Threats to Drinking Water
Your municipality relies on either groundwater wells or surface water to supply drinking water to you and/or your neighbours. To protect the health of the people in your community, it is important to protect this water from becoming polluted.
Drinking water protection starts with protecting the land and water nearest to the well or surface water intake. Hazardous materials spilled, dumped or leaked in these areas can make their way into the municipal system threatening the quality of drinking water. Technical studies have been carried out to determine what areas and what activities on the land or water pose a potential threat to the quality of the water.
What are drinking water threats?
Drinking water threats are activities (or conditions from past activities) that have the potential to pose a risk to the quality of water that is or may be used as a source of drinking water.
Through the source protection planning process, activities that pose risks to drinking water undergo a technical assessment and are ranked based on their level of threat. Drinking water threats are classified as significant, moderate or low based on a ‘Water Quality Risk Assessment’. Through the assessment, how vulnerable the source of drinking water is to contamination and the level of risk posed by the activity is determined.
Under the Clean Water Act, activities that pose the greatest risk to drinking water must be minimized or eliminated. These activities are called significant threats. The Province identified a list of activities that can be considered drinking water quality threats as follows:
- Sewage systems (including septics)
- Fuel (e.g. gasoline, home heating oil)
- Agricultural source material (e.g. manure)
- Livestock grazing, pasturing, outdoor confinement areas, farm-animal yards
- Commercial fertilizer/pesticides
- Non-agricultural source material (e.g. biosolids, food waste)
- Road salt
- Waste disposal sites
- Storage of snow
- Dense non-aqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs) & organic solvents (e.g. dry cleaning solvents, paint strippers/thinners)
- Chemicals used in aircraft de-icing
Source protection plans will include a range of policies aimed at reducing the risks posed by water quality threats. The Source Protection Committee is currently working with municipalities, agencies and others to prepare draft policies for each of the drinking water threats listed above.
The Source Protection Toolbox
Public consultation is a key component in the policy development process. There will be two consultation phases in 2012 (spring/early summer) for the source protection plan in which everyone will have an opportunity to review and provide input to the policies.