ASDWA Releases Building Water System Operators White Paper

The Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) released today a white paper highlighting the issues surrounding buildings that install treatment and are then considered public water systems. The paper also outlines the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for an operator of such systems.

When a building installs water treatment they may then be considered a public water system under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and subject to the SDWA requirements including sampling for regulated contaminants and having a certified operator for the facility. Persons qualified to run a building water system require specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that, in some cases, are different from the knowledge required for a traditional water system operator. The paper makes recommendations on what those key knowledge sets are. The paper does not explore what constitutes treatment or the different ways states are approaching regulating building water systems.

The paper was prepared for ASDWA by ESPRI and grew out of ASDWA’s work around Legionella and the increase of buildings installing treatment for Legionella mitigation in response to the 2017 CMS memo or other drivers.