West Virginia lawmakers have advanced legislation that would loosen state regulation of devices that protect potable water supplies from contamination.
The West Virginia Government Organization Committee forwarded Senate Bill 269 to the full Senate Monday. As approved by the committee, SB 269 would prohibit the state Department of Health from requiring certain backflow prevention assemblies from being inspected more frequently than once in three years.
Backflow prevention assemblies are added to pipes to ensure water flows only in one direction and keep water and wastewater from intermingling. Plumbing experts say backflow preventers should be inspected and tested annually.
The committee substitute version of the legislation the Government Organization panel approved after little discussion would require annual inspections for “high-hazard†backflow prevention assemblies. The bill defined “high-hazard†as “conducive to the introduction of waterborne disease organisms, or harmful chemical, physical, or radioactive substances into a public water system†that present an “unreasonable risk to health.â€
But SB 269 as approved by the committee still would bar the Department of Health from requiring a public water supply system or business from having backflow preventers inspected more often than once in three years for systems that have a hazard that may have a “detrimental secondary effect†on public potable water supply quality or cause aesthetic problems.
Majority leader proposed further-reaching bill
That latest version of SB 269 is watered down from its original version as introduced by Senate Majority Leader Patrick Martin, R-Lewis. The initial version of SB 269 would have prohibited the Department of Health from requiring a public water supply system or business to have backflow preventers at all.
Committee counsel Carl Fletcher indicated during a brief discussion the cost and frequency of inspections had concerned Martin, who is not on the Government Organization Committee.
Fletcher said availability of licensed inspectors had been an issue and that some with backflow preventers were being threatened with shutoffs because inspectors couldn’t get to them.
Similar legislation, SB 819, passed the Senate in a 31-0 vote before stalling on a third and final reading in the House of Delegates last year. A committee substitute version of that bill would have barred the Department of Health from requiring inspection of any backflow prevention assembly more often than once every 10 years.
W.Va.’s drinking water violation deluge
Drinking water violations have been piling up increasingly out of proportion with the rest of the country.
West Virginia’s percentage of public water systems with health-based violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act in 2022 was 22.7%, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data, far exceeding the 4.5% national average. West Virginia’s clip of public water systems in this category had been just 4.7% in 2015. The percentage of public water systems in West Virginia identified as priority systems — systems on a list indicating unresolved serious or continuing violations for at least a quarter of the year — was 42.2% in 2022, dwarfing the national average of 3.2%.
Acute health-based violations, which have the potential to produce immediate illness, have been far more prevalent among West Virginia public water systems than the rest of the country on average. West Virginia’s percentage of public water systems with those violations was 2.7% in 2022, exceeding the national 0.8% clip and the state’s own 1.2% clip in 2015. West Virginia public water systems also struggle to meet public notice requirements.
