Dunn County has received a grant under the EPA Small Communities Big Challenges program to conduct a study of groundwater contamination in the county. More than half of the people in Dunn County depend on unregulated private wells for their water supply. The expenses and difficulty of well testing make tracking the safety of the groundwater in the county difficult.
In 2023 the county approved a well-testing program to determine the base level of contaminants. Over 1000 wells were tested, and the testing continued into 2024. The original story about the grant and the well testing results can be found in the links attached.
Links
Memberships
Support our news coverage with a membership!
Over here at Eye On Dunn County there is a lot to be thankful for. Personally, I am thankful to have a wonderful partner and a whole crew of sweet animals to share my life with. All of them delight and amuse me on a daily basis.
But on the business end there is a lot to be thankful for as well. I'm thankful for all of you who have chosen to support this endeavor either financially or spiritually. This includes all of the members and donors as well as the organizations that have been helpful to make this website actually profitable for the first time.
We have received many types of support from LION Publishers in the past year. Our benefits always outweigh our dues, but this year we have received a grant from their sustainability audit program, a free Canva subscription for our staff, a Cloudflare business subscription, and much-valued support and advice.
We have received a free subscription to a partial Associated Press news feed for the election season (thank you AP for your help) as well as access to election results. AP has also just given us a free subscription to the AP Stylebook.
Our grant through LION was mediated through the Google News Initiative and The Knight Foundation, both of whom I want to personally thank for their support - it has made a big difference to our sustainability, and has allowed me to hire two freelance reporters, for whom I am also thankful. You will see more from them in the coming months, including wider coverage of government meetings and local events.
And yes, you may have noticed that the site was down for a few hours this morning until I noticed all of the text messages I had received while sound asleep. I am thankful for the sleep, but not so much for what in the technical word we refer to as "Faw Down, Go Boom". There seems to be some oddity where once in a while the database server is spinning itself out of control and using all of the memory available after which things get ugly. I am putting Mariadb on a memory diet for the holiday and hope she will stop ballooning up and crowding out everyone else on the server.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I am going to take it a little easy today (this is helped by how many government meetings are canceled this week) and will soon start working on a nice little Thanksgiving dinner with Cynthia, after which we will eat ourselves into a pleasant stupor. I hope your Thanksgiving is as good as mine.
Steve Hanson
Publisher
Steve is a member of LION Publishers , the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, the Menomonie Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Local Media Consortium, is active in Health Dunn Right, and is vice-president of the League of Women Voters of the Greater Chippewa Valley.
He has been a computer guy most of his life but has published a political blog, a discussion website, and now Eye On Dunn County.
Add new comment