NEW YORK — If you live in the United States, there is a nearly one-in-four chance your tap water is either unsafe to drink or has not been properly monitored for contaminants in accordance with federal law, a study has found.
In 2015, nearly 77 million Americans lived in places where the water systems were in some violation of safety regulations, including the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, according to a report released Tuesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental advocacy group.
It’s not only that some tap water has high levels of lead, nitrates, arsenic, or other pollutants, said Mae Wu, a senior attorney with the council’s health program. It is that, too often, a lack of reporting means residents cannot be sure whether their drinking water is contaminated or not.
The issue is not new; tap water safety violations across the United States have been reported again and again. The study is an attempt to tell the big-picture story, Wu said, as a backdrop to piecemeal reports coming out of towns and cities.
These include the story of a sinkhole outside Tampa, Fla., that opened up in September, leaking contaminated water and endangering a major aquifer; Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection took weeks to notify nearby residents. Or Jim Hogg County, Texas, where thousands of people were exposed to high levels of arsenic in drinking water for years, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit group.
Or Flint, Mich., where sky-high levels of lead in tap water were widely publicized in 2015 — led not by the EPA, but by residents, who enlisted allies including Marc Edwards, a scientist at Virginia Tech.
Edwards said he agreed with the council’s conclusion that the government has not done enough to enforce regulations on drinking water safety.
“This has been tolerated so long, and it is so ingrained in the EPA culture to look the other way,’’ he said. “They’re going to need outside pressure to act and enforce existing laws.’’
The council’s report found there were about 80,000 reported violations of drinking water safety regulations in 2015; more than 12,000 were “health-based’’ violations, or cases that involved actual contamination problems. In addition, the NRDC said, “repercussions for violations were virtually nonexistent. Nearly nine in 10 violations were subject to no formal action.’’
Wu said that data are “not sexy,’’ making it hard to push for meaningful actions like investments in infrastructure maintenance. “For drinking water infrastructure, like the pipes and the mains, it’s out of sight, out of mind — until the main breaks outside your house, and you can’t drink your own water,’’ she said.
She added that part of the difficulty is a complicated regulatory system, in which the responsibility to monitor adherence to federal laws falls largely to states. The report, which relied on data collected by the EPA itself, includes a list of 12 states with the most water safety violations based on population; it is topped by Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
President Trump has said he is in favor of infrastructure investment, and told The Times last year on the campaign trail that “crystal clear water’’ was important to him. But both he and the new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, support proposals to cut the EPA budget by as much as 31 percent, something the NRDC says represents “a new threat to the nation’s water supplies.’’
And if the report did not shy away from politics, neither did the EPA. “Under the new leadership, the EPA has made clear it is getting back to its core mission, which includes protecting America’s drinking water. Unfortunately, this is an area in which the past administration failed,’’ said Lincoln Ferguson, an EPA spokesman.
