As Joliet races to meet state requirements to be eligible to tap into Lake Michigan water before the region ’s groundwater is depleted, a handful of neighboring towns are holding off on making plans to identify alternative sources.

About 35 miles southwest of Chicago, Joliet is at the epicenter of a regional water crisis where many suburbs will run out of water supplied by the Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer by 2030, according to estimations in a 2018 report by the Illinois State Water Survey.

Construction of the Joliet pipeline is slated to start next month and is being funded by the Grand Prairie Water Commission, which includes Joliet and the towns of Channahon, Crest Hill, Minooka, Romeoville and Shorewood.

Meanwhile, officials with Elwood, Lemont, Lockport, Manhattan and Morris say they believe even a depleting aquifer will be able to meet their water needs in the future.

However, the challenge with these towns staying on the aquifer is the unpredictability and sensitivity of the deep aquifer, said Daniel Abrams, the principal investigator of the aquifer for the Illinois State Water Survey.

“Can they persist into the future? Yes,” Abrams said. “Will it be a resource that can always meet their water needs? That will depend on how their future demands grow in the region.”

In a geological phenomenon, the deep aquifer sits on the largest fault zone in the state making recharge from rainfall difficult even after communities switch to new water sources, Abrams said.

“The way to think of the deep aquifer is it’s like it has a lid on it,” Abrams said. “And so if you pour water on top of the lid, it’s not going to go through that lid and reach the aquifer. It’s a unique situation.”

John Tyk, a superintendent for Manhattan’s Public Works Department, said the towns that didn’t join the commission make up only a fraction of the region’s daily demand.

“We’re a small community,” Tyk said, “so we’re not drawing nowhere near the amount of water that Joliet draws.”

The Water Survey estimates the region draws 35 million to 38 million gallons per day, with Joliet using 14.5 million gallons. By 2030, Joliet is estimated to draw about 30 million gallons of water per day.

The smaller communities said their towns’ engineering consultants have evaluated their water levels and say they will be able to keep using the aquifer.

“Our evaluations show above average hydraulic properties for our wells for several decades,” said George Schafer, Lemont’s village administrator, in an email to the Tribune.

Officials from Lemont and Lockport said they have secured the Illinois Department of Natural Resources permits to access Lake Michigan water in the future.

But they would still need to get approval from Joliet or another provider to tap into a pipeline to draw water.

Meanwhile, officials from Elwood, Manhattan and Morris said their towns have not applied for an IDNR permit because of costs, location farther from the epicenter of the depleting aquifer or adequate water levels from recent inspections.

Because Lockport relies mostly on the shallow part of the aquifer, City Administrator Ben Benson said the city does not envision a need to tap into Lake Michigan water anytime soon. Both Benson and Lemont’s Schafer said their towns are keeping multiple options open including the Grand Prairie Water Commission.

Elwood’s village clerk, Julie Friebele, said the town has an agreement with Joliet for a water system connection for emergency purposes.

While the design of the commission does not include specific rules about emergency connections with neighboring towns, some of the member towns have emergency pipeline connections between their local water system and some nonmember water systems, said Ann Grooms, an office manager of Joliet’s Department of Public Utilities, in an email to the Tribune.

Towns that want to join the commission and connect to Joliet’s water in the future would be expected to “bear an appropriate share of the total cost of the system including development and construction costs previously incurred,” Grooms said.

Even then, adding new towns would likely pose a challenge for the commission’s water needs, especially with Minooka planning to build a data center that could need 3 million gallons of water a day.

“Moreover, the current design capacity for the Grand Prairie Water Commission system is set to meet only the declared maximum day demands of the existing Charter Members,” Grooms wrote. “The system is not being designed to provide excess capacity for potential Additional Members.”

In 2023, then-Joliet Mayor Bob O’Dekirk signed a landmark 100-year, $1 billion deal with Chicago’s mayor at the time, Lori Lightfoot, to buy Lake Michigan water through Chicago.

Now the town has launched a plan to accelerate the placement of 65 miles of pipelines from the South Side’s Durkin Park to almost 388,000 residents in the suburbs, according to Joe Johnson, a project manager for the pipeline.

Joliet must also reduce water leaks from its aging water mains and bring the loss rate down from its current 29% to 10% before the IDNR will allow it to use Lake Michigan water, said Will Jernigan, a chief operations officer for Cavanaugh Solutions, a sustainability consulting group working with Joliet.

For now, the other town officials remain optimistic that water will stabilize with all the communities in the commission getting off the aquifer in five years.

“We’re sustainable for now,” said Gerald Turrise, a water superintendent for Lemont.

The deep sandstone aquifer receives little natural recharge, but these communities would be able to last longer because they are further from the cone of depression , or the visual bull’s-eye on a map that shows the region’s lowest groundwater level, according to Abrams. Joliet is situated over the deeper part of the aquifer, at about 1,000 feet, and the level of risk decreases for towns that are farther away from Joliet, he explained.

But because the Illinois State Water Survey has not conducted risk assessments for these remaining communities, should they stay on the aquifer, concerns remain.

These towns would rely on recovery, which encompasses a combination of released water from pressure built up underground and minimal infiltration from precipitation in the shallow part of the aquifer, Abrams said.

Experts urge the remaining communities that plan to continue to use the aquifer to heed the region’s “cautionary tale.”

Peter Annin, author of “The Great Lakes Water Wars” and director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, believes Joliet has the worst groundwater quantity problem in the Great Lakes region — maybe even the country.

“They have been overpumping, overwithdrawing the groundwater there for decades,” Annin said. “It’s just a classic example of unsustainable water management.”

But Joliet was not the only community at fault. They just happened to be at the center of the issue, Abrams said.

Drawing from water level trends observed in Chicago’s western suburbs during the 1980s and 1990s — after many communities moved away from the deep aquifer , an underground layer that is made up of permeable bedrock — Abrams predicts that wells in the southwest suburbs could recover between 50 and 150 feet of water once Joliet switches to Lake Michigan. While water supply is hard to quantify, this estimation overall does not amount to a lot of water for these remaining towns because it is returning a “small percentage of total predevelopment drawdown,” he said.

Additionally, noticeable changes may take time, with the most immediate increases expected in about a decade.

But the possibility of an unforeseeable surge in demand — much like what happened in Joliet and its surrounding towns decades ago and what might happen in Minooka — creates uncertainty about how much the aquifer can withstand in the future because it could likely offset the recovered water.

“It doesn’t always take a lot to get water levels swinging back down,” Abrams said.

Any withdrawal is going to be inherently unsustainable, said Dan Hadley, a hydrogeologist working with Abrams at the Illinois State Water Survey.

“When a community says, ‘Our withdrawals will be sustainable,’ it may not be truly sustainable in a sense that you could withdraw water from that aquifer indefinitely,” Hadley said.

Generally, a community should ensure sustainable pumping by establishing a threshold where the rate of removal does not exceed the rate of replenishment.

But looking at the history of growing demands for industrial water use as a precedent, Abrams said community leaders must strictly define what “sustainability” means to them.

“Does that mean you are not going to use more water than enters the aquifer? Or does it mean in 30 years from now, are you willing to deplete your entire resource, or do you want to make sure to retain water levels above a certain point?” Abrams said. “You can’t evaluate your future demands if you don’t know what metric you’re comfortable working with.”