The Reason for Unreasonableness in Groundwater Quality Management

Reasonable approaches for the management of groundwater chemical quality may sometimes lead to unexpected results. This happens primarily because of decisions that are not based on an integrative and quantitative methodology. Some of the practiced approaches are: a) aquifer restoration to pristine conditions followed, after failure, by natural attenuation; (b) the “Forget About The Aquifer” (FATA) approach, which ignores possible wider damage that contaminated groundwater can cause to other environmental systems; (c) managing groundwater recharge in municipal areas while neglecting the presence of contaminants in the unsaturated zone; (d) the Soil Aquifer Treatment (SAT) practice of considering aquifers to be “filters of infinite capacity,” and (e) focusing on well contamination versus aquifer contamination to postpone the solution of a problem.

Three possible reasons for unreasonableness in management of groundwater chemical quality are: (a) the characteristic times of processes associated with groundwater that are usually orders of magnitude greater than the residence times of decision makers; (b) the proliferation of improperly trained “groundwater experts,” and (c) the neglect of the cyclic nature of natural phenomena.

The analysis presented demonstrates that integrated quantitative methods are essential for the management of water related systems in general and groundwater systems in particular.  

Professor Shaul Sorek is with the Department of Environmental Hydrology & Microbiology, Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev, Israel.