DID YOU KNOW???

51% of the people living in the United States depend on groundwater for their drinking water needs.

This fun fact and others are included on our newest bookmark which reminds all of us that we need to help keep groundwater clean!  Each bookmark features a trivia question and a fun fact about groundwater.

Are you a teacher or environmental educator?  Then these bookmarks are for you!  They make a perfect tool to help students learn and understand just how important groundwater is and how they can be involved in protecting it. 

For this and many more cool educational tools, check out:  http://www.groundwater.org/sc/sc.html

                                               

Why I Believe Groundwater is the Right Choice!

You may have recently received a request to consider becoming a member of The Groundwater Foundation or to renew your membership if you have previously supported them.  Like everyone you probably receive several requests for membership this time of year and have to decide who you can support.  So as you contemplate where your limited support dollars go, let me share a few reasons why The Groundwater Foundation is a good, if not critical, choice.

The educational programs of The Groundwater Foundation inspire groundwater protection actions that will ensure:

·         Your two year old grandchild will have safe, clean water to drink.

·         Your dog, Fluffy, will have water to bathe and nourish her.

·         Your teenage child will be able to play in the local lake.

·         Your family will have food on the table that has been grown with groundwater.

For these reasons and many more, I make sure that The Groundwater Foundation is among the organizations that I support each and every year.  Make sure you do too!

Click here to join today and ensure sustainable, clean groundwater for today and for future generations.

Protect Your Groundwater Day & Water1der

 Protect Your Groundwater Day is coming up on Tuesday, Sept. 11. What are you and your community going to do to protect groundwater on that day and every day?

 

Here are some ideas from the National Ground Water Association...

http://www.ngwa.org/Media-Center/press/2012/Pages/2012-09-05-pygwd.aspx

 

And now that we have you thinking about this most precious resource, The Groundwater Foundation will soon be launching “Water1der”, a mobile groundwater awareness trivia game app, developed by SectorNow, which will be available free of charge from the Apple app store.

Through a fun educational game, players test their knowledge about groundwater, pollution prevention, conservation, irrigation, the water cycle, aquifers, recycling, water sheds, water use and wells. Players will “spin” a wheel on the app to determine the topic of the question. The formats vary from traditional ones, such as multiple choice, word scramble, matching and true/false to formats such as drag and drop, where players can move words to areas to label parts of the aquifer; moving, where players can select an item to be placed into the correct area; scrolling, where players can click their finger on the right answer as it moves across the screen; and timer, where players will touch the screen to stop a timer at the right number.

 

It’s coming soon. Follow Water1der on Facebook and you will be the first to know when it’s ready to be downloaded: https://www.facebook.com/Water1der

 

 

 

 

Let's Be Honest Here

By Brian Reetz, Program Coordinator

Water is sometimes a topic around the dinner table at my home and with the drought that we've been experiencing it has become a topic almost nightly. My daughter, Colbi, who is a senior at Lincoln Southeast High School, wrote this essay for her AP Literature Class.

            Let’s be honest here, usually national news or even local news doesn’t phase me beyond sports or the occasional major crime, but one thing that has gotten under my skin in the local news department is water. The water we drink, the water we use to water our lawns, the water we use to bathe: is being used up. Used up meaning close to 60 million gallons of water a day is being used. But, that’s about as much as we always have used in a day. So what’s the problem? The problem is we’re in a drought. One of the worst droughts in history and we’re still using the same amount of water we have been using in a day for a while.

            When mostly everyone’s lawns in the entire city have turned many shades of brown, a green lawn sticks out like a sore thumb. Since August 9^th, the Lincoln Police Department has been issuing warnings and now ticketing at every single offense they are brought light of, of a resident of Lincoln watering their lawn on a day that is not assigned to them. The city of Lincoln, Nebraska has major water restrictions that I can only applaud them for approving. Now, what gets under my skin are the offenders.

            The Platte River is drying up. I can see it with my own eyes every time I take a trip to Omaha. There are brown strips of dried up sand in the middle of the river that look like you could walk right across, the blue you see is in the minority. Yet, people in this city, a city that basically retrieves its water from the Platte, still do not believe that our water is on the verge of drying up completely if we don’t do something about it! These non-believers have been known to: water their lawns on days that aren’t assigned to them, or water 3x as much on days that are assigned to them. I am getting tired of hearing that so many people are getting ticketed and fined for pure stupidity and uniformity. If everyone knew just how much danger we are in at this time then I’m sure this mandatory water restriction would be receiving so many more benefits than just a few less gallons being used up.

            The offenders won’t be laughing anymore when they turn on their faucet to take a shower, or even press their cup against the water dispenser on the refrigerator and barely get a drip out of it. I hope I never have to see that day.

Also read this link from Lincoln's Public Safety Director that ties into what Colbi wrote about:

http://lpd304.blogspot.com/2012/08/explanations-abound.html