In March 2016 the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection sent Lititz Borough a notice of violation under the state’s Safe Drinking Water regulations. The letter did not say the borough’s water was unsafe. It said something narrower and, for many residents, more unsettling: the borough had not tested for lead the way the federal Lead and Copper Rule requires, and had reported some results to customers incorrectly.
The notice was dated March 17, 2016, and it landed in a year when Flint, Michigan, had made lead in tap water a national story. For a borough that had been called the “Coolest Small Town in America” by Budget Travel readers in 2013, the timing was hard to ignore.
What the state said went wrong
According to the DEP notice as it was reported at the time, the problems fell into a few groups:
- Lead results reported to residents over a two-year stretch were not calculated or presented correctly.
- The borough did not pick tap sampling sites that met the rule’s standards. The Lead and Copper Rule asks systems to sample homes most likely to have lead, such as those with lead service lines or lead connectors.
- When the borough changed which homes it sampled, it did not explain the change to the state as required.
- A home that had shown a very high lead reading in 2010 was not sampled again in the 2013 round.
The notice also pointed to the role of Severn Trent Services, the private contractor that operated the borough’s water system then. The DEP laid out corrective steps for the borough rather than a fine, though it noted that enforcement could still follow.
Borough officials responded that steps were being taken to resolve the Lead and Copper Rule violations. Within weeks, the same office sent a parallel notice to Warwick Township, which runs its own systems serving parts of Lititz and Rothsville. We have restored our account of that notice as well: State: Warwick Township Violated Lead in Drinking Water Laws.
Why sampling rules matter
It is easy to treat a testing violation as paperwork. It is not. The Lead and Copper Rule works by sampling a set of high-risk taps and comparing the 90th-percentile result against an “action level” of 15 parts per billion. If a system samples low-risk homes instead, the number it reports can look better than conditions in the oldest parts of town.
That is why the follow-up questions in 2016 centered on which addresses still had lead goosenecks, the short flexible connectors once used between water mains and service lines. Lititz later produced a list of roughly 300 such addresses. Our rewrite of that story, with guidance on what a listing does and does not mean, is here: Borough lists addresses with lead gooseneck connectors.
What has changed since
Federal rules have tightened considerably since 2016. The EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule Revisions required every community water system to file an inventory of service line materials by October 16, 2024. In October 2024 the agency finalized the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, which require most systems to replace lead and galvanized service lines within ten years and lower the action level to 10 parts per billion, with the main compliance dates falling in 2027.
For Lititz residents, that means there should now be a public record of what each service line is made of, and a schedule for replacing any that contain lead. If you live in an older home in the borough, the most useful steps are simple:
- Ask the borough’s water department whether your service line is listed as lead, galvanized, non-lead or “unknown” in its inventory.
- Read the annual Consumer Confidence Report, which every system must send customers by July 1.
- If you have young children or someone in the house is pregnant, consider a certified lab test of your own tap. Our guide to where to have your water tested lists the options.
- Run cold water for a short time before drinking or cooking if it has sat in the pipes for hours, and never use hot tap water for infant formula.
If you have documents from the 2016 notices or later correspondence with the borough, we would like to see them. Reach the newsroom through the Contact page.