Drinking Water Week: Growing Our Commitment to Provide Earth’s Most Precious Resource

Drinking Water Week: Growing Our Commitment to Provide Earth’s Most Precious Resource

Christopher Crockett, Chief Environmental, Safety, and Sustainability Officer, Essential Utilities, Inc.

At Essential, we understand that water is a precious resource that sustains life and enriches the environment, which is why we recognize @AmericanWaterWorksAssociation’s Drinking Water Week– a week dedicated to drinking water’s vital role in our lives and communities. At Essential, and particularly our Aqua brand that serves more than three million people in eight states, offering safe and reliable water and wastewater services is the cornerstone of who we are as a company.

Each day, Essential uses cutting-edge technology to make sure the drinking water that runs out of our customers’ taps is safe and reliable. As science evolves and technology advances, Essential understands we will need to adapt and change to continue to be efficient and effective with our water treatment process.

To help provide our customers with safe and reliable drinking water, Essential has invested in a new water quality laboratory at our headquarters in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Less than one year after we broke ground, we have officially moved into our new two-story, 14,700-square-foot building. The new lab more than doubles the size of our previous laboratory, which served our company for more than 60 years.

We have a team of 17 lab employees – 12 chemists and microbiologists that conduct daily sample tests, and 5 people who manage and conduct routine quality assurance tests and administrative support. Our team is always monitoring to ensure we are striving for perfection when it comes to testing and managing our treatment process.

At Essential, we know that science continues to advance and we need to understand emerging contaminants. There are chemicals that we couldn’t detect 30 years ago, 10 years ago and even 1 year ago, but each day, science allows us the ability to understand more. Science is also teaching us the makeup of different chemicals and providing us the ability, through leading-edge technology, to detect even smaller chemicals to understand what could be in water.

The new laboratory allows us to continue to evolve, grow and keep up with the rapidly changing developments in chemistry and the environment. We built this new space to have the capability to detect and test more chemicals and microbiological samples every day through advanced technology. Currently, we are performing more than 90,000 tests a year. By 2023 we predict we will be able to perform more than 100,000 tests, allowing us to gain significant growth in the amount of work we can accomplish day in and day out to ensure we have the best processes in place.

Drinking Water Week shines a bright light on the importance of drinking water, but we want our customers to know that we strive every day to be at the forefront of advancing with science and technology to continue to protect and provide Earth’s most essential resource. Our new laboratory allows us to continue to deliver safe and reliable water so our customers never have to worry when they turn on their taps.