Giving Compass' Take:

• Brian Grimmett reports on the contaminated drinking water in private wells in Kansas which leaves people vulnerable to cancer-causing toxins.

• What steps can you take now to ensure local communities have safe drinking water?

• Learn how drinking water quality impacts other aspects of life, like education. 

WICHITA, Kansas — About 150,000 people in Kansas get their drinking water from private wells.

How clean, and safe, is that water? Short answer: It depends.

But new research suggests those wells deliver water tainted with a range of pollutants. Some leaked from dry cleaning operations. Yet far more wells soak up, and deliver to taps, fertilizer that’s been building up in Kansas soil and water over generations of modern farming.

But it’s not up to regulators from Washington or agencies in Topeka to test private well water quality. That falls to individual well owners. With little to no government oversight, some public health officials worry that’s creating a system where far too many people are left vulnerable to potential cancer-causing pollutants and toxins.

New research from Kansas State University shows that groundwater quality in the  Great Bend Prairie aquifer in south-central Kansas rates far worse today than 30 years ago.

The main culprit is a dramatic increase in the amount of nitrate. It’s a byproduct of the Green Revolution of the 1960s that turbo-charged modern farming toward greater yields, especially the use of chemical fertilizers.

Read the full article about water contamination in Kansas by Brian Grimmett at Harvest Public Media.