By Ryan Heaton
A BYU honor student''s thesis became a source of useful information Wednesday, Nov. 7, to the Mapleton City Council, which is trying to prevent dangerous contaminants from leaking into Mapleton''s water supply.
John Bailey, major in civil and environmental engineering at BYU, presented his honors thesis to Mapleton City Council Wednesday night.
Bailey built a flow model of Mapleton''s groundwater to help council members understand better how Mapleton''s water flows.
'I learned a lot,' said Bailey.
Professor Wayne Downs of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at BYU was Bailey''s faculty advisor. Downs said Mapleton had good reason to be interested in Bailey''s thesis.
'They''re concerned about their groundwater,' said Downs.
Downs said Mapleton had shut down the use of its groundwater because of the potential for contamination by some of the factories at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon.
Downs cited water contamination as a possible reason some of Mapleton''s residents had contracted a form of cancer.
Six years ago, a lawsuit was brought against Trojan Powder plant, located at the mouth of Spanish Fork canyon, because Mapleton residents believed Trojan was responsible for contaminating Mapleton''s groundwater with explosives.
At Mapleton''s City Council meeting, Downs introduced Bailey''s presentation by stating the value of the information Bailey was there to present.
'We just have some information to share,' Downs told the Council. 'We have no financial interest or political interest in the issue.'
Downs also prefaced Bailey''s presentation with a disclaimer by stating that the information Bailey had collected could not tell the council how fast the water moves through the ground, nor could it determine how long it would take to clean up the ground water.
Bailey presented his model in a slide show, displaying the composition of the ground and the direction of the water flow in three-dimensional diagrams.
Bailey used a computer program named FENWATER to calculate the direction of the water flow at thousands of points on the model. Bailey used data extracted by the U.S. Geological Society as input to the program.
Mapleton City Council member Don Walker asked Bailey about the potential flow of contaminants to Mapleton''s ground wells. Bailey''s model showed heavy water flow into the ground wells.
Bailey said that the program, if configured with the appropriate data, could eventually predict how long it would take contaminants to flow a given distance.
'There are a lot of possibilities with a model like this,' Bailey said.