if you have a home with a well, there’s definitely going to be a problem at some point.
So Mike’s here to join us and talk a little bit about water and the services that they offer. So, Mike, thanks for joining us today.

Mike D: My pleasure to be here, chatting with you both this morning.

Mike: What’s the overall broad mission of the Institute of Water Resources, and it seems like you serve everybody, like I said, from academic institutions to the homeowner who one day turns on his faucet and the well’s dry.

Mike D: Yes. So, for a little bit of context, the Institute of Water Resources is part of a national program. So, there’s an institute in every state and territory in the United States, and this began in the early 1960s with the Water Resources Research Act. So, we have congressional funding that supports our program. It’s a pretty small amount. When you look at it federally, it’s about $16 million per year for the entire national program, and every state has water issues, they may vary across the country. So here in Connecticut, our mission is to focus on the water issues that are important to us. We are tasked with performing research and funding research on water issues in the state.
Another part of our mission is also to train future scientists in the water field and to translate that information and research that’s being generated so that people in, you know, the general public, regular people in this state, understand what the issues are related to water and somehow, hopefully, serve to help them in some way related to water.

Izzy: So, kind of going off of that, for someone that maybe isn’t familiar with water resources, like what are water resources? Can you kind of define what that looks like?

Mike D: Well, it really boils down to who you’re asking. So if you’re asking a municipality that is tasked with serving some of their residents with drinkable water, for them, the water issue at the forefront will be providing safe drinking water for their town, their residents.
If you are talking about, for example, some of the nonprofit institutions that we have in the state here, like Save the Sound and some of the watershed organizations that we have, they’re very concerned with the quality of the water in our surface waters in the state. So, they want to make sure that those waters are of good quality to support wildlife, fisheries, and also support human activities like recreation and other things like that. So, it really depends on who you’re asking. There are also many scientists in the state who are doing research on very detailed issues related to water, such as climate. So we, I have to be careful with how we describe things in certain ways here, but there are a lot of researchers looking at how our precipitation patterns, for example, are changing and how that’s impacting human activities, human municipalities, and work that they have to do, how it’s impacting people when they want to go out on a Saturday, for example, when it seems to be raining every single weekend. So, you know, these are,

Izzy: Yes, I know, it’s sad.

Mike D: And it really does seem to be rather uncanny that every weekend it’s been raining here for, like, ever.

Izzy: Isn’t it, like, 16 weekends in a row or something?

Mike D: I believe it is.

Mike: It’s pretty bad. Yeah, it’s pretty bad. So, tell us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in this, in water.

Mike D: So, I’m not a traditional academic, I would say. First of all, I did grow up in Connecticut.

Mike: Where, where’d you grow up?

Mike D: In Bolton.

Mike: Okay, close to Storrs?

Mike D: Yes, that’s right.

Izzy: And close to Manchester, where I grew up.

Mike D: Yes, right next door.

Mike: All right, that’s cool.

Mike D: So, my grandmother actually grew up in Manchester.

Izzy: Oh, wow.

Mike D: But I came from a blue-collar family. I was the first person in my family to go to college. But when I was very young and going through my teenage years and, you know, into, as a young adult, I spent a lot of time either on the water or playing in the water. We had a small farm and a small pond. My grandfather always had a boat down on the coast, down in Mystic. So, at a very young age, water was something that I basically was involved with every day. And when I came to go to undergraduate here at UConn, I studied psychology, oddly enough, because I was interested in how the human mind worked and what made people make decisions and how they acted and those sorts of things. So, I did that work for a while, for five or so years, and decided that I wanted to go back to graduate school. And it was then that I drew on my background and also some classes that I did take while here as an undergraduate in the Natural Resources and the Environment department, which was then called Natural Resources Management and Engineering. So, I looked up a professor there that was doing research on water issues, and he had an opening, and I ended up doing my master’s and Ph.D. with him on water projects that also involved people. So, there was the tie-in with what I studied as an undergraduate, but also brought my passion for water forward from those younger years. So, for me, it’s been a great combination of various things in my life. And that psychology background has also helped me in my extension work because I’m really interested in how people learn and what motivates people to do what they do and how to change behavior if it’s something that we need to look at.

Izzy: We touched on this unfortunate subject a couple of minutes ago now, but it seems like all we have is rain lately, every single weekend or just really at any inconvenient time when we all can get to enjoy it on a holiday or anything like that. How is that an issue here in Connecticut? What does that mean for us?

