The borough’s first step of mapping ground water flow and behavior in a select area of Nikiski has been completed.
DOWL HKM was contracted by the borough and began surveying wells in November.
Environmental Specialist Zachary Huff helped recap the findings of the data collected from 60 wells and four lakes during Monday night’s Nikiski Community Council meeting.
Huff: “We did a desktop analysis and followed that up with some field measurements to produce a groundwater model. Which basically identified two aquifers, a lower and an upper in that Nikiski area. The lower aquifer was very definitive and a flow direction was established with a lot of confidence. The upper aquifer appears to be a series of isolated aquifers, some of them may be connected, there may be several individual ones that are absolutely isolated from anything else. And those were a little bit more chaotic and were unable to be mapped as a cohesive unit.”
Huff explained that the lower aquifer trends north and west and is confined in a clay and silt layer.
In the company’s presentation they acknowledged that there seem to have been discrepancies between aquifer studies done before but it was because those studies did not isolate which aquifer they were attempting to assess.
Council President Fred Miller…
Miller: “I thought the visuals that they presented there, the glacial deposits, the way the subsurface terrain is possibly connected and channeled, anyways I thought it was a very professional presentation, I learned a lot.”
As far as the next step, the full report lists a series of possibilities but those must be determined by borough administration based on budget and what studies would financially make sense moving forward with.
For that full study, click here.