Executive Summary It has been said that Indiana’s water quality is at the poorest it has ever been and reasoning behind this is simple, technology. Indiana’s waterways are being polluted like never before due to do a variety of different things such as advanced fertilizers and pesticides for crops, dumping of industrial chemicals, vehicle and boat pollution, along with livestock waste spewing into the waterways. Without action this small and sometimes unnoticed problem could grow out of hand by the time a plan is put into action to stop and prevent the pollution. In Indiana there are 92 counties and, without a doubt, there are multiple waterways that are being polluted but specifically there is one in White County. Monticello, Indiana is …show more content…
Indiana Beach has been open since 1926, and first handedly seeing the equipment the rides have not been updated in many years. Without new technology to take the rides environmentally healthy these machines product air pollution along with the dumping of chemicals directly into Lake Shafer. Another form of regular pollution coming from Indiana Beach is the water park that was added in recent years. There are different pools in the area, but a majority of the people use the “beach area” that is sandy area that is directly connected to Lake Shafer as seen in Figure 2. Seeing the water along should cause concern but every year there is an extensive amount of feces dumped along with immeasurable amount of trash dumped into Lake Shafer. All of these factors contribute to the poor water quality in Monticello, but no one problem can be held to the full responsibly for the …show more content…
Purdue University’s Hydrologic Impacts Group studied Indiana’s agricultural land area and the subsurface drainage. In Purdue’s article, “Potentially Drained Area in Hoagland Watershed” it stated, “This potentially drained area was mapped from the National Agricultural Statistic Service (NASS) land cover dataset, as well as soil drainage class and soil slope data from the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS)”. The Purdue research team researched the different land classifications, the soil slope, and the potential drainage area. Purdue’s reports show that in some areas there is an extremely high amount of drainage. The drainage could be caused from the local grazing farm animals in the fields that the farms are raising. An example of this type of water pollution would be Figure 3 where a cow is standing in the stream and/or ditch. It is very common for cattle farms to have their farm animals on lands with streams for their bows to have easy access to water. The problem with this is that the livestock could have different types of bacteria that could affect the human immune system or the farm animals could increase the amount of manure which travels to Lake