Warwick Township runs two municipal water systems. One serves township customers around Lititz with water the township buys from Lititz Borough; the other serves Rothsville. In the spring of 2016 the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection told the township that both systems had fallen short of the federal Lead and Copper Rule.
The finding came in a notice dated March 17, 2016, the same date as the state’s letter to Lititz Borough. “After a thorough review of the system histories, the department has determined that Warwick violated the Safe Drinking Water Regulations,” the notice said, according to the copy reported publicly that May. It was addressed to the township manager and signed by a DEP drinking water program supervisor.
The specific findings
The violations concerned how and where the township sampled, not a single dangerous reading. According to the notice, Warwick did not correctly carry out required lead and copper sampling in 2010 and 2013 in either system. The township did not test the required number of homes, and the homes it did test were not all drawn from the high-risk group the rule targets: houses with lead service lines, lead connectors or lead solder from the right era.
Those details matter because the Lead and Copper Rule is built on a sampling pool. A water system collects samples from taps most likely to show lead, then compares the 90th-percentile result with the federal action level. When the pool is small or tilted toward newer homes, the reported number can understate what residents in older houses might face.
The notice arrived as residents were absorbing other reports from that year, including state Health Department figures on elevated blood lead in young children in the 17543 ZIP code. We have rewritten that story separately: State data on Lititz-area children’s blood lead levels.
Who is served by which system
For many households the first question in 2016 was simply whose water they were drinking. A rough guide still holds:
- Homes inside Lititz Borough are served by the borough’s own system.
- Many Warwick Township homes on the edges of Lititz are on the township’s Lititz-area system, which distributes water purchased from the borough.
- Rothsville homes on public water are on the township’s Rothsville system, which has its own wells.
- Some township properties are on private wells and fall outside these rules entirely.
Your water bill names your provider. If you are on a private well, lead testing is your responsibility, and our guide to having your water tested applies directly to you.
The rules have moved on
The 2016 notices were issued under a rule written in 1991. Since then the EPA has twice revised it. The Lead and Copper Rule Revisions required every community water system to submit a service line inventory by October 16, 2024, listing each line as lead, galvanized requiring replacement, non-lead or unknown. In October 2024 the EPA finalized the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, which set a ten-year window for most systems to replace lead and galvanized lines and lower the action level from 15 to 10 parts per billion.
For a township with two systems, that translates into two inventories and, where needed, two replacement plans. Residents can ask the township’s water authority for the status of their own line and for the most recent annual Consumer Confidence Report, which systems must deliver by July 1 each year.
What residents asked then, and still ask
The questions people raised at public meetings and online in 2016 are still the right ones. Has my home ever been sampled? Is my line in the inventory, and what does it say? If my line is listed as unknown, when will someone check it? What happens if a replacement crosses onto my property?
Warwick Township posts meeting agendas and water authority information on its website, and township supervisors take public comment at regular meetings. If you get an answer that does not match what you find at the tap, we would like to hear about it through our Contact page. For the borough side of this story, see How the state found Lititz Borough broke lead-testing rules.