(upbeat music)
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
This week, find out why some suburbs of Green Bay
chose to pass up a nearby drinking water supply
for one more than 35 miles away.
I don't think that was ever a real issue as to
a mayor or a village president saying, "Damn it,
I'm, you know, we're gonna do whatever it takes
to avoid Green Bay."
Discover the ancient secret this man uses
to help homeowners find well water.
They told me stories about how they couldn't find water
at their houses and they had to become out
and he found water for them.
And meet two women from Jamesville
who helped shape our country's history.
They marched literally march on city hall,
down the streets of Jamesville.
Women didn't do this sort of thing.
Plus, we'll take you to a car rally
where it's not about what's under the hood
but rather what's painted on top of it.
It's all in Wisconsin.
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lion's energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
UW Health, providing specialty and primary care
for all ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health, Physicians, and Clinics
and on University of Wisconsin Hospital
is available on the web.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, providing local education
for the crucial occupations essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, communities first.
- Mark Twain is supposed to have once said,
whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting about.
There are any specific citations of where Twain
made that statement but he could have been
talking about Brown County.
That's where Green Bay and its suburbs
have been arguing about the best way
to replace radium contaminated well water
with clean water from Lake Michigan.
Reporter Art Hackett takes us through the watery dispute.
- I don't mind drinking this water
and I do drink this water all the time.
Pretty tasty too.
I don't mind drinking it.
Bob and Katie Van Den Hewvel were among the first people
to move into their subdivision and the rapidly growing
Green Bay suburb of Bellevue.
- We built our home almost 20 years ago.
This was all field, all field.
- Water for the Van Den Hewvel's home
and all the new ones in Bellevue is pumped from wells.
But Bob Van Den Hewvel, a Realtor who also serves
on Bellevue's plan commission, says
that's no longer a viable option.
- The hardness is there and also the EPA is indicated
that we have too much radium in our water.
- Radium is an element frequently found in hard water.
It's linked to immune problems, anemia
and some forms of cancer.
- I'm not that particularly fussy about the taste.
My contention is you don't know what the long-term
ramifications are.
So-- - Love the radium.
- Right.
- Bellevue probably has the most severe case
of water problems, but so the surrounding communities
have the same problem.
(waves crashing)
This is the solution to those problems,
a pipeline which will run southeast
all the way to Manitowak.
That city draws its water directly from Lake Michigan.
- This is the pipe.
Each section is four feet around and 50 feet long.
Each one costs between $6,000 and $7,000.
The section of the pipeline that's this big around
is about 35 miles long.
- With installation, debt service and other costs
it works out to about $110 million
plus another $25 million to expand
Manitowak's water treatment plant.
The project should be complete and in service
by the end of 2006.
What may be debated beyond that point
is whether this represents the best
in cooperation between local governments
or the worst of infighting among them.
- In my opinion, it's a combination of
urban suburban, fear and low thing.
- John Brogan is a paper industry executive
who served more than 25 years on the Green Bay
Water Commission.
That city is divided by a river and is on a bay,
but the local surface water is not fit to drink.
When the city of Green Bay and the suburbs
built water systems, they relied on wells.
Until the mid-1950s.
- Green Bay and the few suburbs were drawing
13 million gallons a day off the aquifer.
The aquifer was dropping like a rock.
- The solution then, as now, was a pipeline.
In 1957, Brogan's father helped build a link
to the clean Lake Michigan water off Kuwani.
Brogan says when Green Bay stopped pumping water,
the suburbs wells started to recover.
- And Bingo, they had flowing wells all over.
Then it started to drop in the '60s and drop in the '80s.
And then they had this water quality problem
as it dropped, it got more and more heavy metals in it.
- Some of the local communities were finding out
that the water levels were dropping
and we were basically mining water.
We were chasing water.
As you go down in the wells, the water quality isn't as good
as it is on the top.
So you're dropping off like the bottom of the barrel.
- Bell View Public Works Director Ron Eumentum
is the president of the Central Brown County Water Authority.
It's an association of six suburbs
which banded together to build the pipeline.
But before they decided to do that,
the suburbs first approached the city of Green Bay
about a combined water system.
The Central Brown County Water Authority
brought us proposals that would have had
us serving them in a conventional way.
In other words, using our pipe.
- After all, Green Bay already had invested
in the pipeline to Coani and a treatment plant
to process Lake Water.
- Some of the biggest suburbs are adjacent
to Green Bay's water.
- But it turned out Green Bay wasn't alone
in wanting to sell Lake Michigan water.
Essentially I had picked up the phone and called them
and said, "Look, if you are looking at different options,
you might want to consider Manitwak as one of the options."
