ATHOL — For the third consecutive year, Athol’s Water Division in the Department of Public Works has received an award for “noteworthy performance” from the state Department of Environmental Protection. The award was presented to 15 communities in the Large & Medium Community Systems category during a ceremony held in Boston on May 9.

“Every year there are communities that dot the i’s and cross the t’s and really make sure that the regulatory process is being followed,” said Athol Public Works Director Dick Kilhart, “and that’s primarily what this award reflects. There are a lot of things that go into that; everything from the routine monitoring that they do — which is daily, weekly, monthly — and it’s thousands of things that they actually test for to make sure we’re within the constraints of both the state regulatory agency, which is the Department of Environmental Protection, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.”

Kilhart said the DEP looks at a number of other factors to determine which communities are deserving of recognition, including the town’s consumer confidence report, “which we post online each year.”

The state also checks for adequate funding, he said. “This community has been very, very good and gracious, I’ll say, to want to support their public water and sewer systems here in Athol. The DEP looks at that when they do their annual sanitary surveys. They come out and look at what’s actually happening; do we have the appropriate amount of operational staff, do we have licensed staff, are we coming in when have a break and fixing things in a timely fashion, and that’s evidenced by having a reduced amount of unaccounted for water. The state likes to see less than 10% of what we would actually pump in a year, and I think Athol’s this year was around 7%, which is phenomenal.”

Kilhart said some communities have as much as 25% to 30% amounts of unaccounted for water.

“What that means they’ve got leaks that they don’t know about, they’ve got meters that aren’t accurate, old meters that maybe they’re not replacing. We try to be aggressive in getting out there and looking for these things and understanding what our daily consumption normally is. If the amount goes up slightly or there’s a pressure differential that they notice, we might start looking and aggressively try to calculate what we’ve lost.”

That includes, for example, calculating how much water may be used by the fire department in response to a house fire.

“That’s part of the regulatory process,” Kilhart continued. “You have to account not for every drop, but for as many drops as you can find. That’s sometimes a challenge.”

The DPW chief also noted that the Water Division has a number of staffing changes in the past year. Some employees have taken jobs in other communities, he said, “so we have some new staff in some of these rolls, and they’ve stepped in and done an excellent job. The guys and gals in the Water Division are really working hard to promote customer service. That’s our theme here; it says so right on the business card — “at your service.”

Kilhart also credited the town’s Planning Department for regularly securing Community Development Block Grants that pay for upgrades to the water and sewer systems, as well as other infrastructure.

“We try to make those infrastructure improvements,” he said. “All of those things kind of go into that public water supply award, and we’re very proud of that. There aren’t a lot of communities that can say, ‘We’ve done this three years in a row.’ And it’s not just the three years of the award, it’s the previous five years leading up to the award.

“Some folks may not think it’s important to get that certificate,” Kilhart continued, “but when you look at the list and see how many medium and large community systems were awarded, there’s not a whole lot of systems on there, and Athol is one of them. That’s a pretty important thing and I think a lot of people in town really appreciate that. And we’re very proud of that, and very proud of the crew, the folks that we have here, the folks who have moved on, and the new generation of operators that we’re working with now.”