Source Water Assessment of the St. Clair-Detroit River Waterway

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) is completing a Source Water Assessment Program as required by the 1996 reauthorization of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The 1996 amendments to the SDWA require states to:

• Identify the areas that supply public drinking water.
  
• Inventory contaminants and assess water susceptibility to contamination.
  
• Inform the public of the results.
  

The Source Water Assessment of the St. Clair- Detroit River Waterway is progressing in two stages.  The first stage documents possible sources of contamination based on methods defined in the Great Lakes Protocol. These methods have been modified for application to St. Clair-Detroit River waterway, and as such, include contaminant-source inventories of watersheds immediately upstream and adjacent to the intake.  Inputs from these watersheds may or may not impact source-water at the intake.  Information on this stage of the assessment is available at the URL:   http://mi.water.usgs.gov/splan2/sp08902/channel.php

The second stage of the source water assessment for St. Clair-Detroit River will refine the list prepared in the first stage by identifying those possible sources of contamination that could impact water-quality at the intakes based on the hydraulics of the waterway.  This stage includes several analyses that (1) quantify the flow partitioning around the many islands within the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers, (2) apply and calibrate a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model of the waterway, (3) characterize the flow pattern and dispersion characteristics of the waterway by use of drifting buoy studies, and (4) apply particle tracking techniques to assess the likelihood of impacting a specific water intake given that a release occurred.  The URLs listed below provide information on the development  of these analyses.  

Augmenting Two-Dimensional Hydrodynamic Simulations with Measured Velocity Data to Identify Flow Paths as a Function of Depth on Upper St. Clair River in the Great Lakes Basin

Flow Distribution and Duration in the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers

A Two-Dimensional Hydrodynamic Model of the St. Clair-Detroit River

Techniques for Identification of Source Areas to Public Water Intakes

Buoy Deployments Identifying Flow Pattern and Dispersion Characteristics:

St. Clair River
Detroit River

Lake St. Clair

Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) Surveys of Flow Velocites

St. Clair River

Detroit River

Particle Tracking Analysis

MDEQ Source Water Assessment Program

Detroit Water and Sewerage Department

American Water Works Association Research Foundation