When Ship Bottom residents use their water Dec. 1 for everyday activities – cooking, showering, washing clothes – it’s likely they won’t think about where it is coming from or where it came from in the months prior. They, like many utility customers, will only notice when there is something wrong with the service. For borough officials, who budgeted $8.8 million in an automated state-of-the-art water treatment plant that doubled the size of its 1940/50s-era predecessor, that is reassuring.

“We take this very seriously,” Mayor William Huelsenbeck said on a brisk Tuesday morning in November while on a tour of…