Watermark > Spring 2002 > Features: Drinking Water Protection: Where are we at?
Features
- Drinking Water Protection: Where are we at?—Rick Corbett, BCWWA President
- Fire Hydrants: Life Safety and Life Threatening?—Doug Dolan, Cross Connection Control Chair
- Dewaterability of Thermophilically Digested Biosolids—Jim Zhou, Don Mavinic, and Harlan Kelly
- Full Cost Pricing, Accounting for Water and Sewage Services Contained in New Safe Water Legislation Introduced in Ontario
- New Arsenic Limit of 10 Parts Per Billion Now Law in USA
- Protection of Drinking Water ‘to increase’—Scott Simpson
- Tenth Anniversary of The Rice Cake Race
Drinking Water Protection: Where are we at?
By Rick Corbett, BCWWA President
Many of you probably read with interest the Interim Report prepared by the Drinking Water Review Panel (DWRP) in mid-December. The Panel, an independent review group established by the Ministers of Water, Land and Air Protection and Health Services, has a mandate to review the Drinking Water Protection Act, originally passed in April 2001. In conducting the review, the Panel received 73 written submissions and 117 survey results that provided opinions and advice on the legislation – ours being one of the many.
The Interim Report, that can be found on the DWRP’s web site (http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wat/wq/dw/), provides 19 recommendations. The three key ones are:
- Retain and amend the Drinking Water Protection Act
- Create a Drinking Water Protection Agency
- Strengthen Source Protection Measures
The second recommendation is perhaps the most radical. This recommendation would see the creation of a single lead agency to manage drinking water from source to tap. The Drinking Water Protection Agency, as it would be known, is intended to integrate the skills, resources and authority of all of the provincial ministries with a current responsibility for drinking water protection. The agency would be established through legislation as a special operating agency led by a deputy minister-level Chief Executive Officer. This CEO would report to a Board of Directors, comprising non-government, independent appointments representing various drinking water interests and Deputy Ministers, responsible for health protection, resource management, environmental protection and community development. At the time of writing, we have not had any feedback as to whether the Government will accept this recommendation.
Many of the other recommendations in the Interim Report reflect our comments to the DWRP. There were, however, two areas that we felt the report was silent on – cross-connection control and operator certification. On January 14, we wrote a second letter to the DWRP, suggesting that they consider adding recommenda-tions on these subjects. The specific recommendations that we made were:
- Cross-connection Control: Cross-connection control programs, that deal with both the initial installation and on-going testing and maintenance, are critical to the protection of the consumer. We recommend that the legislation implement mandatory crossconnection control programs for all water utilities.
- Operator Certification: The need for trained water system operators, through a mandatory certification program, is well recognized. We recommend that the Province introduce mandatory water treatment system operator certification and continue its support of operator training programs. Certification should be similar to that in place for wastewater operators and should be through the Environmental Operators Certification Program (EOCP).
By the time you read this, the Final Report from the Drinking Water Review Panel should be on the street. The Honorable Joyce Murray, Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection, has kindly accepted our invitation to be a keynote speaker at our April 2002 conference in Whistler. We have also scheduled a fullday technology transfer session to carry on further dialogue. There is an old Chinese saying – may you live in interesting times. It looks like 2002 should be a very interesting time in the water industry.
