The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund Helps Ground Water Systems Deliver Public Health Protection

Progress in Providing Safe Drinking Water

The Forest and the Trees: How Population-Level Health Protections Sometimes Fail the Individual

TIrroughout the debate over re-authorization of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), it has been clear that members of both Houses of Congress are keenly aware of the financial burden facing the owners of small water systems in their efforts to comply with the 1986 and future amendments to the SDWA. The most reliable source of funds for drinking water and wastewater improvements for small systems has been the Water and Waste Disposal Loan and Grant Program administered through the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the USDA's Rural Development mission area. This report provides some background of the RUS loan and grant program. Specific attention is directed towards New York's Rural Development efforts where we develop small system cost models related to treatment and distribution improvements. Over the past 50 years, RUS has been the primary source of low-cost financing to rural water and waste disposal systems, providing over 35,000 loan and grant funding packages totaling nearly $18 billion. Despite the recent increases in obligations in nominal terms, the real purchasing power of these funds has yet to rebound to pre-1980 levels. Due to EPA's efforts to enforce the 1986 and later amendments to the SDWA, combined with the aging of water system infrastructure, the demand for these funds consistently outweighs available obligation levels. Data from nearly 150 small water system improvement projects in New York State receiving RUS funding are evaluated to determine the extent of improvements related to SDWA regulations. Operating revenues and expenses are relatively similar across the state; however residual funds for future capital improvements after reducing net incomes by principle and interest payments are nonexistent. While public water systems should not accumulate large surplus funds, the small residuals remaining are surely insufficient to support any major capital improvements in the future. The costs of treatment varied widely by treatment technology and system size. An indirect cost function was specified regressing annualized treatment and operating costs on system population, water source, and treatment variables. While the economies are substantial for very small systems, for some technologies, they are nearly exhausted at service populations of around 3,300. An indirect cost function for distribution and transmission improvements was specified. These models are useful in comparing the tradeoff between economies of size of treatment to the associated diseconomies of distribution and transmission.

Surveillance for Waterborne Disease Outbreaks Associated With Drinking Water - United States, 2011-2012.

Whereas a large number of empirical studies have been devoted to analyzing determinants of environmental compliance (EC) by firms, less attention has been paid to EC by public water systems (PWS). To address this gap in the literature, this article uses data on compliance with maximum contaminant levels (MCL) under the Safe Drinking Water Act for 971 PWS in Arizona and identifies the characteristics of PWS that are associated with violation of MCL standards. Three main findings emerge from the analysis. First, larger PWS are more likely to violate MCL standards than smaller PWS. Second, publicly owned PWS have slightly higher probability of violating MCL standards than privately owned systems. Finally, PWS serving residential areas are more likely to violate MCL standards, as opposed to PWS serving school districts or office buildings. The results suggest that for ensuring safe water for people, effectiveness of monitoring policy, and an efficient utilization of resources, the environmental agencies may focus their monitoring and enforcement efforts on these water systems.(JEL K32, Q53)

Institutional Diversity and Safe Drinking Water Provision in the United States

Ground Water Systems’ Progress in Meeting National Drinking Water Goals

There are about 54,367 community water systems in the United States, which serve about 253 million people. Approximately 93% of community water systems are small water systems serving fewer than 10,000 persons and serve just about 20% of the population served by community water systems (1). Ownership type and system size are closely related. Most water systems serving 500 or less people are ancillary or privately owned systems, whereas most of the larger systems are publicly owned systems. This chapter discusses the operating characteristics of small water systems and the effect of Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) amendments implementation on small systems. The main focus of the chapter is on the filtration systems of small water systems, which serve communities less than 10,000 persons. The application of sand filters for treatment of wastewater treatment effluents from septic tanks and lagoons for small communities is also discussed in this chapter.KeywordsDiatomaceous EarthSeptic TankWater Treatment SystemCartridge FilterDirect FiltrationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Texas Source Water Assessment and Protection (SWAP) Program was promulgated as part of amendments to the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act and consists of two fundamental aspects: Assessment and Protection. Administered under the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), compliance with the State of Texas Source Water Protection (SWP) program is voluntary and thus taking action on the information contained in the assessments has been encouraged but ultimately left to the discretion of the water system. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of recent SWP implementation efforts in Texas public groundwater systems. Since 2007, TCEQ and its subcontractor CDM have implemented SWP activities for selected project areas. The individual water systems have been selected because they: (1) are highly susceptible, as determined through the initial source water assessment; (2) lack substantial source water protection implementation; and (3) are small water systems. Required elements of source water protection programs include the delineation of the wellhead protection area, development of a contaminant inventory, evaluation of appropriate best management practices (BMPs), preparation of a contingency plan and preparation of a final source water protection report. A streamlined process was developed and employed by CDM to implement the required elements for multiple supply systems concurrently and will be presented. Components of the process include the use of development and use of standardized forms, and report templates, and implementation of a BMP evaluation database tool. In addition, a source water assessment and protection brand was developed to facilitate recognition and communication of a consistent message as part of a comprehensive public education and outreach program. These processes, coupled with effective data analysis and proactive consensus building, have yielded successful SWP implementation. The success of current efforts in the State of Texas will be discussed. Voluntary involvement in the project has been high for the identified systems. A total of seven systems have successfully completed the SWP process, protecting drinking water for 18,000 customers. Of these seven systems, three have completed outreach events focused on SWP with the assistance of TCEQ and several have begun the process of BMP implementation. TCEQ's goal for this project is substantial implementation of SWP activities and the public groundwater systems identified for this project appear to be well on their way to achieving those goals.

