If anyone is interested in monitoring on their own.... Des Moines Water Works has an advanced water quality data page that you can search out the different source water contaminant levels as well as their finished product levels.
DMWW Water Quality Data
Fleur Drive Drive treatment plant is what pumps out the most water (3x as much as McMullen and 7x as much as Saylorville). The data seems to be posted about 48 hours after the date, so we don't know yesterday or today's level. I'm curious to what the levels were yesterday that sparked the upgrade conservation warning as the finished product N levels on Wednesday were high (8.64 mg/L) but not the highest this year or even last year.
I do think it is strange how much higher the DMWW testing shows the Raccoon River (near Water Works) then what the USGS gauge at Van Meter is showing. For example the Raccoon at Water Works tested at 18.95 on Wednesday but the gauge at Van Meter was just over 16 mg/L. The only major tributary after the Van Meter gauge is Walnut Creek which is mainly the NW metro now. Even if it was 100% row crops I wouldn't expect it to have the load to increase the concentration by about 2.5 mg/L with the size of the Raccoon there without a major isolated storm event. For clarification, I'm not a lawn/golf course fertilizer is the problem person. There is almost zero nitrogen leaching away instead of being used by the turf right now, so I'm really surprised by that increase.
Maybe USGS needs to recalibrate. You can use the
Iowa Water Quality Information System (on its now shoestring budget) to quickly jump around the real time sensors if you want to take a look.
The good news is we are tailing down slowly. The bad news is next week could bring more loading.