- Neil Exkateri says Manitwak had just updated
its water treatment plant in the late 90s.
To avoid a repeat of Milwaukee's cryptospiridium outbreak,
the plant included a state-of-the-art process
called micro-filtration.
- The way the plant was laid out is we had provision
for additional capacity to be added
without adding new buildings.
And at the same time when we built a micro-filtration plant,
we had actually retired our old sand filtration plant.
And there was also a lot of additional room available
in the filtration facility as part of that project.
- And we created the plant to be a regional water supplier.
We didn't know who our customers would be,
but we wanted to be able to have a very easily expandable plant
and decided on this technology.
- Mayor Crawford predicts we are entering an era
when there will be lots of cities looking
to import lake water.
If you live in one of those cities,
he says it would be worthwhile to pay attention
to the struggles between Green Bay and its suburbs.
Crawford's as people are used to the economics of water
based on local water supplying local users.
- The Green Bay operation wanted the people in the suburbs
to pay for their deteriorating underground infrastructure.
We didn't have any such needs.
Our first of all, our infrastructure is in great shape
comparatively speaking.
But more importantly, we were just in the process
and had the desire to sell water.
We didn't have any of the relationships
that had been established over the course of years.
- Green Bay in turn had to make sure its rates
would be fair to existing customers,
which included the area's paper mills.
- What the suburbs wanted was for us
to sell them wholesale water at 42% below the cost
that we were selling it to the mills at.
- I think it was July of 2004.
We opened up those bids and it came out
that Manitouac could offer us a better upfront rate.
Unfortunately, we still had to build this pipeline.
- Brogan, meanwhile, says the economics of the deal
will shift against the suburbs as the pipeline
to Manitouac ages and needs maintenance.
- And when asked at some meetings
about how they intend to provide for that,
their answer was we're not going to provide for it
whenever anything wears out, we'll borrow more money.
- As the pipeline crews work their way towards the lake,
the trench is open for less than a couple of hours.
The pipeline crews quickly bury the pipeline
and grade the surface smooth.
The local officials are now trying to bury the dispute.
- I don't think that was ever a real issue
as to a mayor or a village president saying,
"Damn it, we're gonna do whatever it takes
to avoid Green Bay."
- Well, I always hate to say a result of a feud.
I guess it was a result of a break in the negotiations.
'Cause I always think that maybe not today, but in the future,
we have two pipelines, two systems
that we can still probably enhance each system
by an interconnect.
- Who knows, someday the city and the suburbs
that once turned their backs on each other
may be able to back each other up?
- You know, we all want water, we all want good water.
So I think the cost factor wasn't as much of an issue.
And Bob Van den Hewibels' politicians may not realize
people worry about other things besides cost
when thinking about water, a safe and secure supply,
and that all important matter of taste.
- Sometimes if I drank Green Bay water,
it's got more of a taste to it than this.
This is taste pretty good.
- As in Brown County, many other cities face water supply
and quality problems.
An official with the Wisconsin DNR's Bureau
of Drinking Water and Groundwater says there are 42
municipal water systems in the state
under orders to reduce radium levels in their water.
It's uncertain how many of them will or can use
lake water as an alternative.
Our next report also deals with people searching for water,
but these folks are taking a very different route
to locating it.
As reporter Frederica Freiberg found,
they're turning to a man who uses an ancient art
that's a bit hard to explain and even tougher for some
to believe.
- Recently retired, but long time UW Board of Regents
president Toby Markovich has presided over many
important meetings, deciding urgent university policy.
- And at the end of the day, we make decisions based 100%.
For the best interest of the university Wisconsin system,
I have never-- - The superior trial attorney
has friends in high places.
Tommy Thompson appointed Markovich to
the Board of Regents in 1997.
- Do most of these fancy people that you hang around
with have any idea that you come out with coat hangers
and find water?
- I don't think so.
I've had enough trouble with those people as it is.
- She does water again?
(triumphant music)
- At locations across the Northland, like on the Paul
and Ginny Walker sheep farm outside Superior,
Toby Markovich, man of letters, witches for water.
- As it's witchcraft.
- He finds water under the ground using divining rods,
with suit coat flapping his big farm boots
trudged slowly toward the spot.
? It's strictly time ?
- Oh, here we go.
Right here, it was pretty good strong, Paul.
As you can see, those rods just crushed.
- Do that again.
- Using what he calls the "cheap and easy" method,
Markovich cuts a coat hanger into two L-shaped pieces
to serve as his divining rods.
- Wing?
- These flower pots cover the working well head,
where Ginny Walker dug for water at Markovich's
divine direction.
