EPA's Drinking Water Data Shows Large Reporting Gaps

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors the quality of drinking water across the country. The EPA also maintains a database of incidents that cover infractions of SDWA and related incidents—from excess coliform bacteria, lead, and chemicals to boil water advisories and criminal complaints.

But the data is severely lacking due to weak reporting as major incidents are missing from the data. For example, Jackson, Mississippi has struggled with water quality issues for years. The local residents endured hundreds of boil water advisory periods since 2020 before their water treatment facility completely failed in August of 2022.

Yet, the data only lists reported boil advisories in the late nineties. While there are plenty of entries in the data over the last ten years—mainly related to excess turbidity, contaminant levels, monitoring flaws, and treatment techniques—none of them are flagged as major incidents.

The same goes for many other water treatment facilities that advised the public to boil their water before ingesting it in any way, yet the only SDWA reporting might be a notice about high turbidity, or, sometimes, no reporting at all.

The city of Detroit lists no boil advisories in the data whatsoever, despite news stories announcing boil advisories in 2019 and 2017. The only SDWA enforcement entry for Detroit in recent years is for a failure to file a Consumer Confidence Report in 2022.

Sometimes the water authority seems to report quite extensively on various water quality issues, like turbidity or potential contamination, but then boil water advisories don’t show up. This would be the case for major metropolitan utilities like Trenton, New Jersey’s and Atlanta’s water works, which each saw boil advisories in 2018.

For Trenton, the issues go far beyond EPA reporting. The local newspaper, the Trentonian, reported that the water works failed to warn the public about the need for boiling their water and some residents have complained of chlorine-flavored water, or sometimes purple water. Effectively, the state of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) had to step in and force the utility to announce a boil advisory to the public.

In general, there’s plenty of reporting of boil advisories in the data, although most of the incidents, 93 percent, come from water systems that serve fewer than 1,000 people. Major cities are there, including Baltimore, Jersey City, and San Diego, but there’s no indication why the reporting is scattershot.

The scattershot reporting applies to enforcement actions at the federal level as well. For the violations that are recorded for these large city water quality issues, the enforcement action are often deferred to the state, such as “State Public Notification requested” or “State Formal Notice of Violation issued.”

There are still a number of data points related to federal enforcement actions, approximately 2 percent of all actions, but there’s little indication why one issue is a state infraction and others are federal.

A notice on the EPA website says the agency “is aware of inaccuracies and underreporting.”