Water Quality

Shortly following the 1974 federal Safe Drinking Water Act, DHEC became the primacy agency responsible for the regulatory oversight and enforcement of South Carolina’s public drinking water program. As such, DHEC is responsible for ensuring that all public water systems monitor for contaminants and report results, certifying that contaminants are within regulatory limits and that the public is informed of any Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) exceedances. Since 1996, states have been required to submit annual compliance reports to the EPA. In 2007, S.C. ranked 13th among states for percentage of the population served by facilities reporting a health violation.

The S.C. Listing of Impaired Waters, updated by DHEC in 2004, reports that Spartanburg County has 41 impaired water bodies. Of these, 30 are impaired by fecal coliform.

In calendar year 2006, 99% of South Carolina’s 1,476 federally-defined public water systems were considered to be in significant compliance with drinking water regulatory requirements. Of the nine systems (1%) considered to be in significant noncompliance, seven are under either a consent or administrative order, one is in enforcement and one has returned to compliance. Of the 144 systems that incurred violations in 2006, 69% incurred only a single violation during the year. Eighty-one systems had MCL violations for bacteriological contamination, and 66% of these were one-time occurrences.

Metro sub-districts, the Spartanburg Water System and S.C. DHEC routinely monitor for 81 chemical and biological contaminants in Spartanburg County drinking water. The Annual Drinking Water Quality Report for Spartanburg, issued in June 2008, shows that no Maximum Contaminant Levels were exceeded for contaminants measured during calendar year 2007. The 2005 Spartanburg Water System Water Quality Report indicates that that the System was in full compliance for all regulated contaminants including inorganic contaminants, lead and copper, microbiological contaminants, organic contaminants, and radioactive contaminants.

The Spartanburg Area Conservancy (SPACE) has formed a partnership with the Spartanburg Water System and the Spartanburg County Foundation to protect the County’s watershed. Working with private landowners, SPACE procures riparian buffers within the Pacolet River watershed to help mitigate the threat to the area’s water quality and supply by acquiring and protecting critical forested buffer lands along the Pacolet Rivers and their tributaries. Further, in 2008, Spartanburg County was issued a Phase II Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit by DHEC and now must update local regulations to ensure compliance with federally mandated requirements to assure that unregulated discharges will not occur to local streams and water bodies.