Unlike many states, Massachusetts doesn't track the locations of private wells. This is especially important in Western Mass, since private wells supply drinking water for the majority of our residents. In fact, many towns rely 100% on private wells. Because there are no statewide private well regulations and no system for tracking private well locations and water quality, wells can (and do!) become contaminated through nearby septic systems, dumping, and pollutant storage.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection keeps track of public well locations, which is fine for the Eastern part of the state but doesn't provide Western Mass boards of health, planners, land conservation groups, real estate agents, and the general public with enough information about their own water supply. In fact, only about 5% of private wells (those drilled since 2006) are geolocated.
This lack of information has very real consequences for residents. For example, five wells in Leverett, MA are contaminated from an old town landfill; the recently-closed Northampton landfill caused groundwater contamination. Aside from the obvious health implications, there are financial costs as towns remediate the wells and property values are affected.
To address this problem, a team from Hack For Western Mass developed a process to allow towns and other interested groups to record data about well locations and water quality using a mobile device, syncronize these data sets to a cloud database, and visualize the data on a map. Memento, a database manager for Android, allows personnel in the field to record location and other well information and synchronizes with a shared Google spreadsheet. We wrote a script to automate the generation of Google Fusion Tables which are used to visual the well locations.
Instructions on how to create the spreadsheets to store the well data and link the data the fusion tables are in this document.
This document contains instructions to syncronize data between the mobile android device and the google spreadsheet.
The data visualization showing a map with the private well locations can be viewed here.