In order to solve the problem Bill project had three main objectives: To delineate the ground water basins of the Summer, Auburn, and Shakertown springs, to determine the available water for use by the city at these springs and to propose recommendations to the city as to their options for use of these three springs once the above two goals were met. I will now review the procedures he used in solving each of the three steps.
First Bill made an exhaustive search of the literature for any previous Karst hydrological projects done. He found many of these and from them he was able to find the locations of several caves, get some initial well data, and get the results from some earlier dye traces in adjoining water basins. Once this was done, he set off to measure all the water wells in the region in order to have the data necessary to form an potentiometric map (Water table map) of the area of study. During this time he also ran a Karst hydrological survey of the region in order to discover the caves, Karst windows, blue holes, springs and swallets of the region. Most of the above well and hydrologic data were done by field work although some of the data was obtained through research and then checked in the field for its validity. Finally, Bill ran many dye traces in order to prove the boundaries of the different basins and to establish the main paths of water flow whenever possible. From all this data he constructed a hydrologic map of the three basins that included their boundaries, potentiometric surface, and location of the wells and Karst features within the area of study.
In order to determine the amount of water available for the city at each spring, Bill constructed stilling wells to measure the stream stages of the spring, and also conducted discharge measurements over a period of a year. He also was able to obtain data from records at Auburn. From this data he was able to determine the amount of water flowing from the springs that could be used by the city of Auburn.
From this data Bill was able to draw conclusions and make recommendations to the city of Auburn as how to deal with their water problem. There were five recommendations given to the city, the choice of which solution was to be determined by need and the availability of money. The first solution was for the city to do nothing and absorb the environmental fines in the name of lesser costs than the other alternatives. The second was to purchase water from the East Logan County Utility District when their own supply ran low, again in the name of lesser short term cost. The third choice which was definitely the preferable one was to use the Shakertown spring to supplement the towns water supply and to help the Summer spring to dilute the cities waste. This unfortunately was costly with 4 miles of horizontal pipe and 60 feet of head to be overcome.
The final two solutions, were to pump water from a Karst windows linked to the conduit that fed the Shakertown spring. These could be simply pumped over the basins divide to naturally flow to summer spring. Lesser volumes of water could be produced from these windows then from Shakertown spring (Which received other tributary conduits downstream from them) and a large head difference of 120 feet for the larger discharge window and 40 feet for the smaller upstream window had to be overcome. Again cost effectiveness was an issue in the choice.
So what is my opinion of this thesis. I really enjoyed this one. I helped Bill with some of the dye traces, hydrological survey and the construction of the stilling wells. plan on doing a similar well head protection survey of my own as my Thesis. I was glad to have a chance to read this thesis as I will presumably be writing one of my own in the future very similar to this one. (And I had a legitimate excuse to do it this time! ) This thesis was thorough, used most of the research methods I was taught in my hydrology classes, and was a great contribution to the community of Auburn. I cant think of any real faults, other than the lack of fine tuning on some of the external boundaries. This is a good Thesis! Now stop giving us papers so I can start mine! =)