The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

by Dan Egan

one of history’s great hydrologic ironies, today the Milwaukee suburb that is only a 20-minute interstate trip from the Lake Michigan shoreline has so depleted the groundwater that fed the famous springs that all but a handful have vanished. Waukesha is now forced to tap a pool of ancient water in wells stretching 2,000 feet below ground. Levels in this deep reserve have plunged some 500 feet and the water that is left comes out of the ground as a low-grade poison; it’s laced with radium, a naturally occurring radioactive element that is a known carcinogen, at levels about three times above the federal limit. The city now uses a patchwork treatment system that removes the radium from water pulled from the deep wells and mixes it with the non-contaminated water that’s left in the shallow aquifer. Despite the jerry-rigging, Waukesha still exceeds federal radium limits and is under a government order to find a new water source. The obvious answer is Lake Michigan, which you can almost see from town. But the problem is that Waukesha, like Georgia, lies on the wrong side of a border—a border that, like Georgia, it is now trying to nudge.