Adams County water district seeks volunteers for lead sampling

The Adams County Regional Water District is asking customers with copper plumbing installed between Jan. 1, 1983 and Dec. 31, 1988 to volunteer for lead and copper sampling, a targeted request tied directly to water safety monitoring. The district’s public notices page also says there are no scheduled service or maintenance disruptions at this time, giving households one place to check for both health-related alerts and day-to-day system status.

That same notices page lays out where the district’s board of trustees meets: regularly scheduled meetings are held at 7:30 p.m. in the district business office at 9203 SR 136 in West Union. For a county where families, farms and villages are spread across a wide rural area, that kind of public posting matters because it puts meeting times, service notices and sampling requests in one visible place instead of leaving residents to piece together updates from bills or word of mouth.

The district has also paired the notices page with a broader push for customer alerts. Its homepage says ACRWD has added a One Call system and asks customers to update phone numbers and email addresses so the district can send emergency or mass messages. That makes the notices page part of a larger communication network, not just a bulletin board, and it gives the utility a faster way to reach customers if weather, repairs or another emergency affects service.

ACRWD’s service line inventory page and interactive map add another layer of accountability. The survey was created so water customers can determine the material of their private and system service lines, and the map viewer was developed to satisfy the district’s requirement to display that information as part of Ohio EPA’s service line inventory work. Ohio EPA says tap sampling under the Lead and Copper Rule is risk-based and starts with sites that have plumbing materials containing lead, while action levels are based on the 90th percentile of tap water samples.

The state also requires systems with lead, galvanized requiring replacement or unknown service lines to submit inventory-related items each year. In West Union, which buys its water from ACRWD, the district’s reporting reaches beyond its own customers, too. The village’s 2024 consumer confidence report notes that every community water system serving year-round residents must deliver an annual report to consumers by July 1 of the following year. Third-party business listings say ACRWD was founded in 1969 and serves about 21,810 people, underscoring how many households depend on the district’s notices, testing and public meetings.