As part of a new federal program, seniors and teens in Kane and McHenry counties are teaming up to be watchdogs for their community’s drinking water supply.
Taking a cue from other national volunteer programs such as Americorps, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this year funded 15 Source Water Protection Mentor Initiative Projects across the country.
This summer the agency began by recruiting and training participants from local chapters of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program to serve as “auxiliary ground-water technicians” and to lead efforts in their areas to develop and implement drinking water protection programs.
The EPA zeroed in on the Fox Valley and surrounding areas because its drinking water comes from particularly shallow underground sources and is designated as one of the most vulnerable to contamination in the state, according to Rita Bair, Regional Wellhead Protection Coordinator for the EPA’s field office in Elgin.
Local RSVP volunteers decided to launch their first project recently in East Dundee and involved students from Carpentersville’s Dundee-Crown High School.
“Young people have to be involved,” said Dick Hilton, a retired social studies teacher who lives in Wonder Lake.
RSVP volunteers, staff from the EPA and East Dundee’s water department, and Dundee-Crown ecology teacher Gary Swick recently took about 30 students on a field trip.
After stopping at one of the village’s wells to see how it works, the group toured the parts of East Dundee and Carpentersville that sit directly on top of the ground water supply that feeds their faucets and is known as the “recharge area.”
During the next few weeks, the students and their six mentors plan to break up into teams and drive around the recharge area looking for situations in which harmful contaminants, such as motor oil, gasoline and other chemicals could leak into the ground water through the soil or abandoned wells.
The teams will then go door-to-door interviewing residents and businesses who have water supplies that are potentially threatened.
Bair said her agency hopes the seniors and students will eventually develop brochures and meet with elected officials to help educate the community on how to prevent contamination of its drinking water.
