ABSTRACTFew would argue that ground‐water pollution is a problem and that serious ground‐water pollution problems do exist. As serious as some isolated ground‐water pollution problems are, regionally and nationally, it is only a limited problem. An industrial landfill may result in a leachate plume contaminating ground water over an area of up to several square miles downgradient from the disposal site. Municipal landfills or chemical/petroleum spills can result in polluted ground water over areas measured in square miles. Surrounding these areas of ground‐water pollution, however, are tens and hundreds of square miles of area where the ground water moving through the aquifers maintains its natural good quality. The ratio of good quality to contaminated water is such that ground‐water pollution can really only be considered as a limited problem.The problem will most likely remain limited as existing and future regulations continue to restrict the poor disposal practices that have been responsible for much of the past and existing pollution problems. Technology has advanced to the point that with proper management and sound governmental regulations, control, isolation and cleanup of contamination sources and areas of polluted ground water can be so effective that migration of the pollution front can be stopped and actually reversed with time.The same technology that provided us with the new chemicals and the wastes that show up in water analyses, has also provided us with the means of detecting many more contaminants at much lower levels of concentration in a water sample than was possible 50, 25 or even 10 years ago. One must thus ask, has ground‐water pollution really become a national crisis, or do we just know more about an old problem made apparently more complicated by our own technologic
展开▼
