This project was made possible through a donation from Ron Blum and the Chenango Forks Model United Nations Club.
We started implementation of this project almost a year ago by distributing information materials and inviting schools in the Siauliai district (in Northern Lithuania) to participate in monitoring of the quality of the wells' water.
15 schools of Siauliai town and its district participated in the water
quality monitoring. Each school selected the wells to monitor (according
to the location of the school and responding to the requests of
interested and concerned inhabitants).
Results of monitoring of 250 wells show that concentration of nitrates in
57% of wells exceed the standards. In implementing the project,
schoolchildren worked in cooperation with specialists of the Centre for
Public Health and representatives of local department of environment and
education, who helped the students learn to use portable lab (HACH kit),
identify fertilizers and other potential pollutants of wells' water, to
find out how old the well is, and measure the depth of groundwater.
Results of the monitoring were presented at the conference "Wells - What
is the water we drink?" in October, 1998 . The reports on impact of
polluted drinking water, inspection of the wells' water were presented as
an outcome of the monitoring results. Participants of the conference were
not only students, but also local residents and representatives of local
government.
We are very glad that this project received publicity and
interest of municipality officials: currently local government is
discussing possibilities to improve the situation in suburb of Kalniukai
where the nitrate pollution level is very significant.
This environmental education project helped us to involve residents in local problem solving. We believe that this cooperation will continue in the future projects, such as monitoring of water quality of open water bodies that we currently are planning to implement, since we all have a common goal - to make our environment clean.
Many thanks to our donors!