WAUKESHA, Wis. — An important anniversary for the city of Waukesha: today–Wednesday, October 9–marks one year since the city transitioned to using Lake Michigan for its drinking water. The entire project was completed two weeks earlier than anticipated after years of preparation to minimize the impact to residents.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources confirmed that an average of 8.2 million gallons of lake water would be diverted to Waukesha on a daily basis. This came following a decades-long process of conversations, research and pitches to leaders in the Great Lakes states and Canadian provinces, who uphold a pact that restricts non-lakefront communities from drawing Lake Michigan’s water.
Waukesha Water Utility General Manager Dan Duchniak outlined his involvement in the process on the “Talkin Waukesha” podcast with hosts Andrew Noffke and Anthony Tirrell. Residents could even watch the transition through the city’s pipes with an interactive map.
Duchniak said working on the transition to Lake Michigan water was not just about concerns for the radium levels in the water. “It was about the long-term sustainability of our water supply and how we wanted to address that,” he said. “We could have installed radium treatment, and we would have spent $100 million dollars putting radium treatment on our wells. However, we’d have been in the place that we were at, you know, where we were at 20 to 30 years out, it would have been a bandaid.”
He said they originally didn’t even consider Lake Michigan as an option because he didn’t think it was on the table as they reviewed alternatives. “We have this body of water that’s 15 miles to the east of us, and it’s sustainable in the long term if we put the water back, why don’t we potentially have that as our source,” Duchniak said. “Now the residents of Waukesha won’t ever have to worry about their water supply again, which is what we wanted [at] the onset of this”. He admitted that the entire project was pricey but it was “worth every penny”. The estimated cost for the project in 2023 was listed as $286 million.
Part of the agreement for the transition included returning water back to the Great Lake, since water as a natural resource doesn’t have many alternatives. The Waukesha Water Utility says that so far in 2024, over 1.4 billion gallons have been returned to the Root River and over 1.3 billion have been returned to the Fox River.
