Protection, maintenance

Protection, maintenance

of water supplies pledged

“I hope — and promise — this won’t go to waste,” said County Administrator John McCarthy last month, upon presentation to the Planning Commission of ground water maps produced by the Piedmont Environmental Council with financial support from the Rappahannock League for Environmental Protection.

“I hope it’s just the beginning,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I view this project as the first brick in a major effort to protect the ground water supplies of Rappahannock County. Our next step is to guarantee that the ground water supplies we all depend on can be maintained.”

Intended as a general planning tool, the maps identify the sections of the county most susceptible to ground water pollution: Rappahannock Lakes; Sperryville; the Poe’s Cabin area along both sides of Route 637 north of U.S. 211 to the Fauquier County line and Route 647; the Covington River area crossing U.S. 211 between Washington and Sperryville; Laurel Mills along the Thornton River in the eastern sectipn of Rappahannock; and an area north of Amissville, a section of which abuts the new county landfill.

The National Water Well Association developed the system used in the mapping project. Seven parameters are included in the evaluation, and each has an assigned weight between one and five, according to relative significance; the higher the number, the greater the importance of that parameter. The parameters, with their weights in parentheses, are:

• DEPTH TO WATER (5) — the distance from the ground’s surface to the depth below ground where either the pore spaces in the soil or cracks in the rock are saturated with water. Generally, the deeper the water table, the greater the possibility that the contaminant will dissolve or break down before reaching the water. Areas with shallow water tables are particularly succeptible to