Throughout the month of June, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has been mailing its Annual Water Quality Report to every household in its service area.

For 2013, MWRA again met every federal and state drinking water standard. The hundreds of thousands of tests taken during the year confirm that the quality of MWRA’s water is excellent.

MWRA hopes the report will encourage residents to drink local tap water and highlights its environmental benefits and low cost compared to bottled water.

The big news this year is the completion and start-up of a new ultraviolet (UV) disinfection facility at the John J. Carroll Water Treatment Plant in Marlborough, improving the quality of the drinking water delivered to MWRA’s customers.

UV light is essentially a more potent form of natural disinfection from sunlight enabling MWRA to inactivate the most difficult to kill pathogens - which could potentially be in the source water - without the use of additional chemicals and any associated disinfection by-products.

The addition of the UV to the existing ozone process provides additional assurance that any pathogens potentially in the reservoirs will be rendered harmless. The UV process and MWRA’s high quality source water allow MWRA to meet new regulatory requirements cost effectively.

"In just a few short years, water treatment has gone from chlorine with its taste and odor issues, to ozone and now ultraviolet – with no additional chemicals and no disinfection by-products,” said MWRA Executive Director Fred Laskey. “Just better, safer water.”

MWRA is also proud to announce that Quabbin water was voted “Best of the Best” in a taste test held at the American Water Works Association annual conference in June. Samples from both the Boston Water & Sewer Commission and MWRA were among the 31 entries and came in first and second, respectively – a clean sweep!

Required under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, the report is distributed to over 850,000 homes in the MWRA service area.

Community-specific inserts also provide information about municipal water systems. The reports are being mailed through the end of June. Look for it in your mailbox.

The report is also available on-line and in Spanish. A large print version is available upon request.