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Why Your Pressure Washing Vendor's Wash Water Is Your Liability
Water reclamation pressure washing is the difference between a clean property and a citation with your name on it. If a contractor washes your sidewalk and lets the runoff reach a storm drain, the violation does not necessarily stop with the contractor. In Gwinnett County it can land on the person who hired them. Most property managers have never been told this. It is worth ten minutes of your time before you approve the next service date.
What the ordinance actually says
Gwinnett County’s Illicit Discharge and Illegal Connection Ordinance prohibits putting anything other than stormwater into a storm drain or waterway. Not oil, not degreaser, not soapy runoff carrying grease off a service entrance. Maximum penalties reach a thousand dollars and up to sixty days in county jail.
The county goes further than most. It publishes a specific water quality guideline for surface cleaning, WQ-1, which sets out how wash water is to be collected, handled and disposed of. It also maintains a list of businesses the county considers capable of collecting surface cleaning wash water, and it runs a twenty-four hour line for reporting contractors who discharge into drains.
The clause that puts it on the property owner
Section 100-23(a)(1) of that ordinance says a person must not allow others under their control to discharge a pollutant into the storm drain. A vendor you hired and scheduled and paid is, for these purposes, operating under your control.
That single sentence is why vendor selection on this trade is not the same as vendor selection on landscaping. You are not just buying a clean sidewalk. You are accepting responsibility for how the water leaves the property. If your contractor cannot explain their containment method, you are carrying a risk you were never quoted on.
What counts as polluted wash water
Plain water on an unpolluted surface is treated differently and the guidelines are lighter. The problem is that almost nothing on a commercial property qualifies. A restaurant service entrance carries grease. A parking lot carries oil, brake dust and tire residue. A fuel island carries hydrocarbons. A dumpster area carries food waste and bacteria. Add any detergent or degreaser and the water is a pollutant regardless of what it lifted off the concrete.
This is the part contractors quietly skip. Collecting and disposing of wash water requires equipment, time and a disposal route. A crew without that equipment cannot comply, which is why the lowest bid on a large concrete job is often the one that plans to let the water run.
How Crown Pressure Washing handles it
Drains are protected before any water moves. Depending on the site that means covers, berms or socks positioned to divert flow away from the inlet. Wash water is then recovered with vacuum equipment, filtered, and routed to an appropriate disposal point rather than a storm inlet.
On graded lots and multi-level parking decks the sequencing matters as much as the equipment, because water finds the low point long before a crew does. We plan containment by section and work in the direction the site drains, not against it.
Documentation goes to the property manager after the visit. If an inspector ever asks how the water was handled on a given date, you should not have to take anyone’s word for it, including ours.
Five questions to ask before the next service date
Ask your current vendor how they contain wash water on a sloped lot. Ask what recovery equipment is on the truck. Ask where the collected water goes. Ask whether they appear on Gwinnett County’s list of businesses capable of collecting surface cleaning wash water. Ask for documentation after each visit.
A contractor who handles this properly will answer all five without hesitation, because the equipment is expensive and they want you to know they own it. Hesitation on any of the five is the answer.
Outside Gwinnett
Gwinnett publishes more detail than most Georgia jurisdictions, but the underlying law is federal. Discharging pollutants into a municipal storm sewer system is regulated under the Clean Water Act, and Georgia’s local governments administer that through their own stormwater programs and ordinances. The specific citation number changes from county to county. The exposure does not.
If you manage property across metro Atlanta or down on the coast, the practical answer is to hold every site to the strictest standard in your portfolio rather than tracking which ordinance applies where.
Where this leaves you
Exterior cleaning is not an expensive service and the compliance piece adds less to a bid than most managers expect. What it removes is the possibility of a fine, a complaint call to the county, or a conversation with an owner about why the property is named in an enforcement action over a sidewalk wash.
Send us the property address and we will walk the site, show you where the water goes, and price the work with containment included rather than as a line item you can decline.