Groundwater — the area well concerns

The record trail shows residents raised well-drawdown concerns as the campus was built. This page holds the groundwater evidence three ways: a hypothetical cone (what a well field supplying the campus would do to the aquifer), the documented construction-dewatering wellfield the developer actually installed, and a screen of the river record for where that pumped water went. The surface-water dilution screen lives on the water balance page.

The hypothetical cone

What would a well field supplying the campus makeup do to the aquifer the county's 492 nearby domestic wells tap? A Theis cone of depression over the ODNR well-log census.

At the low-transmissivity end of the bracket the cone exceeds the 47 ft saturated thickness — the aquifer cannot sustain this rate, which is exactly why the campus is on municipal surface water. Pumping is a hypothetical [inference] stress, bracketed by the aquifer's transmissivity uncertainty; it is not a documented groundwater withdrawal.

The documented dewatering

The cone above is hypothetical. This one is on the record: to grade the campus the developer installed 44 construction-dewatering wells (~4.9 MGD of combined yield-test capacity), pumped 2025-12-16 to 2026-05-28. As a superposition of their Cooper-Jacob cones over the ODNR well-log census, 10 nearby domestic wells fall inside the composite cone with more than a foot of [inference] drawdown (7 with more than five feet). The wells, rates, and dates are [verified] ODNR well-log and sealing records; every drawdown is [inference], bracketed by the aquifer's transmissivity uncertainty.

None would be dewatered outright: the flagged wells are deep enough that the drawdown eats only part of their water column, so the shallow-well 'ran dry' failure mode belongs to a different, more marginal population.

Direction matters. A radial cone is direction-blind, but groundwater isn't. Fit to 760 shallow census wells (R²= 0.83), the regional water table falls ~11.8 ft/mi toward compass 315° — so 9 of the 10 flagged wells sit down-gradient of the field, the direction a dewatering field's drawdown and capture preferentially extend.

1 of the 44 wells remained active as of the 2026-07-28 records pull; the rest were sealed at the close of grading. See the wellfield and the wells it draws down on the campus map →. The yield-test rate is an upper bound on the sustained dewatering rate, and installs and sealings were staged, so a simultaneous-full-rate composite bounds concurrency rather than metering it.

The cone screens by distance only, in the dewatering wells' own aquifer — it can't reach a far well through a preferential (buried-valley) pathway, nor cross from sand & gravel into a bedrock well. A reported impact beyond the modeled radius stays an [open] lead (see the leads board), not a modeled result.

Where did the pumped water go?

The wellfield pumped up to 8 (0–8 cfs) of groundwater. If it was discharged to surface water it would ride in the Ottawa River's reach gain between the Ottawa River at Lima OH gage (upstream) and the Ottawa River near Kalida OH gage (downstream). We screened that gain over the pumping window against the prior year, restricted to baseflow days.

The reach adds 222 sq mi of drainage between the two gages, so its baseflow gain naturally runs tens of cfs — a 8 (0–8 cfs) point source sits inside that variability. Gage flow is [verified] USGS daily values; the attribution is [inference]. The discharge's rate and receiving water are an [open] owed record — the construction-dewatering NPDES authorization.

• Gage discharge is [verified] USGS daily values; the reach-gain ATTRIBUTION to dewatering is [inference] -- a screen, never a metered discharge.
• The 222 sq mi of incremental drainage between the gages produces a baseflow gain of ~40 cfs, so a ~7.6 cfs point source sits inside the reach's natural variability.
• The discharge point + rate are not on record (the construction-dewatering NPDES authorization is an [open] owed record), so 'to this reach' is itself an assumption -- the water may have gone to a storm sewer, infiltration, or another receiving water.
• Recent water-years are NWIS provisional (unreviewed); the screen is directional only.

Reservoir recharge over the same window

Over the pumping window the Auglaize River near Fort Jennings OH ran a median 44 cfs with 150 of 164 days above the 2.5 cfs pumping passby (vs 164 of 164 the prior year) -- the days Lima could pump the off-stream reservoirs full. Recharge context, not a dewatering effect: the reservoirs refill from the rivers at high flow, independent of the campus grading.

• Supply-gage flow is [verified] USGS daily values; the refill-day count is [inference] (the pumping passby is the modeling minimum, not a metered diversion schedule).