Next week, September 24-30, 2023, is Source Water Protection Week! This year’s theme is once again “Protect the Source.” Source Water Collaborative (SWC) members and partners can celebrate and promote the week by sharing information with your networks, creating posts on social media, and helping to encourage actions aimed at protecting our nation’s drinking water sources. The campaign supports programs that protect drinking water sources such as rivers, lakes, reservoirs and underground wells from pollution, which is the most effective and least expensive way to keep drinking water safe and healthy. It also seeks to foster collaboration and partnerships with various stakeholders, including agriculture, forest management, states, water utilities, local businesses, developers, and all of you.
To mark Source Water Protection Week, the SWC is pleased to announce updates to our Clean Water Act (CWA) Infographic as well as the development of a new NPDES Permit Comment Guide.
- Updated SWC CWA Infographic: The SWC is launching the 2ndround of improvements to our online interactive infographic How to Use the Clean Water Act to Protect Source Water. The infographic provides information on how to engage in implementation of specific CWA programs, represented by images on the infographic. Last year, we updated the image itself and modernized navigation within the tool. This year, we have expanded and updated the underlying content.
- New NPDES Permit Comment Guide is in Development: A focus group of the SWC is currently working to develop a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Permit Comment Guide for drinking water utilities. The purpose of the guide is for drinking water utilities to improve and protect the quality of their drinking water sources and ensure public health protection from contaminants in upstream discharges that are regulated by NPDES permits under the CWA. The guide will help with:
- Understanding which upstream discharges are impacting their drinking water source (raw water) quality and associated treatment processes; and
- Learning how to provide comments, data, and information on the associated NPDES permits from these sites and facilities to inform and affect changes in monitoring, contaminant discharge limits, and notifications to the drinking water utility.
SWP Week Graphics and Resources: AWWA’s website includes ready-to-use graphics and messages for different social media platforms, case study examples from four different communities, a Whiteboard Animation on Nutrient Runoff, and more! For questions, please contact Megan McDowell, AWWA’s senior communications specialist.