Source Water Protection Committee

Mission

The mission of OAWWA Source Water Protection (SWP) Committee is to promote and encourage the protection of source waters throughout the state of Ohio - whether surface water or groundwater - through information sharing, education, and collaboration between water purveyors, the Ohio EPA, National’s AWWA SWP Committee, and other entities.

Background

This committee began as a sub-committee of the OAWWA Technology Committee in 2019 through discussion about asset management and source water protection. Our committee members from Ohio Utilities and the Ohio EPA are actively involved in developing and implementing source water protection programs for their water utilities and want to help others! In late 2022, this committee became a full committee of OAWWA.

Source Water Protection Award

If you apply for this grant, your source water protection efforts may be featured in an OAWWA newsletter.

Ohio AWWA’s Source Water Protection Committee would like to award exemplary source water protection programs for all they do to protect Ohio’s sources of drinking water. The award will recognize efforts made towards source water protection, as well as encourage and inspire other programs to pursue source water protection by highlighting the projects these exemplary programs have completed. Other community public water systems can utilize these examples in their own source water protection efforts. Additionally, the award will demonstrate the benefits of protecting our most important asset and encourage source water protection conversations across the state and at One Water.

Eligibility: Anyone can submit a nomination for their own system or collaborative. There will be up to three awards given annually to Community Drinking Water Systems or Collaboratives that represent drinking water systems. If there is a high volume of applicants, entries may be split into categories based on population size [small (<10,000), medium (10,000-50,000), and large (>50,000)] so that awards may be distributed to a variety of system sizes.

Award Presentation: Awardees will be notified in June, and awards will be presented at the OneWater Conference in August.

When applying, consider the following project ideas that your program may have completed (you are not expected to have completed all of these, this is just to get you thinking):

Implementation Success Stories – Implementing strategies in a system’s source water protection plan
Innovative Solutions – a new approach to source water protection or a unique new strategy
Collaboration Efforts
Emergency Response – story of how a source water protection plan helped a system to respond to an emergency or prevent an emergency • Education & Outreach – a successful education/outreach campaign
Resource Utilization – Using grants or other sources to fund source water protection strategy implementation
Risk Reduction – Implementing measures to minimize the potential for contamination. Are there measurable quality improvements or a metric to evaluation mitigation? How do you measure risk reduction?
Other Applicable Protective Strategies: Website updates, GIS programs, land use plans, water supply plans, potential pollution source databases, new ordinances or policies, infiltration & inflow programs, water conservation, land conservation, plan updates: models, contingency, monitoring, outreach/education, etc.

Click Here to Apply for this Award

Committee Officers

Chair – Ruthy Meinstein, Ohio EPA DDAGW
Vice Chair – Robert Andrews, City of Columbus
Secretary – Richard Stuck, Greater Cincinnati Water Works

Current Members

City of Akron
City of Columbus
City of Dayton
City of Middletown
City of Trenton
City of Troy
Greater Cincinnati Water Works
Hamilton to New Baltimore Groundwater Consortium
Northern Kentucky Water District
Ohio EPA Division of Drinking & Ground Waters
Power Engineering
Raftelis
Southwest Regional Water District
WSP USA Inc.

Resources

American Water Works Source Water Protection Web Site: https://www.awwa.org/Resources-Tools/Resource-Topics/Source-Water-Protection
Ohio EPA Source Water Assessment and Protection Program Web Site: https://epa.ohio.gov/divisions-and-offices/drinking-and-ground-waters/source-water-protection-and-underground-injection-control-(uic)/source-water-assessment-and-protection-program
The Groundwater Consortium: https://gwconsortium.org/
Groundwater Protection Council: https://www.gwpc.org/
The Groundwater Foundation: https://groundwater.org/

Committee Meeting Dates

Virtual: February 24, 1:30pm to 3:00pm
In Person: May, TBD

How to Join

If you are interested in participating on the committee, please review our Standard Operating Procedures (below) and contact our Chair at: [email protected]