The Wabash River is seen Nov. 28 from Fairbanks Park in Terre Haute. Terre Haute and other Indiana cities have concerns about a proposed upstream project that would draw up to 100 million gallons daily from the Wabash River aquifer.
Terre Haute has joined 10 other communities in sounding the alarm about a project that one city council member says could change the Wabash River forever. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. is planning a high-tech business park for Lebanon in Boone County. It would be called the Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace Innovation District, and the goal is to bring tech companies.
However, critics argue the IEDC did so without ensuring there are sufficient water resources for the industries that they wish to recruit. So, IEDC has proposed constructing a pipeline that would divert up to 100 million gallons of water daily from Wabash River aquifers in the Lafayette area.
Terre Haute has now joined the cities of Lafayette, West Lafayette, Monticello, Attica and Covington; the towns of Battleground and Shadeland; and Fountain County, White County and Tippecanoe County in expressing opposition to the proposed pipeline.
City Councilman Todd Nation’s resolution — passed Thursday evening by the City Council — further called for an independent third-party study and public hearings on the potential impact of this project on downstream communities.
“We need more information,” Nation said. “It’s not just the city of Terre Haute, all the Wabash River communities need more information about this, because there’s a strong possibility that this is going to change the Wabash River. These decisions need to be made in an open way where people understand the consequences.”
Brendan Kearns, president of the Wabash River Heritage Corridor Commission and an executive committee member of RiverSCAPE’s board, said of the pipeline, “I think it’s a horrible idea. It’s hard to imagine that pulling 100 million gallons of water from an aquifer from so far away could impact us, but we don’t have the data to show that it doesn’t. “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 added.
Nation agreed. “No one knows [what the result could be], and my fear is that the state will get us into a position where we are suffering and there won’t be any recourse for us.”
“I wish I understood” how the IEDC could justify a project for which ramifications can’t be predicted, Nation said.
“I think that one thing that this whole situation illustrates is that we have some work to do in Indiana on water rights and who gets them, what they mean, how durable they are.”
Nation said communities are calling on the “state legislature to get some legislation on water-rights issues so that this isn’t a Wild West kind of thing.” Nation likened the Lebanon LEAP project to Indiana’s legislature smiling on Wabash Valley Resources’ efforts to construct two deep underground injection wells for carbon dioxide in West Terre Haute and Vermillion County despite residents’ opposition — more evidence, he says, of government’s cavalier attitude toward Wabash Valley communities.
“It feels like to me that [these projects are being] seen through this lens: ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter. We’ll sequester carbon over there and do a big experiment and if the Wabash River gets poisoned, well, those people don’t matter.’ It’s similar with this.”
In September, IEDC said that initial modeling showed the aquifer would be able to support enough water for the Boone County business park in Lebanon without impacting water supplies along the Wabash River in Tippecanoe County.
On its website, it said, “The IEDC is contracting with INTERA , an environmental and water resource consulting firm, to conduct a study ensuring this path forward will not negatively impact Lafayette or any other communities. … The study has shown promising initial results and will be complete and shared [by the end of the year].”
IEDC added, “The study is designed to evaluate and investigate the Lafayette area and build predictive groundwater flow models of the river/aquifer systems with projected water yields, allowing the IEDC and other state agencies to weigh a number of options, determine the best path forward and ultimately come up with the most effective and most efficient strategy for increasing water to central Indiana. … “This process will enable us to build comprehensive models that consider relevant factors, such as surface water/ groundwater interaction, seasonal changes, groundwater recharge rates, and neighboring water uses; inform various pumping scenarios to determine water yield; and predict what will happen in the hydrologic system, locally and regionally, if changes [i.e. various flow and pumping scenarios] are made to the system.”
Beyond the unknown fallout from the pipeline draining water from the Wabash, there are other environmental concerns, Nation noted.
“River water goes 35 miles through a pipeline from Lafayette to Lebanon to be used by a semiconductor chip factory or whatever, and then what?” he said. “It doesn’t go away — it gets treated and then it gets discharged where they’re not sure yet, either a tributary of the White River or the Eagle Creek Reservoir, which then finds its way into Indianapolis.
“There’s a lot of plastic pollution that end up in the water that’s been used for these semi-conductor chips,” he added. “It doesn’t come out in wastewater treatment — it persists. They’re forever chemicals and this could end up having ramifications on other water sheds depending on how much of it there is and what processes it does or doesn’t go through at the industrial use that it’s earmarked for.” Nation doubted that Terre Haute’s resolution would strike much fear into the IEDC.
“What does a non-binding expression of sentiment from the city of Terre Haute mean to the IEDC?” he said. “Probably not very much. It’s noteworthy that 10 other communities have done this. … The people closest to it in Lafayette and West Lafayette were immediately on this — the battleground is up in that area.”
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