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Brendan Reese is a reporter with Community News Service, a collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program. 

JEFFERSONVILLE — Is your water safe? Probably.

You can check through your town's consumer confidence report or the state’s test and compliance database. 

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Have kids? Another system shows lead testing results in schools and child care facilities.

Behind that data, for every water system in the state, a certified operator does the daily detective work — roadside surveillance, testing and signing off — needed to keep local water safe and headlines about busted mains and runoff pollution to a minimum.

It pays to track down anything out of the ordinary in that line of work. Town water operators often spend their days driving around in a pickup on the lookout. Just as often, their efforts go unnoticed.

But ride along with one, and you can learn a lot. 

Boil your water, officials in Jeffersonville told the village’s 700 or so residents in mid-March. What had started as a small 5-gallon-a-minute leak, enough to maybe splash you in the face, had become a 3/4-inch hole gushing water.

Village water operator Trevor Welch could tell something was wrong weeks before he had to shut down the section of pipe and repair the break.

“In the middle of someone’s driveway, in a place where I drive by daily, I noticed a patch of ice starting to slowly form,” said Welch, who’s held his role for nearly seven years. “This was in the middle of winter. I've been watching it for a couple of weeks, and it’s getting bigger.”

Boiled water notices are common in Vermont, said Jeff Girard, a compliance supervisor for the state Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division. Water line leaks that result in a loss of pressure, like the one in Jeffersonville, are one of the most frequent reasons for the notices, he said.

When a water line loses pressure, groundwater can seep into pinholes and potentially expose people’s drinking water to harmful bacteria. Boiled water notices are also issued if a water sample shows levels of contaminants exceeding regulated thresholds, a dangerous situation.

“Systems with old infrastructure are more likely to run into the issue of water main breaks,” Girard said.

Jefforsonville’s water system was established in 1914. Some of those original pipes are still in use, even though the system underwent a major upgrade in the 1980s. Welch said he was told by engineers that the mountain water and soil around Smugglers Notch has helped preserve the pipes. He tends to be modest about his own contribution in holding the system together.

On a sunny spring day in the first week of May, Welch set out to make his daily rounds at the water treatment building by the two springs that provide Jeffersonville’s water.

Outside the brown building about the size of a lean-to, Welch took a sample of water from a nearby spigot. Then he opened a concrete cover and pointed out the water main beneath it. Two chemicals — caustic (to control pH) and chlorine — are stored in the water treatment building and shot directly into the main line before the water moves down to the village.

Welch headed into the building with his water sample and began his testing.

“0.67,” he said. “That’s a good amount of chlorine. PH is up around 9, which is a bit on the high side.”

Along with temperature, the pH and chlorine readouts are something he records every day to comply with state requirements. He likes to take note of pressure and overall system demand, too.

“Right now we’re treating 38 gallons a minute,” he said. “I like to keep track of that because if we had a big leak down the mountain, we’d jump up to 60 gallons a minute as the system tries to make up for it.”

It’s a game of noticing outliers.

To be sure, state regulators don't just surrender drinking water safety to the good fortune of having an eagle-eyed Trevor Welch on the front lines of every town’s water system. The state’s compliance infrastructure rivals the physical infrastructure of pipes and reservoirs you would find powering any water system.

Beside the reporting and public databases, training and testing are vital to the water compliance landscape.

Providing training to certified water operators like Welch is a cornerstone of this compliance system.

“Every water system needs to have a certified operator,” said Girard, the state compliance official. 

To have Welch’s job — a class 3 certified operator (one of five designations) — one must beat an exam and have more than a year of experience working under another certified operator to get a license. Renewals and continuing education hours are required to keep it.

Testing guidelines make up another pillar of compliance.

Every public water system needs an approved monitoring schedule with the state that spells out what needs to be tested for and when, depending on system size, complexity and past violations. Mainstays include monthly total coliform bacteria and E. coli testing for some 90 contaminants, state rules show.

Most of the contaminants pass through a layered screening regimen where more routine monitoring at first gives away to three-, six- and nine-year testing intervals if everything looks good. Lead and copper have their own guidelines that follow a similar system, as do radioactive materials. 

After Welch finished his testing trip that day, he charted out the rest of his schedule: a few more samples and a few more adjustments if necessary, possibly a curb stop to make adjustments to a customer’s water level, maybe a hydrant adjustment, a visit to help sort out a metering issue.

What would he do if he wanted to know whether a town’s drinking water was safe?

“Go talk to the operator,” Welch said. “You can tell if someone is on top of stuff.”

“It’s rare that people will reach out to me. In general, people take water and wastewater infrastructure for granted. It’s just human nature,” he said.

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