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AWWA WQTC69451
- What Is the Quality of My Water? Answering the Public When Multiple Sources Are Involved
- Conference Proceeding by American Water Works Association, 11/01/2008
- Publisher: AWWA
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Running coincident with, and parallel to, the rise of public interest in water quality, regulatoryrequirements are refined on a continual basis and new standards are frequently established. Asof 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) required that drinking water be monitored for 90 contaminants. With a wealthof water quality information that may be necessary to disclose and stricter monitoring requiredof utilities, it may be a difficult task to provide this information to the public without increasingoverhead costs related to public relations. Such a balancing act can become even more difficultwhen a utility provides supply through multiple sources as not all customers throughout theservice area are provided water with the same quality characteristics. This paper discusses themanner by which the Madison Water Utility (MWU) developed a web-based address lookupsystem as an end result to help direct the public to obtain for themselves the water qualityreports directly related to the sources from which they are served. MWU proposed a project that would consist of a three-step approach: hydraulic/water qualitymodeling would be performed to understand and identify source water movement through thesystem; geographic information system (GIS) applications would be utilized to associate customer service addresses to themodeling results; and, a database obtained from the GIS efforts would be incorporated in theutility's website with links to the water quality reports specific to a customer's location withinthe system. Includes abstract only.