Lusk, WY - Water Quality issues? (how much, home, live)

[mountainme]

I will be going to Lusk with my hubby for a temporary job contract, and I've been looking up information on the area.

Looks pretty much what I would expect for a remote area in WY, but I heard mention in another posting about Lusk that the town water quality is bad, and found online in an WY environmental quality website that the water quality in Lusk ranks 50 out of 100! Not good. I have a young child so this is a concern.

Anyone know why this is?

[ElkHunter]

I am not familiar with Lusk's exact problem, so I cannot address that directly.

I can tell you some of the things I have encountered.

Some of Wyoming's water sourses are Rivers that present challenges if they are in agricultural areas. Where I live, we get our drinking water from a river that goes through pastures. The water is treated and filtered and normally well within specs. But you will see the water treatment engineer take a drive every couple days to see how many cattle are running in the pastures that border the river, or how much irrigation water is runoff, etc.

These things are treatable if they are detected early enough. In some cases the rancher can suddenly stage a thousand head of beef for a couple days and where it may not be a problem normally, what if there is a lot of rain. So it is a real challenge for the treatment center to state ahead of what is going to happen and be prepared.

In other places, water still comes from local wells. There are several areas that have a real problem with mineral content. These are more set conditions, but in some cases treatment and filtering is inadiquate for the local funds to deal with, so they will do what they can, but also recommend people use filters.

A lot of these small towns the people have wells, even though city water is available. For cost reasons the people have never hooked up to city water, or simply don't use it.

I recommend filtering Wyoming's water source. Personally, I won't drink it cook with city water. I go up on the mountain and get water from a spring every couple weeks.

Have you seen actual water reports? Is it something that a cheap Brita type filter can take care of?

[WyoNewk]

Frankly I surprised that the water ranks 50 out of 100. That's average, and for a tiny town on Wyoming's eastern prairie to maintain average water is pretty good. I don't know where you found the quality ranking, but I'd imagine that it might be based, at least in part, on taste, softness, and solubles that have little to no effect on how healthy it is to drink.

Either way, as EH suggests, you might want to find another source for drinking water. Or you might not. We had bottled water delivered to our home years ago, but sometimes we'd get some bad water -- stinky. We decided it was worse than what came from the faucet, which wasn't too good either at that time. Some oldtimers in eastern Wyoming who grew up on stinky prairie water prefer water that you can sink your teeth into.

Lusk would get its water from wells, possibly from different formations. Each formation provides different kinds of water -- some soft and stinky, some hard and sweet. Some will have so much mineral content that it'll turn your teeth orange, and coffee made with it has a scum on top and won't mix with cream. If Lusk water is ranked 50/100, it's probably better than that. Rejoice!