Jordan water plan open for comment

SALT LAKE CITY — Two decades of planning and the results of a four-year, $2 million study have been incorporated into a draft permit that involves turning contaminated groundwater into drinking water and then disposing of the contaminated salts in the Great Salt Lake.

Water quality officials have completed an extensive review of Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District's plan and are now seeking public comment on the draft that would facilitate moving the project forward.

The 60-day public comment period began Dec. 1 and ends on Feb. 1. A public hearing is scheduled at 5 p.m. Jan. 4 in the Department of Environmental Quality's board room on the first floor the Multi-Agency State Office Building, 195 N. 1950 West.

Cleanup of contaminated, shallow groundwater and an aquifer in southwestern Salt Lake County is being undertaken by the district, which extracts the water out of wells and runs it through a reverse osmosis treatment plant anticipated to supply up to 14 million gallons of drinking water a day to area residents.

The byproduct of the treatment process, however, would be conveyed through a 21-mile pipeline to Gilbert Bay at the Great Salt Lake. The byproduct would consist mostly of dissolved solids such as salts and some trace amounts of selenium, which at elevated levels poses harm to the reproductive health of migratory birds.

State water quality regulators, joined by the district and scientists convened an exhaustive study to determine at what level selenium could pose harm to the water fowl, which frequent the Great Salt Lake and its wetlands by the millions each year because of its destination as a migratory "flyway."

Although a selenium standard has been set by the Environmental Protection Agency for acceptable levels of selenium in fresh water, no such standard exists for salt water. The salt water standard developed by Utah regulators was submitted to the EPA, which neither approved or disapproved of the standard.

An original proposal to pump the reverse osmosis byproduct water into the Jordan River was withdrawn by the district because of concerns over adding selenium into the river and the downstream wetlands.

Critics of the district's plan to directly pump the byproduct to the Great Salt Lake contend too many unknowns remain about the potential long-term impacts and say no discharge should be allowed.

State water quality regulators say they don't believe the discharge will adversely affect the bird population, although if the permit is issued, testing will continue to assure that selenium content is within the standard.

Even though the treatment process concentrates the contaminants by five times, district officials say the byproduct that would be discharged has a salinity level that is about one-tenth of the salinity found in the south arm of the Great Salt Lake.

For more information on the project, visit www.deq.utah.gov. Written comments may be directed to: Kim Shelley, P.O. Box 144870, Salt Lake City, Utah 84114-4870 or by e-mail at: kshelley@utah.gov.

e-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com