Mike D: Well, I guess I’ll put it in a little bit of context. So, many people, like if you ask someone in the Desert Southwest, they would be laughing at us for complaining about having so much water available to us. So, in some ways, we’re very fortunate that we have water available to us for drinking, for other, you know, to keep our rivers flowing, that sort of thing.
Drought and floods have been a part of our history for thousands of years. And in this region, it’s very common to have rain for periods of time, to have it be dry for periods of time. But one very important thing has been happening lately. So, although our annual total of precipitation that we get is around 48, 49 inches on average here, about four feet falls across this state in any average year, that total hasn’t changed very much. But over the past century, basically, the intensity of storms that we’ve been getting has been changing dramatically, especially in the last 50 years. And so, this is not looking forward, predicting now what’s going to happen in the future. This is turning around and looking backwards and looking at real data. And if you’ve lived here in Connecticut for your life, Mike, have you been here for your whole life?

Mike: All but 10 years, lived in the Midwest for a while.

Mike D: Okay, all right. So, you know that, anecdotally, we’re getting a lot more intense storms than we used to get.

Mike: Sure, sure.

Mike D: And the data do show that. So, this is actually part of what’s happening due to the additional heat that’s in the atmosphere. I will choose my words carefully and we’ll describe it in that way for you. If you’d like to say other words, that’s up to you. But the additional heat in the atmosphere that is also documented is driving those changes in that hydrologic cycle.
So if you think about the math now, if our annual total of precipitation isn’t changing much, but we’re getting more intense storms in shorter periods of time, that also means that there’s going to be intense periods of dry time. And so last fall, for example, in Connecticut, we had glorious weather in October and November.
I remember thinking to myself, we’re going to pay for this because it’s so nice right now. It was clear and sunny and dry for like two months, and we were actually in a drought. If you look at the measures of drought, we were in a D2 and D3 drought in parts of the state, which is excessively dry. If that had happened during the growing season, it would have been catastrophic here in the state.

Mike: Oh, wow. You never, yeah, you never think about that part of it.

Mike D: It’s true.

Mike: I don’t think about that part.

Mike D: That’s right. So, because most of our agriculture in this state does not have irrigation, it relies on precipitation. So, to answer your question, this is part of what’s going on with our hydrologic cycle right now, and you can expect more to come in the future.

Mike: Well, speaking of bad news, when people own a home, sometimes they have a well. I guess especially in rural areas, I don’t know if that’s perfectly true, but one of the services the institute offers is well testing and well services. Can you explain what people can do if they have a well problem?

Mike D: Yes, that’s a great point. So, do you own a home with a private…

Mike: I have a condominium that has a well, but fortunately, if it’s the owner’s…

Mike D: You don’t have to manage it.

Mike: I don’t manage it.

Mike D: Okay.

Mike: I grew up with well water, and I thought everybody grew up with well water.

Izzy: Can I be honest? I’m kind of scared of wells. I feel like they’re just big and scary, and I’m like, oh my gosh, what if someone’s going to fall in them?

Mike: You’re watching too much TV.

Mike D: Yes. So, in fact, a residential well is only about six inches around, so you can’t fall in. But just to back up a little bit, so you grew up in Manchester, you said, Izzy, so you did not have a private well at your home. You turned on the tap and that water came from the municipal supply in the city.
So anybody who is on what we call city water or municipal water, the company or municipality that is providing that water is required, as part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, to test that water regularly for a variety of things to ensure that it’s safe for you to drink, like very regularly. And if something is going wrong with it, they have to treat it, they have to deal with it. So, they’re well aware of how to do that stuff. When you own a private well, the only time the water is required to be tested is when that well is installed. So, for example, the house I grew up in was built in 1720. It had a shallow hand-dug well. We installed a drilled well in, we’ll call it 1980. We lived in that house from… First of all, the shallow well was never tested. The drilled well, we lived there for 20 to 30 years after the installation, and it was never tested again after that install. The scary part is, just because it was deemed safe at the installation does not necessarily mean that it will always be safe. The groundwater quality can change over time, underground. So that’s the important piece. If you own a private well, it’s your responsibility to test it regularly. The Connecticut Department of Public Health recommends every one to two years that you test your private well to make sure that it’s safe to drink. And they have had a great educational program for private well owners. And so, we were well aware of this program, and I’ve collaborated with folks at the Department of Public Health for many years on issues related to groundwater. But the bottom line is, they don’t provide free testing for homeowners. They don’t have money or staff to do that. So, I saw this gap and used some Institute of Water Resources funding, and then used that to apply for a larger grant to basically provide funding to do testing for people with private wells. So, we’ve been doing that project for three to four years now and have tested almost a thousand homes, provided testing for almost a thousand homes.
At the beginning, we were doing it just for $50, but those grant funds ran out. So now we’re doing it at cost. Basically, it’s $225, but it’s still cheaper than if people would have to take it themselves. And we also just facilitate that process and make it easier, and we do something on the results that also makes it easier for people to understand. If you were just to take your sample to a regular lab, they would… You would just get a printout saying it’s safe to drink, or there’s one exceedance on this parameter. But if you look at it, unless you’ve got a degree in chemistry, most regular people aren’t going to know what to make of it. So, we make that easier to understand. We explain it to people. We’ve held workshops to help people understand their results. And if there’s an issue, we’ve worked with people to get it addressed. We talk about the different types of treatment available and step people through that process. That can be very scary, especially if you’re older.

