Program seeks to educate homeowners on the quality of their water

In Virginia, about one in five people rely on a private water supply. So those are unregulated, meaning that they don't fall under the Safe Drinking Water Act regulations, and so they're not monitored by any other entity. "Hello, hello !" And so they're totally the responsibility of the owner. And so our program offers water testing through about 70 counties every year across the state, working with extension agents all over the place. And then we offer water testing programs where we provide education, explain what the results mean, and help people solve problems, if anything is detected. We have people come pick up test kits and drop off their samples a few days later. We bring the samples back to Virginia Tech for analysis. And so we're looking for bacteria, a bunch of different metals that can be in the water, either from the geology, where the water is coming from or from the plumbing within the household. We've analyzed close to 50,000 household samples since I came to the program in 2008. People are sending in their own samples. They want to know if their drinking water is good enough. I really want to bridge that gap because you can do all of these things, make all these tests, but if you don't get the population involved, it really doesn't mean anything. So we find about 20% of our participants are return. So they come back, year after year or every other year. But 80% are new. And so we also know from our survey data that people are telling their friends and neighbors about the program and encouraging them to come too.