Safe Water From Every Tap Improving Water Service to Small Communities (1997) / Chapter Skim
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community water systems violated safe drinking water standards one or more times for microbes that indicate the possible presence of bacteria, viruses, or parasites associated with human illnesses. Nearly 600 waterborne disease outbreaks have been reported in the past two decades.
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Whether a small system is located in a rural area or a metropolitan one, it will lack the economies of scale of larger communities in providing water service; per-person costs for water service must be higher in small communities than in larger ones to provide the same level of service because the costs are spread over a smaller population. Small communities that lack adequate revenue for water treatment and distribution can have difficulty complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act.
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Such options are often more cost effective than attempting to remove contaminants from a poor-quality source water. When other options are not available and small systems must turn to water treatment processes in order to provide water that meets the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, they may have difficulty raising revenue for capital improvements.
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The expanded data base should cover all of the available technologies, use standard formats for reporting data, and include complete information about raw water quality, finished water quality, and operation and maintenance costs for each technology. While development of standard protocols for testing drinking water treatment technologies is a desirable goal, it is essential to recognize that the degree to which pilot testing can be centralized in order to reduce site-specific testing varies considerably depending on the type of technology, the nature of the water to be treated, and the availability of data documenting the performance of the technology on waters of various qualities.
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• Diatomaceous earth filtration systems require a few weeks of pilot testing to establish the effectiveness of different grades of diatomaceous earth and to estimate the length of filter runs that might be expected with a full-scale plant. • For slow sand filtration systems, site-specific pilot testing is necessary, unless a slow sand filter is already treating the same source water at another location, because understanding of these systems is insufficient to allow engineers to predict what filtered water turbidity an operating slow sand filter will attain.
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• The EPA should continue support for the fledgling water treatment technology verification program that it recently initiated with the National Sanitation Foundation. • The EPA should oversee development of standard protocols and reporting formats for pilot testing water treatment technologies, especially package plants.
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Performance appraisals should include analyses of the following types of information: • existence of health orders (for example, boil water orders) issued to the water system or waterborne disease outbreaks in the community; • the system's record of response to these orders and outbreaks; • violations of water quality standards, including monitoring requirements; • the water system's methods for keeping track of its compliance with Safe Drinking Water Act standards; • the number of staff and their levels of training;
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contract service, in which a contractor provides specific services, such as operation and maintenance, water quality monitoring, emergency assistance, and billing, on a routine basis; and 4. support assistance, in which another utility provides support such as training the small system operator to repair a chlorinator, helping the small system develop a financial management plan, sharing water storage facilities, or making joint purchases of supplies or water to get volume discounts.
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• The EPA should provide temporary waivers to utilities for liabilities associated with Safe Drinking Water Act violations in cases where the utility has acquired a failing water company. These waivers should be tied to reasonable compliance schedules.
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In addition, most operator training programs (and state certification requirements) cover the general theories underlying operation of numerous types of water treatment processes, some of them quite advanced, while operators of smaller systems need specific, hands-on training in only the treatment technologies their systems use.
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From page 11... ...
Conversely, a water system with a well-trained operator and sound financial plan may be unable to meet drinking water standards unless it can obtain treatment systems that are within its budget. National and state leadership are needed to improve the delivery of quality water to small communities.
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