Despite extensive research and policy initiatives to increase the technical, financial, and managerial capacity of drinking water systems, there has been little research focusing on understanding how consolidation can increase the overall capacity of the drinking water industry. Consolidation of water systems may be a mechanism that increases regulatory compliance by removing poorly performing systems from the industry and replacing inefficient management and/or capital. The US drinking water system is highly fragmented, with over 50,000 Community Water Systems (CWSs), of which the vast majority are classified as small by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A discrete choice model is employed to determine the characteristics shared by water systems that are acquired. On average, these acquired firms are small, have frequent drinking water violations, are privately-owned, and purchase their water from another system. These results suggest that consolidation may have an important role to play in increasing overall industry compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).

This research seeks to determine whether health-based drinking water violations for total coliforms have increased since the Revised Total Coliform Bacteria Rule (RTCR) established in 2013 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA); as well as to determine the geographic regions, states and territories with the highest number of health-based Total Coliform Rule (TCR) and RTCR violations. Data was obtained for drinking water violations involving total coliform bacteria from the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) for 2000-2019 and trend analysis was performed by state, region, water source, violation type, month, and year This research seeks to determine whether health-based drinking water violations for total coliforms have increased since the Revised Total Coliform Bacteria Rule (RTCR) established in 2013 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA); as well as to determine the geographic regions, states, and territories with the highest number of health-based Total Coliform Rule (TCR) and RTCR violations. Data were obtained for drinking water violations involving total coliform bacteria from the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) for 2000-2019 and trend analysis was performed by state, region, water source, violation type, month, and year. Out of total 587,983 reported TCR and RTCR violations, 124,977 were health-based. EPA Region 5, which is headquartered in Chicago had the highest number of health-based TCR and RTCR violations (n=27,030), followed by EPA Region 1, which is headquartered in Boston (n=17,771). Within EPA Region 5, Wisconsin had the highest number of TCR and RTCR violations (n=7,022). Frequent acute violations occurred in small water systems using primarily groundwater, serving primarily rural populations.Within EPA Region 5, Wisconsin had the highest number of TCR and RTCR violations (n=7,022). Frequent acute violations occurred in small water systems using primarily groundwater, serving primarily rural populations.

Land cover and community water system characteristics as predictors of Safe Drinking Water Act violations in Central Appalachia, USA

The goals of environmental legislation and associated regulations are to protect public health, natural resources, and ecosystems. In this context, monitoring programs should provide timely and relevant information so that the regulatory community can implement legislation in a cost-effective and efficient manner. The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) of 1974 attempts to ensure that public water systems (PWSs) supply safe water to its consumers. As is the case with many other federal environmental statutes, SDWA monitoring has been implemented in relatively uniform fashion across the USA. In this three part series, we present over 30 years of evidence to demonstrate unique patterns in water quality contaminants over space and time, develop alternative place-based monitoring approaches that exploit such patterns, and evaluate the economic performance of such approaches to current monitoring practice. Part III: Place-based (PBA) and current SDWA monitoring approaches were implemented on test datasets (1995-2001) from 19 water systems and evaluated based on the following criteria: percent of total detections, percent detections above threshold values (e.g. 20, 50, 90% of MCL), and cost. The PBA outperformed the current SDWA monitoring requirements in terms of total detections, missed only a small proportion of detections below the MCL, and captured all detections above 50% of the MCL. Essentially the same information obtained from current compliance monitoring requirements can be gained at approximately one-eighth the cost by implementing the PBA. Temporal sampling strategies were implemented on test datasets (1995-2001) from four water systems and evaluated by the following criteria: parameter estimation, percent deviation from "true" 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles, and number of samples versus accuracy of the estimate. Non event-based (NEB) strategies were superior in estimating percentiles 1-50, but underestimated the higher percentiles. Event-based strategies were superior in estimating 95th and 99th percentiles, and required significantly fewer samples (than NEB strategies) to estimate the "true" 95th and 99th percentiles. Incorporation of place-based information significantly improves the performance of monitoring and temporal sampling strategies in the context of surface-influenced water systems in the state of Iowa. Application of similar methods to other areas and types of water systems would likely produce similar results. Compared to current SDWA monitoring, the place based approach allows for cost-effective, enhanced characterization of local contaminants of concern.

LCRR Compliance Involves More Than Lead Service Lines

Disparities in community water system compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act