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Final Report for Wells - What is the Water We Drink ?

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!