Through a social media post, dated Wednesday, January 20, the Lewisburg Water Plant presented a public notice regarding the area’s drinking water.
The intention of the notice was to inform residents about the “availability of monitoring data for unregulated contaminants (in the water supply) for Lewisburg”, as required by EPA regulations.
The notice states, “Our water system has sampled for a series of unregulated contaminants. Unregulated contaminants are those that do not yet have a drinking water standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The purpose of monitoring for these contaminants is to help EPA decide whether the contaminants should have a standard. As our customers, you have a right to know that this data is available.”
While the notice may lead some residents to believe that the city’s drinking water is in some way hazardous, this is not the case.
According to Lewisburg Director of Public Works Roger Pence, “the water supply is not contaminated.”
The Lewisburg Water Plant, as many other utility companies across the country do, participates in an EPA-sponsored program known as the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule program, or the UCMR. From time to time, the agency will ask municipalities to test for the presence of certain unregulated contaminants in order to determine if they should, in fact, be regulated.
The EPA requires testing for regulated contaminants on a consistent basis, some as often as every 30-seconds. Contaminants, whether regulated or unregulated, are not necessarily hazardous. In fact, minerals are classified as contaminants despite many of them being sanctioned by the EPA to be added to drinking water to improve taste. Magnesium is but one example of an unregulated contaminant.
As explained on their website, “The EPA uses the UCMR to collect data for contaminants that are suspected to be present in drinking water and do not have health-based standards set under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).”
Performing these types of tests is a routine research-function of water utility providers. And the identification of contaminants, both regulated and unregulated, is a common occurrence. This is referred to as “Tier Three Sampling.”
According to Pence, when these tests are performed, “The EPA requires us to give information on what we detect when monitoring, including the number of unregulated contaminants that we find.”
In addition to giving information regarding any contaminants detected, the EPA also requires utility providers to post a public notice, written using the agency’s specific language without addition or alteration. Public notices must be shared via social media, printed in the local newspaper and delivered to each utility-customer. Once the notices have been presented, the utility provided must send a certification back to the EPA advising them that the requirement has been satisfied. The notices, and the certification of them, are intended to ensure transparency with both the EPA, as well as community water plants.
“Facebook was the first step in satisfying the requirements for public notice,” Pence said. “Next we’ll look into the newspapers and then get them delivered.”
As it would be logistically unfeasible to hand-deliver notices to the more than 6,000 customers serviced by the Lewisburg Water Plant, a copy of the public notice will be included in each customer’s monthly statement.
Those wishing to examine the test results for themselves may contact Randy Johnson or Charlie Cooper at the Lewisburg Water Plant by calling 304-647-5585. Requests may also be emailed to waterplant@lewisburg-wv.com. Information regarding the EPA’s Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule program can be found by visiting www.epa.gov and typing “UCMR” into the search field.
