Network of wells allows residents to fill up at dozens of watering holes
Braving subzero temperatures and icy side-walks ,77-year-old Yury Sansevych walks every day to one of the city’s 70 artisan wells to fill bottles with water.
“I prefer the well water because it looks, smells and tastes better than tap water,” he explained.
Leonid Stepanets, a Zhytomyr oblast resident, has similar reasons for frequent trips to the artesian wells.
“The centralized water system is unhealthy, you can smell the chlorine,” said Stepanets, who works in Kyiv. “I use this water to fill the office samovar.”
For those who can’t afford bottled water, artesian wells are the cheapest alternative for clean water, said Vyacheslav Prokopov, head of the Kyiv Institute of Hygienic Medicine.
A 1999 study conducted by Mama-86, a non-governmental environmental organization, indicated that 77 percent of the city’s residents believe their tap water is inadequately treated.
In response to the public’s demand for unchlorinated drinking water, in 1998 Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko initiated the Municipal Alternative Drinking Water Program.
It gave the public an alternative to tap water, which has high levels of chlorine, said Anna Tsvetkova, a coordinator for Mama-86. There are more than 130 artesian wells operating in Kyiv.
“Building the wells was the best thing Omelchenko has done for our city’s ecological problems,” Sansevych said.
Yet for people like Stepanets, who live outside of Kyiv, fetching water from an artesian well requires a trip to the city.
Because most rural towns don’t have centralized water systems, residents pump their water from shallow wells.
Artesian wells extract water from at least 300 meters underground so the water contains fewer hazardous groundwater contaminants. Natural filtration occurs as groundwater percolates down through rock and sandy loam. Artesian well water is trapped under great pressure between layers of rock. When the well is drilled, the pressure forces the water up through the hole.
Despite public demand for artesian wells, most regional water supply and sanitation departments do not have the money to pay for them, Tsvetkova said.
She said the average artesian well costs $7,000 to $10,000 to drill.
“It’s a shame because people are concerned about the health risks [of their water],” Tsvetkova added.
While research has shown that artesian well water in urban areas like Kyiv meet state quality standards for contaminants, the same cannot be said for water in towns like Artyomivsk in Donetsk Oblast.
A study by the Mama-86 and the Women in Europe for a Common Future, a non-governmental organization based in the Netherlands, found that the water supply in Artyomivsk is polluted with mercury by 15 to 20 times the maximum allowable level and with nitrates by four to five times the level. The area draws its water from the heavily polluted Seversky Donets-Donbass water channel.
Long-term exposure to mercury causes kidney damage, and exposure to high levels of nitrate can cause methemoglobinemia, or suffocation due to lack of oxygen supply to the cells. The condition primarily affects infants.
