Full Description

Water system specialists from 16 nations, U.S. federal agencies, and water-relatedprofessional groups met in Bozeman, Montana on May 9-12, 2004 as part of the colloquium"Protecting Public Health in Small Water Systems" to consider a detailed set of issuesfacing small water systems in the developed world. The purpose was to exchangeinformation and experience with the end result being guidance on improving small water systemperformance. Among the issues were potential threats to public health, systemmanagement and operation, personnel training and public education, regulatorychallenges, and models of system consolidation. Attendees agreed upon four principalproblems in small systems: incomplete understanding of public health risks; lack ofexpertise on designing, organizing, managing, monitoring and operating small systems;insufficient training and education at all levels of operation and oversight; and aregulatory climate too focused on compliance rather than on risks to public health.This paper summarizes a document entitled "Protecting Public Health in SmallWater Systems: Report of an International Colloquium" published in January of 2005(Ford et al., 2005) that is available from the Montana Water Center. The full report canalso be downloaded at http://water.montana.edu/colloquium.

Product Details

Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 11/01/2005 Number of Pages: 5File Size: 1 file , 160 KB