Priority Area 15:
Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS)

 

The Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) federal and state databases contain information submitted by states, EPA regions, and public water systems in conformance with reporting requirements established by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and related regulations and guidance.  These statutes and accompanying regulations establish maximum contaminant levels, treatment techniques, and monitoring and reporting requirements to ensure that water provided to customers is safe for human consumption. The Safe Drinking Water Query within SDWIS allows users to locate their drinking water supplier and view its violations and enforcement history for the last ten years.  In this manner, data management plays a critical role in helping states and EPA protect public health.

EPA’s Office of Water (OW) collaborates with states on a number of groups (SDWIS Data Sharing Committee, SDWIS Data Management Steering Committee, Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, etc.) to recommend and make improvements to SDWIS and the collection of drinking water information.  In addition to participation on two different data committees, there is an annual conference and monthly calls where states may raise their concerns to EPA.  States had a number of recommendations related to streamlining reporting elements and eliminating duplicate reporting. 

While many of the recommendations in this priority area directly relate to changes that have been or could potentially be made to the SDWIS databases, others relate to enforcement or region-specific reports.  A brief description of each is outlined as follows:

• Recommendation W1 – Streamlining SDWIS – Massachusetts, Montana, and Texas all reported a variety of reporting that duplicated data submitted elsewhere, required state staff to verify data, or required states to perform time-consuming queries to build a report.  EPA made significant modifications to SDWIS-Fed in 2006, which has streamlined data calculation, data queries, and other data extraction.  The Office of Ground Water Drinking Water (OGWDW) confirmed that data verification is necessary to ensure data quality, and is typically done biennially via national surveys.

• Recommendation W3 – Significant noncompliance reporting– Iowa, Massachusetts, and Texas requested revisions to EPA’s significant noncompliance (SNC) determinations, reporting, or verification.  The modifications made to SDWIS-Fed in 2006 have corrected errors to the Public Water System (PWS) quarterly noncompliance reports and streamlined SDWIS further to generate lists of new systems in SNC.  However, the new SNC calculation tool is still under development.

• Recommendation W27 – Data sharing– Massachusetts, Maryland, Montana, and South Carolina all requested streamlining of SDWIS to contain related information and to extract the data in a more efficient manner.  With the exception of Underground Injection Control (UIC) data, which is outlined in Priority Area 12, many ground water systems have already been added or will be added to SDWIS.  Additionally, SDWIS has been updated for queries on public water system information.

• Recommendation W31 – Ground Water reporting – Florida requested that the SNC report used for capacity development be eliminated.  While the calculation formula for SNC that forms the basis of the capacity development report is under development (see Recommendation W3), EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water (OGWDW) will still require that states provide reasons for systems in historical SNC or new systems in SNC. Meanwhile, Tennessee requested that SDWIS accept only changed or modified data elements.  EPA believes that the modernized SDWIS-Fed has made the electronic data exchange more efficient for updating entire data files.

• Recommendation W33 – Sanitary surveys – Both Florida and Massachusettsmade recommendations for changes to EPA’s sanitary survey collection requirements. In response to Florida, EPA Region 4 has agreed that the state does not have to submit an annual list of completed sanitary surveys. Region 4 will extract this information from SDWIS-Fed, if that is what the state prefers. Massachusetts’ request was to not duplicate sanitary survey data collection in both SDWIS and the Integrated Compliance Information System (ICIS). EPA confirmed that state sanitary survey information is only collected in SDWIS, and not in ICIS.

• Recommendation W34 – Operator certification – Massachusetts asked to eliminate the annual narrative report of the operator certification program and to instead be allowed to enter the information into SDWIS.  EPA plans to discuss this with its Data Sharing Committee.