- I talked to enough people, real reputable people,
like bankers and things, who said, "Have Toby
witch your well?"
And they told me stories about how they couldn't find water
at their houses, and they had Toby come out
and he found water for them.
- Skeptics abound, of course.
- Like a little slower, I think of it.
- I gave it a shot.
It didn't work.
Some people got it, and some people don't.
You probably don't believe in Santa Claus either, if it.
- What do you attribute that to your ability?
I mean, I tried it, I didn't have it, what is it?
- Oh my good looks and intelligence probably.
(laughing)
I don't have a clue.
I have no idea.
- But theories about what it is abound, too.
- Some people think that the underground,
subterranean water that flows may create an electrical charge
either positive or negative that would then
by magnetism move the rods.
I don't know that that's a fact.
(upbeat music)
- I could drill anywhere in the property and get a well.
- For most professional well-drillers,
it's open and shot.
- I'd rather rely on what I know,
because I know what formations the water comes on of.
And I know how to find it.
And all us drillers in the area know how to find it that way.
- In fact, the unknown surrounding water-witching
or dousing, as it's also known, creates an aura of mysticism
that makes many drillers just plain nervous.
- Have you ever tried it?
- No, I won't touch the sticks.
- What?
- Scared of them.
- Water-dousing is thought to be as old as biblical days.
The term water-witching reportedly derived
from a dousers use of sticks pulled off which hazel trees.
But some believe it's more sinister.
- A lot of people get really concerned
about the witch part of witching.
And is a witch crop?
Is a witch crop?
- It said to expect me to come in on a rumor or something
and land on a spot.
- Would you have any other powers?
- Yeah, but I don't want to get on camera with those.
(laughing)
- For fourth generation well-driller Keith Lynn,
this is a serious and sensitive matter.
Still, he's ready to extend a branch if not a stick
to reputable dousers and work with them.
- I've heard of a lot of cases where water-dulls
were come in, where drillers could not get water.
And them stories are all up there too.
- It doesn't happen to me.
- In fact, Toby Markovich is batting a thousand.
He has successfully devined the spot to dig the well.
All 75 times he's been called on to witch for water
over the past 35 years.
- Water.
(laughing)
- Teaches on.
- Indeed.
- Winged.
(upbeat music)
? As it's witchcraft ?
? That crazy witchcraft ?
? And although I know it's strictly taboo ?
- Wisconsin Public Television takes us back in time next week
with the debut of a new series called Home Town Stories.
The series aims to tell the history of Wisconsin
one town at a time and has produced in partnership
with the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The first installment of the series takes
place in Jane'sville.
And in this excerpt, you'll meet two trailblazing
Jane'sville women who left their mark
on our nation's history.
(upbeat music)
After the Civil War, many of Jane'sville's women
who had kept businesses and households afloat
and worked tirelessly to support the troops
now work to continue a women's rights movement
that began in the 1850s.
- The rights of women, the right to vote
was very popular among ladies in the area.
- Most of the activists in Jane'sville
were also part of the temperance movement
to control the growing problem of post-civil war alcoholism.
- Temperance was a very, very big issue.
The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant emphasis
of the New Englanders was countered
by the Catholic wets, as they were called,
Irish and Germans who valued their alcoholic beverages.
- So a great many illegal saloons were operating on Sunday
and that was a cause of great consternation.
- Interestingly, in Jane'sville, I think we see the
beginning of what becomes a nationwide movement.
There is a Jane'sville group of women in 1873,
who are furious.
And they marched, literally march on city hall
down the streets of Jane'sville.
Women didn't do this sort of thing.
And demand that these aldermen who had been elected
promising to limit the number of tavern licenses,
will live up to that promise instead they got an office
and who cares, women can't vote, can't hurt the aldermen,
start granting licenses right and left.
And this is the first women's temperance crusade,
actually, that I find.
- Levinia Cadel, who would go on to become
Wisconsin's first woman lawyer, organized the demonstration
and wrote about it in local and national women's newspapers.
- I think that's how it gets picked up nationwide.
Women are becoming aware of what the Jane'sville women did,
why they did it, and more important, how they did it.
This is how you do a petition.
This is how you call a meeting.
These are things that women are not conversant with at the time.
They're not supposed to know these things.
In late 1873 and most of 1874, in every state and
every territory, more than 150,000
women nationwide, are marching down
streets with petitions that gotten women to sign.
They are singing hymns outside taverns.
They're doing all the things that Levinia Cadel
and her group, Dan and Jane'sville.
So this women's temperance crusade sweeps the country.
It affects a lot of change and powers a lot of women.
