New EPA site says whether your drinking water meets standards
A new website from the Environmental Protection Agency shows how public water systems are complying with federal drinking water laws.
Launched last week, the dashboard offers an overview of Safe Drinking Water Act violations and enforcement actions. It presents annual statistics and five-year trends on public water systems across the U.S. and in individual states. At the same time, users can drill down data and reach individual water system facility records by clicking on the dashboard’s interactive charts and graphs.
Users can export, download and print all the information.
“It’s critical that the public knows whether public water systems are complying with laws that protect against harmful pollution in drinking water,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance at EPA, in a release about the new dashboard.
The new dashboard is linked to EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online website, which has similar dashboard tools on the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
The White House’s Open Gov blog highlighted the new Safe Drinking Water Act dashboard in a post Wednesday.
In the blog, Corinna Zarek, senior adviser for open government to the U.S. chief technology officer, and Lisa Lund, director of EPA’s Office of Compliance, wrote that the dashboard “sits at the nexus” of two policy efforts: protecting drinking water and opening government data.
“With expanded access to data, anyone can get informed and help play a role in keeping communities safe and healthy,” they said in the post.
