No decision yet from EPA over NE Iowa drinking water

Nearly a year after several Iowa environmental groups filed a petition asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to step in and protect Northeast Iowa’s drinking water, no action has been taken.

In a statement Monday to The Gazette, the EPA’s Region 7 Office, which includes Iowa and other Midwestern states, said the “EPA continues to evaluate the petition and has not made any decision at this point.”

Micheal Schmidt, staff attorney for the Iowa Environmental Council — one of the 12 groups behind the April 2024 petition — said the groups asked the EPA for emergency action to address contaminated water in Iowa.

“Iowans are drinking water that is unsafe by EPA’s own standards,” Schmidt said Monday. “At this point, it has been nearly a year since we asked for EPA’s help with no sign that our drinking water conditions have improved. The facts here are clear: Each day that EPA waits adds to the risks Iowans face.”

The petition asks the EPA to use its emergency authority to intervene to “address groundwater contamination that presents an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of residents in northeastern Iowa.”

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Schmidt said the groups received “no formal acknowledgment or written response” from the EPA about the status of the petition.

The EPA, under the Biden administration, did respond to a similar situation in Minnesota in December 2023. The EPA requested the Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture develop a comprehensive work plan to reduce nitrate contamination of drinking water in eight southeast Minnesota counties.

Inspired by that Minnesota petition, the Iowa environmental and health groups filed the petition under Section 1431 of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.

The act was amended in 1986 and 1996, further regulating public drinking water — including rivers, lakes, reservoirs springs and groundwater wells — around the country from contaminants. The act does not regulate private wells that serve fewer than 25 people.

Geographically vulnerable

Southern Minnesota and Northeastern Iowa have a similar topography that is made up of karst terrain. Karst terrain occurs when there is soluble rock near the surface, which can create sinkholes, caves and springs.

Hosted by the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, Schmidt gave a presentation Friday on the state of drinking water in Northeastern Iowa, adverse health effects of some contaminants and the status of the petition.

With karst terrain, “you don't have a deep soil profile, like you have in some parts of the state,” Schmidt said.

And with Northeast Iowa home to many large-scale confined animal feeding operations — known as “CAFOs”— agricultural runoff and liquid manure from animals has an easier time sinking into the soil and into the region’s water supply through the porous terrain.

“This creates a problem if we are putting a lot of stuff on the surface of the land (like agricultural runoff) that can get into the aquifers, and unfortunately, that is what we see,” Schmidt said.

Some of the largest CAFOs in Northeast Iowa are in Fayette and Clayton counties.

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Schmidt said about 989 CAFOs in the 12 counties in the northeastern region of the state are registered with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

“We have a lot of manure being generated here and we also have a lot more row crop land than we used to,” Schmidt said. “The manure gets spread across the crop land without any treatment. So, if you think about all that manure, most of the animal feeding operations here are swine operations that produce liquid manure that can just go down into the soil.”

Schmidt said that water contaminated with nitrate, lead or manure runoff is harmful to everyone.

“If you look at long term studies of tens of thousands of people over decades, you can tease apart the interactions between high nitrate and drinking water and those health effects down the road,” Schmidt said in the presentation. “Iowa is one of those places where we've been able to do that. We have high nitrate.”

Going forward, Schmidt said that council is “looking at other actions to protect drinking water in Northeast Iowa and across the state.”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com