WESTFIELD – The Water Commission approved a revision of the Water Resource Department rules and regulations, modifying the original document adopted on April 11, 2001.
The regulation revision, dated June 4, 2013, was approved by a vote of 3-0.
The department’s regulations reflect the state requirements for public drinking water system (MGL Chapter 40, Sections 40 and 42 and 310CMR22), and were established to protect water quality and public health.
Several of the regulation changes augment the state regulations and are even more restrictive. One policy states that: Water service will not be provided to any residential property with a private domestic or irrigation well. All private wells must be properly decommissioned through the City’s Board of Health.
The state codes also prohibit cross-connections between a public water supply and any other water supply source, but do not require that private supplies, generally private wells, be decommission.
The regulations state: “No person shall install or maintain any unprotected connection whereby water from any system of unknown quality may enter the public water system or the consumer’s potable water system.
The Water Resources Department will not supply water to any premise served by a private well or other water supply system.
The Water Resources Department shall have the right to enter premises served by the public water system at all reasonable times for the purpose of making surveys and investigations of water use practices within the premises. Upon request, the consumer shall furnish the Water Resources Department information on water use practices within the consumer’s premises.”
Chairman Ron Cole questioned Water Resource Superintendent Dave Billips on several of the policies, especially those prohibiting residents from having both public water and a private well.
Water Resource Engineer Charles Darling said that state regulations prohibit cross-connection between the two water sources.
“It’s a city regulation that the department will not supply water to a lot with a private well,” Darling said.
“So for clarification,” Cole said, “the purpose (of that private well prohibition) is to protect the city’s water supply from cross connections?’
Billips and Darling affirmed that clarification, with Deputy Director Fran Cain explaining “that there are a who bunch of issues with cross connections. You have to protect the public system.”
“Your neighbors could be drinking your untested and untreated well water,” Cain said.
“You have to think about why a resident on a well wants to connect to city water,” Cole said. “The typical reasons are that the well runs dry or that the well water has contaminates that we don’t want getting into the city’s water.”
