The state’s plan to withdraw up to 100 million gallons of water from a Wabash River aquifer in Lafayette and pipeline it to a high-tech industrial park in Boone County lacks one important element.
The consent of residents in Wabash River communities. That should have been a first priority.
Most of those Hoosiers do not want the Indiana Economic Development Corporation’s pipeline project to happen. On Thursday night, the Terre Haute City Council passed a resolution expressing firm opposition to the IEDC plan. Ten other Indiana communities have taken similar measures. They include the two cities most directly affected, Lafayette and West Lafayette, and their home county of Tippecanoe, but also several located elsewhere along the river — Monticello, Attica, Covington, Battleground, Shadeland, Fountain County and White County.
Communities downstream fear the IEDC pushed forward with this plan before it has been fully researched. The IEDC has said its initial testing by its contracted environmental and water resource consulting firm, INTERA, showed “promising results,” and that final testing analyses will be compete and shared by the end of this year.
The Terre Haute City Council resolution also called on the IEDC to allow an independent third-party study and public hearings on the potential impact of the project on downstream communities.
Councilman Todd Nation introduced the resolution.
Terre Haute and other Wabash communities “need more information,” Nation said. The long-term effect of sapping up to 100 million gallons from the river daily, and transferring it through a pipeline to a multi-billion- dollar industrial park 35 miles away in Lebanon, is unclear.
“There’s a strong possibility that this is going to change the Wabash River,” Nation said Thursday. “These decisions need to be made in an open way, where people understand the consequences.”
Even if initial tests and study indicate the river’s aquifers can sustain the daily withdrawal without affecting communities’ water supplies, the overall strain on the Wabash’s quality may not manifest itself for years. Brendan Kearns, president of the Wabash River Heritage Corridor Commission, pointed out that uncertainty.
“My concern is that we’re being told it’s OK, but if in four years you discover it’s not, then how do you recover from that? I don’t think you do,” Kearns told Tribune-Star reporter David Kronke.
Indiana has a poor track record of taking environmental concerns seriously. The General Assembly routinely dismisses all attempts by environmental groups to protect land, water and air quality in the state, and regularly defers instead to the desires of corporations and developers. The Legislature’s most recent degradation of the Hoosier environment involved stripping away protections for Indiana wetlands, which are crucial natural resources for cleansing the water supply and preventing flooding.
Thus, it is no surprise that residents in Wabash River towns and counties worry that the IEDC has an understood green light to push the pipeline plan forward.
Objections to the plan stirred Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to put a different state entity in charge of the pipeline study. Last month, Holcomb ordered the Indiana Finance Authority to oversee the INTERA study, rather than the IEDC.
That is one step, albeit a small one, toward hearing Hoosiers’ concerns. But the bottom line remains — if Wabash River communities do not want tens of millions of gallons of river- aquifer water withdrawn and transferred elsewhere, it should not happen.
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