National Water Quality Month is Here!

Did you know August is National Water Quality Month? This makes now the perfect time to educate yourself on where your water comes from and how everyone can protect and preserve it. Keeping ourselves educated helps ensure that our water continues to be of high quality and free from contamination. Both the protection of our water resources and education are important goals of National Water Quality Month.

The majority of our water is regulated and safe to drink; however, we should be aware of what could potentially be in our local waterways contaminating the water. “According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), contaminated water could have higher concentrations of lead, atrazine, pathogens, chlorine, arsenic, nitrates, radioactive material, vinyl chloride, perchlorate, and pharmaceuticals.”

 

There are simple steps you can take to help protect your water on an everyday basis. Here are just a few:

• Pick up after your pets: Animal waste contains harmful organisms like e. coli, salmonella, and giardia and can be washed into our waterways if not disposed of properly.
• Use a car wash instead of washing at home: Washing your car at home can flush chemicals down storm drains that flow into our lakes and streams. Professional car washes are required to drain into sewer systems so that wastewater plants can treat the water before it’s re-used.
• Use a trash can, NOT the drain: Avoid putting products like motor oil, medications, household cleaners, paints or paint cans, bug/pest repellants, pesticides, flea collars, and detergents down the drain. These toxic chemicals can reach our waterways if emptied down the drain.
• Don’t overuse fertilizer/pesticides: Many fertilizers and pesticides contain hazardous chemicals that can seep into the soil and contaminate the groundwater.
• Clean Up: It’s important to educate yourself and learn from others who care about our environment. Joining a community clean up can help with both!

 

 

And Did You Know?

Envicomply offers multiple training courses that can help you at home and on the job. Modules like Drinking Water Awareness, Stormwater (individual courses and multi-course packs), Wastewater Awareness, & Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) Maintenance. Plus, many of our convenient contractor course packs include them too! Learn about important safety and compliance topics such as federal and state standards for public water systems, how to keep backflow from contaminating drinking water, water supply disinfection, presence of lead and copper in drinking water, wastewater management, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits, storm drain inspection and maintenance, stormwater runoff and pollution, federal stormwater laws, stormwater pollution prevention plan (SWPP), best management practices, penalties for non-compliance, and so much more.

 

 

Check out all of our water awareness training courses now!