Mike: Sure. So, what kind of problems, of the thousand wells or so you’ve tested, how many come back with nasty grams?

Mike D: About 50 percent.

Mike: Oh, so it’s a problem.

Mike D: It’s a problem.

Izzy: Wow.

Mike D: It’s a problem.

Mike: And what are the problems with a well?

Mike D: The biggest problem that we find, the biggest exceedance of drinking water standards, is for bacteria. So, two bacteria that we test for are total coliform bacteria and E. coli bacteria.
The coliform are just indicators that other potentially harmful bacteria could get into your well. So, it means that there’s surface water getting in, in some way, either coming in from above ground and getting into the well, or going subsurface in, like, a nearby septic system or something like that.
So most homes that have private wells in this state also have a septic system. There are required setback distances, but sometimes there’s an older system where maybe it wasn’t done properly, or you’ve got a very high-water table that’s happened because of this excessive rain that we found, and that’s driving surface water down into the well. We did notice that specifically when we’ve had periods of really high precipitation. So, the bacteria, anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of people we’ve tested are positive for total coliform bacteria. So again, that’s an indicator that other potentially harmful stuff could get in there. The next most common thing I would say was probably iron. So iron is not necessarily dangerous to your health. It’s more of a nuisance contaminant. Same thing with manganese. Hardness is another thing that comes up frequently. So that’s dissolved calcium and magnesium in the water. That can cause chalky residue on your glassware, not necessarily a health concern, more of a nuisance. Your water doesn’t suds up when you take a shower.

Mike: Sure.

Izzy: And on your hair, right?

Mike D: And your hair. As you can see, I’m very concerned about how my hair is in the shower.

Mike: And what do these people do when they get this report? What are the remedies? Do they have to dig a new well, start all over again, or what do they have to do?

Mike D: So, for the bacteria, the first thing is to basically chlorinate the well. So, you’re opening up the cover of that well cap, dumping bleach down in there. There’s some information from the Department of Public Health that we provide on how to do that.
You’re basically bleaching the water that’s in your well. That water gets run through the entire system in the home until you can smell the bleach coming out. That would kill any bacteria that’s in the system. Then you flush it all out, and we offer a free retest for people to see if that did the trick.
Most times, I would say that takes care of it. When that does, when people have this, we recommend that they definitely do test, at least for bacteria, every year to make sure it hasn’t come back.
If it comes up again positive, even after the bleach treatment, that definitely means that there’s some sort of surface water leakage in that system where water’s getting in with bacteria in it. So, at that point, we recommend an ultraviolet light, a UV system, to basically be installed in line in the home, and that kills any bacteria in the water. I actually had to install this at my home myself. I had this issue a few years back, and so it’s easy for me to understand how people feel when they get a positive result and they’re told that they shouldn’t drink their water, and also how to manage that going forward.

Mike: So, is there an advantage to well water over city water, as we used to call it?

