Preventing backflow is critical in maintaining a safe and healthy water supply throughout any residential plumbing system. In Pasadena, CA—a city that so perfectly blends old, remodeled homes with the new residential construction where we tend to work—the backflow risk is significant.
Backflow occurs when the water inside your home’s plumbing system flows the wrong way—back into the clean water supply that’s supposed to come into your home. When water pressure inside the system drops suddenly—from a broken water main, for example, or an unusually high demand for water when fire-fighting services are underway—water reverses its flow and attempts to find the first opening it can.
Without proper backflow prevention mechanisms, the first opening that the water finds could easily lead it and the various contaminants it might be carrying directly into your clean water supply.
Those contaminants, without question, are dangerous to your health.
They could include fertilizers, a pipeline of typical Pasadena chemicals bound for our prized local nurseries, pesticides, or a whole host of other bad-for-you-to-ingest chemicals.
Don’t even get us started on the bacteria!
That is why backflow prevention is part of every plumbing job we do.
Backflow prevention device installation at home ensures water supply safety, in plumbing systems; it checks for backflow and safeguards against cross connections, the surest way to keep our plumbing systems and overall water supplies free from contaminants and vice versa. It hence follows that the more reliably we can ensure the integrity of our home's plumbing system, the more effectively we can also safeguard our overall community's water quality. These regulations and codes are not there simply to ensure our precious water is safe to drink. They exist to stop us all from putting each other at risk of having our water supply cross-contaminated.
Investing in backflow prevention is not only about protecting one's personal health; it is also about being a conscientious citizen of Pasadena. The water that flows through the plumbing of a Pasadena home may at any time also be flowing through the public parks and municipal buildings of the City of Pasadena. Serious problems anywhere in the plumbing of Pasadena pose serious problems for all of Pasadena, and that includes the public health problems that backflow and unsafe plumbing can cause.
Backflow prevention is, then, a major public health issue. And what the City of Pasadena is doing in the next several years to achieve the objective of stopping backflow is what this report is all about.
