PCA launches new interactive Groundwater Contamination Atlas

For most Minnesotans, we walk our beloved cities, valleys, plains and river basins not knowing the status of the groundwater we’re standing on.

“You are probably blissfully unaware because you trust someone to be taking care of your drinking water, lakes and rivers,” said Anne Morris, Remediation Division Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Coordinator with Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (PCA) and MAPE Local 301 treasurer.

Thanks to Morris and a few other groundwater experts – and a lot of work organizing decades of data – the PCA and the public have more groundwater information at its fingertips than ever before. The PCA recently launched a one-stop shop for Minnesotans to find information about groundwater contamination, via an easy-to-navigate web platform, Minnesota Groundwater Contamination Atlas.

Knowing that building such a database would require not only mapping and GIS expertise, but also IT proficiency, Morris reached out to her fellow MAPE member and MNIT@PCA colleague Jason Ewert, GIS Application Analyst. For Ewert, the Atlas was an opportunity to modernize access to information in a way that worked for those who needed it.

“From a MNIT perspective, the Atlas shows off our ability to build modern, full stack applications that take advantage of the database, ReSTful APIs, and the Angular web framework,” Ewert said. “Another innovation is the integration of our web GIS with the Angular framework in a way that is seamless for the users.”

Prior to the Atlas platform, data about groundwater status was not easily accessible to the public, and very little information was available digitally, so people had little or no idea if they were living on contaminated land, and no easy way to find out.

 “Four or five years ago, we didn’t have maps of contamination sites; it was a huge unknown,” Morris said. “And when it’s below your feet, it’s easy to ignore.”

But Morris could not ignore the millions of soil samples’ worth of data that existed only in PDF format.

“We had millions of dollars of sampling data that the state and private businesses collect. It’s our responsibility to merge it all together and share it with the public,” Morris said. 

It’s been three years since Morris first applied for a grant that would allow for the hiring of new groundwater experts, two of whom would be hired full time after the grant ended, meaning the Atlas project also helped create jobs in a tight economy.

They spent a year planning before jumping into the three-year process of digitizing decades of data that previously lived solely on PDFs; data from more than 100 sites, 13,000 monitoring locations and 1.3 million samples of analytical data. Now, for the first time, that information can be easily queried with a click of a mouse.

“The Atlas, along with our new permit application user interfaces, integrate the map and search function by mapping all search results as well as by creating search results from the map’s current extent,” Ewert said. “These workflows purposefully mimic those of Google Maps for a user experience that is familiar and easy to understand.”

In the first month of the Atlas going live, nearly 1,300 non-PCA users visited the website.

“We assume they’re homeowners interested in a part of Minnesota who want to know if the groundwater underneath them is safe,” Morris said. “A lot of technical people also need this data to do their jobs and protect ordinary people who don’t know about groundwater – other state agencies, researchers and counties and cities, too.”

Morris said the project continues to grow as more information can be added to existing sites and the team hopes to add 100 new sites from the closed landfill program. 

“This Atlas is a one-of-a-kind resource, and I’m really proud of all the teamwork that’s gone into it,” she said.

The Minnesota Groundwater Contamination Atlas is just another great example of how MAPE members – even during a pandemic, and while working from home – are finding new ways to make Minnesota better.