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SMART About Water helps America's small communities protect their source water

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," Benjamin Franklin famously stated more than 250 years ago. This simple philosophy informed an environmental program—SMART About Water—designed to protect drinking water quality.

While the program ran from 2008 to 2009, the resources produced during its time of operation are still available on the program's website (see link below).

SMART (About Water) stands for Strategic Management and Available Resources and Technology. The program provided training and technical assistance about source water and wellhead-protection planning to small and rural communities and focused on untreated wastewater from failing septic and sewer systems, the largest contributor to water quality degradation.

According to EPA, communities derive several important benefits when they protect their source water:

• If source water is contaminated it threatens public health.
• The better the water is when it reaches the treatment plant, the easier and cheaper it is to treat.
• The cost of dealing with contaminated groundwater ranges from 30 to more than 200 times the cost of wellhead protection.
• Clean water and healthy ecosystems are vital in terms of quality of life for both humans and animals.

Although water quality has improved in the decades since passage of the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts, pollution problems linger. Previous efforts concentrated on reducing point-source pollution, such as from industrial sites. Water-quality issues now are related to the cumulative effect of nonpoint source pollution—untreated wastewater, agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, stormwater runoff, and roadway pollutants—that impact the physical, chemical, and biological health of nearby waters.

The separate website for the program gathers in one place many resources from a variety of authorities on the subject to assist small, rural communities in protecting their source water.

Go to the SMART About Water website

Credits: The SMART About Water program was funded by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and carried out by West Virginia University's National Environmental Services Center (NESC) and RCAP.