How Elkins Monitors Your Drinking Water

The City of Elkins tests and monitors its drinking water on an ongoing basis as part of our commitment to providing safe, reliable drinking water to our customers.

Water treatment, monitoring, testing, and maintenance of the distribution system take place all year, every year. The City also publishes an annual Consumer Confidence Report to provide customers with information about their drinking water and water-quality testing.

Separately from this ongoing monitoring work, the City recently published results from a separate testing EPA-mandated program called the Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, or UCMR 5. This has prompted some questions about the purpose of the program, as well as why our most recent UCMR results are from 2025, with no UCMR results available for 2026.

UCMR 5 was a special nationwide EPA monitoring program, not the City’s regular water-quality testing program. Public water systems serving 3,300 or more people were required to participate and collect samples during the 2023-2025 monitoring period. The purpose was to help the EPA gather nationwide information about selected contaminants that do not yet have federal drinking-water standards.

UCMR 5 required testing for 29 PFAS and lithium. Because the EPA’s ordered monitoring period ended in 2025, there are no UCMR 5 results for 2026. The EPA has proposed UCMR 6 as the next round of this nationwide program, with sample collection proposed for 2028 through 2030.

None of this means that Elkins stopped testing its drinking water in 2026. The City’s regular water treatment, monitoring, testing, and reporting continue.

Our Regular Water-Quality Monitoring

The Elkins public water system operates under state and federal drinking-water requirements throughout the year. The City’s water-treatment and distribution employees monitor the treatment process, perform required testing, and conduct testing at locations throughout the distribution system.

Each year, the City publishes a Consumer Confidence Report, sometimes called an annual water-quality report. Required under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, these reports provide information about the source of our drinking water, substances tested for and detected, possible sources of those substances, and other information about water quality.

The Consumer Confidence Report and UCMR serve different purposes. The Consumer Confidence Report provides customers with regular information about their drinking water and the results of required water-quality monitoring. UCMR is a separate EPA program designed to gather nationwide data about selected contaminants for which federal drinking-water standards have not yet been established.

Current and previous reports are available on the City’s Water Consumer Confidence Reports page.

How Elkins Produces Drinking Water

The Elkins water system directly serves thousands of customer locations and also supplies water for resale to the Midland and Leadsville public service districts.

Elkins starts with surface water from the Tygart Valley River. Water is pumped from the river to the Elkins Water Treatment Plant, where it undergoes treatment before entering the distribution system that supplies homes and businesses.

The plant uses membrane filtration technology. City water-treatment employees operate and monitor the treatment process, while water-distribution employees maintain the system that carries treated water to customers.

The work includes treating raw water, monitoring the treatment process, testing water quality, maintaining the treatment and distribution systems, and meeting state and federal requirements.

In 2022, the EPA even used the Elkins Water Treatment Plant as the site of an Area-Wide Optimization Program training workshop for drinking-water professionals. State and federal drinking-water regulators from several EPA regions attended the workshop, which focused on applying water-treatment optimization principles at membrane filtration plants like Elkins’s.

More information about the plant and the treatment process is available on the City’s Water Treatment Plant page.

Where UCMR Fits In

UCMR has a different purpose from the City’s regular water-quality monitoring. Rather than testing specifically to determine compliance with an existing drinking-water standard, the program gathers information that can help the EPA decide whether substances that are not currently regulated should be considered for future regulation.

Under UCMR 5, systems across the country collected data on the same group of substances during a defined monitoring period. Elkins participated because the EPA required systems of its size to do so—not because of a particular concern or finding involving the Elkins water system.

The 2023-2025 Elkins results and additional information about the program are available on the City’s UCMR 5 webpage.

More information about the next round of nationwide monitoring is available from the EPA’s Proposed Sixth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule page.

The end of UCMR 5 sampling in 2025 means that this particular nationwide monitoring cycle ended. The City’s regular treatment, testing, monitoring, and annual public reporting continue.