Progress in Providing Safe Drinking Water

For thousands of years, civilizations have faced the challenge of obtaining safe drinking water. As a global society, we have learned a great deal about drinking water quality. However, we still have much to learn about the health effects of drinking water contaminants, the testing and treatment technologies required to detect and remove contaminants, and ways to protect our water sources from contamination.

During the 1800s, scientists began to gain an understanding of the sources and effects of drinking water contaminants, especially those that were not visible to the naked eye. By the early 1900s, engineers had developed techniques such as filtration and chlorination to prevent waterborne microbes from causing disease.

Federal regulation of drinking water quality began in 1914, when the U.S. Public Health Service set standards for some disease-causing microbes. These standards were revised and expanded and eventually, with minor modifications, all 50 states adopted the final 1962 Public Health Service standards either as regulations or as guidelines. By the late 1960s, health concerns spurred the federal government to conduct several studies on the nation’s water supplies which showed that many chemicals were present in treated drinking water.

The Safe Drinking Water Act

Increased awareness of environmental and health problems in the early 1970s eventually led to the passage of several federal laws, one of which was the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) of 1974. The SDWA is administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its state partners. The Act was amended in 1986 and 1996. EPA, states and public water systems have worked hard to implement provisions of the law and maintain basic health protection.

One of the original provisions of the SDWA was a regulatory program to protect underground sources of drinking water from injection well fluids. The Underground Injection Control (UIC) Program ensures that injection activities are performed in a safe manner so that the underground sources of drinking water that supply 90% of all public water systems are protected. Today, the UIC program regulates more than 800,000 injection wells. To find out more, visit http://www.epa.gov/safewater/uic.

The SDWA aims to ensure that public water systems meet national standards that protect consumers from harmful effects of contaminants in drinking water. The Act requires EPA to regulate contaminants that present health risks and are known to, or are likely to, occur in public drinking water supplies. For each contaminant requiring regulation, EPA sets a legal limit on the amount of the contaminant allowed in drinking water. States must also set limits that are at least as strict as EPA’s. Since 1974, the number of contaminants regulated under SDWA has quadrupled. There are currently more than 90 contaminants regulated under SDWA. The list of these regulated contaminants can be viewed at http://www.epa.gov/safewater/mcl.html.

One way to gauge whether the quality of our nation’s drinking water has improved under SDWA is to examine water systems’ compliance with federal regulations. Community water systems of all sizes have generally followed the same decreasing trend in violations since 1980, except for a period in the early 1990s when systems of all sizes struggled to comply with several new regulations. Since the 1996 Amendments, the percentage of the population receiving water from systems reporting no violations has significantly increased. EPA has a goal of ensuring that 95% of the population receive water from systems without violations in 2008.

To help all systems provide safe drinking water, the 1996 Amendments to the SDWA established a multi-billion dollar state revolving loan fund for water systems of all sizes. This revolving fund provides low interest loans to systems to upgrade plants and distribution systems, protect source water and to provide security enhancements. For more information on this program, see http://www.epa.gov/safewater/dwsrf.html.

After the events of September 11, 2001, EPA was designated as the sector-specific agency responsible for coordinating infrastructure protection activities for the nation’s drinking water and wastewater systems. EPA is working in partnership with its stakeholders to provide information to help protect the nation’s drinking water supply from terrorist or other intentional acts. See http://www.epa/gov/safewater/watersecurity for additional information on EPA’s water security efforts.

Information has the power to motivate the public. Two provisions of the 1996 Amendments to the Act required states and utilities to undertake efforts to provide more information to the public about their drinking water. Each State was required to conduct an assessment of the susceptibility of all sources of drinking water for all public water systems and provide that information to the public to help inform decisions about steps local communities could take to protect their drinking water. Source water assessments have been completed for more than 90% of the systems in the country and water utilities and local communities have begun to take action to protect their drinking water.

Local water utilities are also required to provide annual water quality reports to their customer to inform them about the water system's compliance with drinking water-related rules. The reports must also inform the customers about their source of drinking water and how it is treated. Finally, the report must inform customers about the potential health effects of any contaminant detected in violation of an EPA health standard, and an accounting of the system's actions to restore safe drinking water.

Challenges Ahead

• While tremendous progress has been made in improving the testing, treatment, source protection, and provision of drinking water to the public, numerous challenges remain:
• More drinking water health information will need to be provided in a timely fashion to consumers who are most vulnerable to contaminants. This is especially important as cancer survivors and HIV/AIDS patients increase in number, and the elderly make up a growing percentage of the population.
• The public and private sectors must work together to more effectively and efficiently conduct sound scientific research in order to continue learning about the health effects of known contaminants and to begin studying emerging contaminants.
• Tap water must be conserved and its sources protected in order to lessen the negative impacts that trends in increasing population, urbanization and development may have on the future availability and quality of drinking water.
• High quality tap water comes at a price, but that price can be significantly less than alternatives such as bottled water.
• It is important for all of us to recognize that our actions affect the quality of source water and the level of treatment required for safe drinking water to flow from our pipes.
  

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