Approximating Community Water System Service Areas to Explore the Demographics of SDWA Compliance in Virginia

Although the United States Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) theoretically ensures drinking water quality, recent studies have questioned the reliability and equity associated with community water system (CWS) service. This study aimed to identify SDWA violation differences (i.e., monitoring and reporting (MR) and health-based (HB)) between Virginia CWSs given associated service demographics, rurality, and system characteristics. A novel geospatial methodology delineated CWS service areas at the zip code scale to connect 2000 US Census demographics with 2006–2016 SDWA violations, with significant associations determined via negative binomial regression. The proportion of Black Americans within a service area was positively associated with the likelihood of HB violations. This effort supports the need for further investigation of racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to safe drinking water within the United States in particular and offers a geospatial strategy to explore demographics in other settings where data on infrastructure extents are limited. Further interdisciplinary efforts at multiple scales are necessary to identify the entwined causes for differential risks in adverse drinking water quality exposures and would be substantially strengthened by the mapping of official CWS service boundaries.

Spatial and temporal multivariate statistical analysis to assess drinking water quality in medical services

Drinking water quality supplied to medical services presents significant role regarding the health aspect of the society. Multivariate statistical techniques were applied for the interpretation of data obtained, i.e., cluster analysis (CA), principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA), and discriminant analysis (DA) to analyze and assess the spatial and temporal variations of drinking water quality in different medical services in Kuwait. This study was generated over a period of 11 years (2007–2017), including 19 parameters at fourteen different sites. Hierarchical CA obtained two groups regarding both spatial and temporal variations. For spatial variations, 14 sampling sites were grouped into Low Concentration (LC) and High Concentration (HC). For temporal variations, 12 months were grouped into Summer and Winter. DA provided better results by data reduction for the large data set with great discriminatory ability for both spatial and temporal variations, as only five parameters were used concerning the spatial variations to afford 68.4% of the cases being assigned correctly, and seven parameters were interpreted for the temporal variations affording 76.1% of correctly classified cases. The applied PCA/FA on the spatial variations resulted in five principle components (PCs) for the LC region, and the total variance is 74.84% and three PCs for the HC region explaining a total variance of 64.86%. For the temporal variations, summer yielded into five PCs with a total variance of 70.6%, whereas the winter resulted in three PCs describing 67.1% total variance. Thus, multivariate analysis provides better spatial and temporal variations assessment in contemplation of effective drinking water quality management and control.

Identifying and Prioritizing Urban and Commercial Stormwater Concerns: City of Grants Pass, Oregon

For many communities, drinking water comes from surface water sources, or source water, such as rivers and creeks. Within the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, this is the case. The Rogue River, which spans 215 miles, beginning near Crater Lake and emptying into the ocean at Gold Beach, is Grants Pass’ drinking water source. While the capacity of the Rogue River, in relation to drinking water, is rarely an issue for the City of Grants Pass’ Public Works Department, the potential contaminant sources (PCS) from the urban, commercial, and industrial geographical areas of Grants Pass is a concern. In order to deploy treatment processes that are capable of targeting these PCS, it is important to have an idea of where and how these PCS are reaching the storm drains, creeks, and eventually the Rogue River. The purpose of this study was to identify area-specific risk components and how those components spatially aligned with PCS and their locations. Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis and a risk matrix were used to rank the PCS according to risk in relation to Grants Pass’ source water intake. PCS ranked as high priority, or exuding the highest risk to drinking water quality, were followed up with onthe- ground surveys. After surveying the high priority PCS, best management practices (BMP) recommendations were made to the City of Grants Pass to better protect the drinking water quality. Branching off of this initial project work came similar studies in many other Rogue Basin communities. With this continued work, improvements were made to streamline the processes, such as recording survey observations. Overall, this project work has led to many discoveries regarding threats to drinking water quality and how to best respond to certain types of threats.

A Call to Broaden Investment in Drinking Water Testing and Community Outreach Programs

Ensuring access to safe drinking water is a challenge in many parts of the world for reasons including, but not limited to, infrastructure age, source water impairment, limited community finances and limitations in Federal water protections. Water quality crises and the prevalence of impaired waters globally highlight the need for investment in the expansion of drinking water testing that includes public and private water systems, as well as community outreach. We provide justification including a case example to argue the merits of developing drinking water testing and community outreach programs that include drinking water testing and non-formal education (i.e., public outreach) regarding the importance of drinking water quality testing for human well-being and security. Organizers of drinking water testing programs should: (1) test drinking water quality; (2) develop drinking water quality databases; (3) increase public awareness of drinking water issues; (4) build platforms for improved community outreach; and (5) publish program results that illustrate successful program models that are spatially and temporally transferrable. We anticipate that short-term and intermediate outcomes of this strategy would improve access to drinking water testing, facilitate greater understanding of water quality and increase security through inclusive and equitable water quality testing and outreach programs.