One may notice many things when visiting a strange town, one of the most outstanding being water.

Students who have recently made their first annual migration to Iowa State are getting used to the water and may be wondering what they’re consuming.

The Ames water supply is ground water pumped from medium depth wells of 100 to 160 feet.

The water is drawn from sand and gravel deposits, filled by glaciers beneath the Downtown area, Squaw Creek Valley and the Skunk River Valley .

As it comes directly from the wells, the water has three undesirable qualities: iron, which leaves rust-colored stains; hardness, caused by dissolved minerals; and dissolved gasses, which contribute to taste and odor problems.

The Ames Water Treatment Plant takes care of all these problems plus softens the water and adds fluoride, meeting the federal regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which was amended last year.

All public water sources now have to delineate the boundaries where they are extracting water and release annual confidence reports informing the public about the quality and implications of the water.

“We’re going to start to see some things happening in the next couple years that we haven’t seen before,” Tom Glanville, of the Department of Agriculture and biosystems engineering, said. “It’s going to make many in the public more aware and responsible of where their water is coming from and how daily activities affect it.”

Any public water supply is required to be tested regularly for a wide variety of things.

If the treated water fails to meet the guidelines, federal law requires the supplier to notify their customers.

Water quality is affected by numerous factors. Water that comes from rivers has more potential for risk than ground water. Applications of chemicals is also a concern, as are a lot of other industrial activities.

“People have to realize that the effect is due in part to what we do above ground, and the degree of the effect to where it comes from,” Glanville said.

However, Ames has never had any problems with such contamination. “The ground water supply in Ames is relatively unaffected by most of the surface water contributions,” Tom Neumann, water utility manager, said. “There is no evidence of any kind of contamination or threat.”

There have never been any water quality problems in Ames, not even with the floods in 1993 and 1996, Neumann said.