A public meeting the Georgia EPD will hold at Southeast Bulloch High School beginning at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26, is expected to reveal the agency’s prediction of groundwater impacts and details of proposed special conditions for approving four wells to supply the Hyundai Motor Group’s Metaplant America.
The meeting in the SEBHS Auditorium, 9184 Brooklet Denmark Highway, Brooklet, is slated to last as late as 9 p.m. Although the huge electric vehicle and battery manufacturing complex is under construction in northern Bryan County, the 3,000-acre “mega site” was purchased and offered by the Savannah Harbor-Interstate 16 Joint Development Authority, with Bryan, Bulloch, Effingham and Chatham counties as members, in cooperation with the state.
Both Bryan and Bulloch have a proposed role in supplying water to the site, and the counties submitted permit applications to the state Environmental Protection Division last fall for a total of four wells. All four would be drilled in southern Bulloch County near the county line, since Bulloch is in a “green zone” for withdrawing water from the Floridan aquifer, while Bryan County is in the inland-coastal counties “yellow zone” for groundwater permit restrictions.
Bulloch County submitted an application to the EPD Watershed Protection Branch for two wells, asking for up to 3.125 million gallons a day on an annual average. Bryan County has submitted an application to EPD for two Floridan aquifer wells that also would be sited in Bulloch County, asking for up to 3.5 mgd on an annual average.
Mitigation fund
In January, the EPD announced this coming Monday’s public information meeting and also released a draft of special conditions for possibly issuing the groundwater withdrawal permits.
Among those conditions, the EPD Watershed Protection Branch has proposed that Bulloch County and Bryan County create a joint “municipal managed fund” to address “short-term impacts” of the wells. This would be a 10-year fund to compensate owners and users of residential and agricultural wells in a five-mile radius of the I-16 and Georgia Highway 119 interchange, the area where the four big wells are proposed to be drilled.
“(M)oney from the fund may be used to indemnify the affected party to solve such delineated water problems,” the draft conditions document states. “These options may include methods proposed using best management practices of a Georgia licensed well driller, such as resetting the water pump deeper or by other proposed solutions.”
That refers to resetting the pump deeper in the wells of affected residential or agricultural owners, not the county-owned wells that would supply Hyundai.
Surface water, later
The EPD has also proposed several conditions to address “long-term impacts.”
First among these is that the agency “strongly encourages Bryan County and Bulloch County to work together to expeditiously plan for the timely provision of treated surface water (or other alternatives) and the construction of all infrastructure necessary to deliver sufficient quantities of treated water to northern Bryan County and southern Bulloch County.”
In other words, the EPD asserts that when possible, alternative sources such as treated water from the Savannah River should be used to replace the groundwater from these wells.
The agency made clear that this is expected to take a long time, but set a limit.
“This provision of treated surface water (or other alternatives) and the construction of all infrastructure necessary should not exceed 25 years,” the proposed document states.
The full list of proposed special conditions can be found online through this EPD page: https://epd.georgia.gov/water-withdrawal-permitting under “Related links” and the notice about Monday’s meeting.