And in 1874, they have a convention as
crusade is winding down.
So we have to continue this work and join together
and found the woman's Christian temperance union,
as we've called it ever since the WCTU.
- Within five years, the WCTU elected
Francis Willard, a former Jane'sville resident,
to head the National Organization.
- And under Francis Willard, first of all, the organization,
grows phenomenally.
It becomes international, it becomes the largest women's
organization in the world.
She was born in upstate New York,
in the area that was called the Burned Over District.
But when she was six or seven in 1846, her family,
took up a farm about four miles from Jane'sville.
- As a strong, wild young girl, Francis Willard complained
that she was not allowed to do the same things
as her older brother.
- And she and her sister wanted to go to school,
just like he did.
And so she really begged to go to school.
The father finally broke down and built the
little schoolhouse.
- The Willard schoolhouse is now preserved
on the Rock County Fairgrounds, where hundreds of
school children can take a trip back in time.
- The teachers who had been interested
in the history of the little school in Francis Willard
got together and they decided that they would invite
the third graders at the end of their unit
on local history to come in and spend half a day.
And go through lessons the way that children did
153 years ago.
- Francis Willard went on with her schooling,
eventually becoming dean of women at
Northwestern University.
It was there she made the crucial decision
to devote the rest of her life to the temperance movement.
- And it changes the temperance movement forever.
It changes really the course of women's history
and therefore this nation's history forever
because of her incredible skills as a speaker,
as a writer, as a thinker, as a philosopher.
- Over the years Willard expanded the temperance movement
to include the larger issues of women's rights.
- Francis Willard brings them together
and shows the linkage, shows the causal relationship
between alcohol and women's impoverishment,
women's lack of education, violence against women,
violence against children, the destitution of a family.
If you became part of the WCTU, you got increasing information
that showed you that mainly women were not going to be
able to affect changes in laws until they had a voice in the
legal structure of this country until they could vote.
- You can watch the entire program,
hometown stories, Jamesville, on Wisconsin Public Television
when it airs Monday, May 8th at 8 p.m.
It repeats on Friday, May 12th at 9 p.m.
And again, on Sunday, May 14th at noon.
That's our program for this week.
Join us next time when we examine some research
that's trying to pinpoint the cause of pollution
off the shores of Door County.
- Door County is known for all of its water front.
We have over 300 miles of shorefront.
So those beaches are very important,
not just to the business community,
but to the residents and to the quality of life in Door County.
- What's in there?
- That's next time.
We leave you now with something a little different.
Back in 1980, Jamesville was described as a car town
fretting over troubles in the US auto industry
and rising gas prices.
Some things never change.
But on the other hand, some things do.
In 1980, Jamesville was trying to discourage drivers
from cruising its downtown circuit.
Now, Art Hackett reports they are celebrating it.
We leave you with Art's look at Jamesville's
Chevy's on the circuit, past and present.
- In 1980, for a certain kind of person,
cruising downtown Jamesville was the thing to do.
- In some cities, it's called the Strip.
Here in Jamesville, it's called the Circuit.
- Feel the fun.
- 26 years later, there are 39 miniature cruisers
along the circuit.
Themed public artworks installed by Forward Jamesville's
Design and Development Center.
Chicago Head Bulls, Milwaukee Head Cows.
Jamesville has 57 Chevy's.
- We wanted to just do a car that would show a journey
or avoid evolving from Jamesville, no place like home.
- I just wanted to do a mirror car
and I called it reflect in the community.
- Some cars were decorated by men
who actually worked at Jamesville's GM Assembly plant.
The factory built 57 Chevy's.
- Our riders love them.
Great cruise car.
- Before the cars were placed along the circuit,
they were put on display at Jamesville's
performing arts center.
Inside folks danced to do out.
Outside, there was a real full-sized 57.
- That I lived during those years,
and at the time being 22 years old,
I think of my left leg for one of those.
And at the time, I don't think any of us thought
that the 57 was that big a deal.
It is now.
The Chevy's will be on the Jamesville circuit
until the end of September.
? I see my 57 Chevy ?
? Yeah, my 57 Chevy is the coolest car ?
? You're never gonna see me ?
? Those oversized pipes really rumble when
it's deaf on the gas
?
? The body is super...
?
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable, and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly,
a lion's energy, offering energy-saving
ideas on the web, UW Health, providing specialty
and primary care for all ages
throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health physicians and clinics
and on University of Wisconsin Hospital
is available on the web.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, providing the
people of Wisconsin with the knowledge and
skills they'll need for the economy of tomorrow.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, communities first.
Outro plays in the background?