Community Profile: West Lafayette - Purdue, Indiana

Population Served: approx. 30,000


West Lafayette is the town of Purdue University’s main campus. The city of West Lafayette has a population of about 30,000. Purdue University has 36,000 students for most of the year.

Lesson to be learned: Cooperation with another community can make the job go smoother. Having many people involved assures the process will continue, even if one or two people transfer out.


 

Purdue has a separate water system from the city, but both systems draw water from the same aquifer, and the wellfields are less than two miles from each other. It was a natural partnership for these two systems to work closely with one another toward wellhead protection planning.

The West Lafayette and Purdue communities decided to use the same consulting firm to delineate the wellhead protection areas, thinking that there was a possibility that the areas might overlap. The delineation showed that the areas were separate, but that only about one city block separated one area from the other. Because only this thin strip of land that was in neither area, the teams decided to protect the larger area. And set their wellhead protection area boundaries to include both the delineated boundaries and the thin strip between. The two systems also shared resources and personnel to complete the contaminant source inventory.

Midway through 2000, both Purdue and West Lafayette underwent water management changes. Because of the thorough and professional manner in which the wellhead protection process had been run, these management changes were accomplished with little significant interruption to the wellhead protection planning process.

The two systems decided it would be beneficial to work separately on the management aspect of wellhead protection planning. The needs of a major teaching and research university and those of a residential and industrial community are diverse enough to require different management techniques. Neither system has completed the entire plan, but both are progressing well.