Water Source
The City of Sartell's goal is to provide high quality, safe, reliable drinking water that surpasses every state and federal requirement. Sartell is fortunate to have a very clean and safe water source: the Lower Cretaceous Aquifer. An aquifer is an underground lake imbedded in rock, in this case a sandstone rock layer. Our wells are about 50-150 feet deep and we blast a cavity, like a large cave, in the rock at the bottom of the well. We then draw our drinking water from the water that seeps, through the rock, to this cavity. The Lower Cretaceous water has spent many decades flowing through the rock layers to reach our wells. During that long period, organisms that might have caused diseases have died and been filtered out by the rock layers.

During this flow through the rock, the water dissolves some of the minerals imbedded there. The only major impact we see in our water is from the limestone, where we pick up calcium. The calcium from the limestone is the major contributor to the hardness in Sartell's water. Hardness is the measure of dissolved minerals that are in the water. We have about 18-21 grains of hardness and can be lowered by using a private water-softening system.

Though we have very good source water, we do take additional steps to comply with the Minnesota Department of Health rules. We add Fluoride to the water to allow bodies to build stronger bones and teeth. We also add Chlorine to the water. Chlorine is a very strong disinfectant and assures that no harmful bacteria or organisms can grow in the system. It also protects the water if any contaminants were to find their way in to our water. We have very precise equipment to add these items and we also test the water daily to assure we have the right amounts of Chlorine and Fluoride throughout the water system. The state requires cities to have 1.2 milligrams of Fluoride per liter of water and have a detectable Chlorine residual at the farthest points in the system.