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WAYSIDE — The well water in the unincorporated community of Wayside in the south end of the Town of Morrison is being threatened by e coli and coliform bacteria.

Six wells have been found contaminated and test results were pending on eight more.

“So far, everybody who has had their wells tested has it,” said Jeff Gibbons, 3668 Wayside Road, at the far west end of the village.

He was apparently the first person to realize something was wrong on Jan. 24.

“I smelled manure in my water,” Gibbons said. “I can’t point a finger at a source.”

He got his water tested and the results confirmed his suspicions.
His contaminated well was about 80 feet deep.

Gibbons had a new well drilled to a depth of about 300 feet, and there is no contamination in the water from the new well.

Gibbons appeared at Tuesday night’s meeting of the Morrison Town Board and said the community needs to be warned.

“It is not safe for kids, the elderly or people with low immunity,” Gibbons said. “Everybody should be made aware of it.”

Sheralee Reetz lives in the center of the village at 8294 County W and said her well also tested positive for both bacteria.

She said her well water also was smelling strange, but warned that the water can be contaminated without any aroma of fecal matter.

“Two doors down from me, they had no odor but it tested positive for e coli and coliform,” she said. “But mine stunk.”

Town Chairman Todd Christensen said he received some phone calls informing him that there may be a problem with well contamination in the Wayside area.

He alerted the Brown County Conservation Department and the state Department of Natural Resources, and said both agencies are looking into the situation.

“I feel we should find out the source (of the contamination),” Christensen said. “Right now, we have no way to tell where it came from without expensive testing.”

Gibbons said he was told the tests necessary to gather evidence to identify the source of contamination would cost $1,600.

Testing wells for bacterial contamination is much less costly, and Christensen urged people in the Wayside area to get their water tested now.

Christensen is asking people in Wayside to contact their neighbors and make them aware of the problem.

“We don’t know that the problem is only in Wayside,” Christensen said. “We have to look out for our natural resources.”

The urban communities in the Town of Morrison are served by a sanitary sewer district, but the area has no municipal water supply, so each home or business has its own private well for potable water.

A similar problem a year ago in the community of Lark, in the northeast corner of the Town of Morrison, was believed to be caused by manure spread on area farm fields in the winter.

Christensen said it is too early to identify an exact source for the new contamination in Wayside, which is several miles south of Lark.

“There is a possibility that a pipe in our sewer system could be broken,” Christensen said.

Neal Zastrow, a partner in the Parkview retirement home in Wayside, said that facility has a deep well.

“We were advised not to drill the well shallower than 200 feet,” Zastrow said.

Ed Byrne can be reached at 920-532-0054 or by e-mail at ebyrne@wrightstownpostgazette.com.