What is the difference between Source Water Protection and Wellhead Protection?
Source Water Protection (“SWAP”) and Wellhead Protection (“WHP”) are both national programs designed to help protect our nation’s drinking water. They have the same goal and the same methods, but originated at different times historically, with different scopes. The Wellhead Protection Program was created by the 1986 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act, and focused exclusively on ground water systems. Ten years later, Congress recognized that the program was faltering due to lack of funding. They passed the 1996 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act, which extended source water protection to surface water systems, and provided for funding. In Ohio, the WHP program is merged into the Ohio SWAP Program, which is administered by Ohio EPA. The terms WHP and SWAP are used interchangeably. (In some other states, the two programs are kept separate due to state-specific administrative or legal issues.) In Ohio, the differences between the two programs are mostly of historical interes