Mike D: Well, I guess many people say the taste. You know, when you have city water, you notice the taste of the chlorine in there. So, any municipal supplier has to put in, including here at UConn.
UConn is a municipal public water supplier for the campus here and the surrounding community. I would say UConn’s water, I don’t notice a bleachy taste in the water or smell. But if you go to some other cities, people often notice that. Like Manchester, for example. I think Hartford has generally pretty good water, and I don’t notice a bleachy smell necessarily, but some people don’t care for that bleachy taste and smell in their water. But again, those municipal suppliers, honestly, if I were to, you know, if I had to pick one without knowing the quality of it, just as far as safety is concerned, like if I could only pick one to drink right now and I couldn’t do any of the testing myself, I would pick a municipal supplier because I would feel more confident that it was safer. There are many things that come up with private wells. Again, if you’re not aware of these issues, you wouldn’t necessarily want to test for it. But many people will tell you that well water tastes good. It’s what they grew up with. It tastes better. And I grew up with well water and do like the taste of well water too. But it’s not without its things you have to pay attention to, and not without its issues.

Izzy: So, I’ve always been the kind of person that will just go for the tap water, and now I’m feeling a little sick to my stomach thinking about that. Can you tell us a little bit about what homeowners can do to make sure that their water is safe?
And now that I’m thinking about it, I have a trip coming up to the Canary Islands and…

Mike D: Whoa.

Izzy: This isn’t something I would’ve thought about previously, but is there something that I could do to bring with me to test the water before I drink it there? Because like I said, I’m probably going to be filling up my water bottle in the bathroom sink of my hotel room.

Mike D: That’s a great question. So, I think for that, I’m not too familiar with how their water systems are there. I probably, if it were me, would try to get one of those bottles that has a purifier on it.
I’ve used these for hiking. There’s basically a water purifier that you can use with a little pump, a hand pump type of thing. But they make them now that you can put water in the top of it and it goes through this little clarifier, like a basic filter that mostly is getting at the bacteria. That’s really what I would be most concerned about in a situation like that.
So I would give that some consideration if I were you.

Izzy: That’s a great piece of advice. Thank you.

Mike D: You’re welcome.

Mike: News you can use on the UConn 360 Podcast. That’s what we’re here for. Well, Mike, thanks for joining us today. In all seriousness, I think we’ve uncovered another part of UConn here that really reaches out to everybody in the state. And we’ll put a link in the podcast description, so if people want to get their well water tested, they know where to go and what to do. And good work, and great work on behalf of the university, exposing the university to the people in Connecticut.

Mike D: It’s my pleasure. There was one other thing that I would add, if that’s okay.

Mike: Please.

Mike D: So, this is the other issue that’s come up recently. I mentioned that when people have their own private well, the only time that testing is required is when it’s installed.
The Department of Public Health maintains a list of what’s required, along with the Department of Consumer Protection. In 2022, three things were added to that list, arsenic, uranium, and lead. So, if your house was built prior to that time, your well was never tested for those three things.

Mike: What year was that again?

Mike D: 2022.

Mike: So, most houses…

Mike D: So, most houses. Here’s an example. We just held a workshop down in Middlesex County a few weeks back. We had more exceedances there for uranium than we found in any other workshop that we’ve done across the state.
So those people had never tested their water for uranium, and a sizable percentage of them, I’m going to say probably 10 to 15 percent, maybe even more, had been drinking water with uranium above the limit. So, this is another reason to get that water tested if you haven’t done so.

Mike: Yeah, uranium. That sounds serious.

Mike D: That one is serious. Arsenic is another one that’s very serious. These aren’t like nuisance contaminants. These are things that have real health effects on you.

Mike: Well, no, thank you for adding that, and again, for our listeners, the link is in the podcast description. And, you know, sounds like a pretty good investment for a homeowner to get their water tested.

Izzy: I am literally going to buy my filtered water bottle right after this.

Mike: When do you go to the Canary Islands?

Izzy: July 2nd.

Mike: Oh wow, that’s exciting.

Izzy: So, coming up. I know, crazy stuff. You might not hear me on the podcast. There could be a guest host.

Mike: Maybe I’ll have to go solo.

Mike D: I’m free that day if you would like me.

Mike: Hey.

Izzy: Oh, you know what, Mike and Mike.

Mike: There we go. There we go. There used to be a radio show with that name. So, well, Mike, again, thanks for joining us today and great work.

Mike D: My pleasure. Thank you for putting the spotlight on the program.

Mike: Izzy, enjoy the Canary Islands.

Izzy: Mike, Mike, it’s been fun.

Mike: Thanks for listening, everybody, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.