Panhandle Health District urges Hayden to restore local aquifer protections, offers ordinance drafts

Jenny Gray, protection program coordinator at Panhandle Health District (PHD), told the Hayden City Council on April 8 that the Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer is a shared, fast-moving source of drinking water and urged the city to reestablish local ordinances that would require stronger controls on chemical storage and non-domestic wastewater.

Gray said the aquifer supplies drinking water for “over 600,000 residents between North Idaho and Eastern Washington” and noted it is federally designated as a sole-source aquifer (1978) and was designated a sensitive resource aquifer by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality in 1997. She described the aquifer as unconfined and unusually permeable — “water moves very quickly…about 50 feet per day” in places — so surface activities can rapidly affect groundwater quality.

PHD staff reviewed the district’s four core aquifer-protection activities: long-term water-quality monitoring, education and outreach, the critical materials program (chemical handling and secondary containment inspections), and efforts to identify sensitive aquifer recharge areas (SARAs). Gray said PHD maintains a groundwater-quality dataset dating to 1975, actively samples 28 wells three times per year, and has tracked a long-term decline in…