The Safe Drinking Water program, under the Bureau of Environmental Coastal Quality, has received national recognition for their data quality collection.<\/p>\n
BECQ administrator Frank Rabauliman said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded the Safe Drinking water program with \u201cmost improved award\u201d for data quality collection.<\/p>\n
The branch earned the highest honors with the \u201cplatinum award.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rabauliman said the exciting thing about the award is that \u201cout of all the states and territories,\u201d he said, one branch bested the rest to get the award.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a branch that manages safe drinking water. In the mainland, you would think a \u201cdepartment\u201d of safe drinking water\u2014they have more resources. So I was ecstatic when I heard,\u201d the administrator said.<\/p>\n
The Safe Drinking Water and Ground Water Management Programs monitors the activities of all public water systems in the CNMI and regulates access to and withdrawal of the ground water from fresh water aquifers.<\/p>\n
The branch monitors these systems through the training, testing, and certification of water treatment plant operators, inspecting public water systems on a periodic basis, reviewing designs of new or modified public water systems, tracking the water monitoring and compliance activities of public water systems, and investigating drinking water violations and responding to drinking water complaints.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not only for the fact that we manage this data here and how we readily send it to EPA,\u201d Rabauliman said. \u201cBut I think it\u2019s how we work with the regulated community and how well they are informed of what the regulations are so we don\u2019t get a lot of hits that there is enforcement here and enforcement there.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The award] has a lot to do also not just with us as the regulators but also the regulated community in understanding the importance of our safe drinking water,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Safe Drinking Water program, under the Bureau of Environmental Coastal Quality, has received national…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[880,26,1496,5756],"class_list":["post-205467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-becq","tag-cnmi","tag-frank-rabauliman","tag-safe-drinking-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}