After detecting chemical residues in drinking well water north of Fort Hall for the past several years, officials are hoping tighter regulations will finally begin reducing the contamination.
"We haven't seen any chemical drops yet that we can attribute to our new rules," said Roger Turner, water quality specialists for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. "We expect to eventually see improvement, but we don't expect the drops to show up for quite a while."Early test results are still being compiled. But as testing continues on the 26,000-acre strip of land where high nitrogen fertilizer levels have plagued domestic wells, farmers are cooperating fully with the Fort Hall Business Council's new farm chemical code, Turner said.
It requires regular soil and leaf samples from fields to measure nitrogen use and maintenance of records on amounts and types of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides used. Farmers must also prove the necessity of making additional field applications.
And another regulation requires back flow prevention devices on irrigation pumps.
The Business Council is using $110,000 in federal funds to drill deep wells at up to 10 sites in the target area. Samples from them will be compared with water from the traditional 100-foot wells in the area to see whether the deeper wells are uncontaminated.