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WASHINGTON — Nearly 90% of all violations of the Sate Drinking Water Act are not reported In the government database that alerts consumers and triggers legal action when water systems don’t meet health standards, a federal audit says.
The Environmental Protection Agency audit suggests there are tens of thousands more cases a year than previously documented in which water systems break safety rules.
Violations range from missed water quality tests to
"It’s likely that regulators are unaware of many health risks to consumers that have been going on for extended periods,” says Erik Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
The audit, obtained by USA TODAY, reviews the accuracy of the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS).
The state-federal database is the main depository for information on 170,000 public water systems that must meet water quality and testing standards. It also is the basis for an EPA Web site that lets consumers check systems’ records.
The audit blames many of the database’s shortcomings on state regulators, who have primary responsibility for enforcing safety rules. Based. on a sampling of state files and water system records, the audit finds that 80% of the unlisted violations are missing because states didn’t report them.
Other problems include glitches in data transfers and different interpretations of what constitutes. a violation.
State officials note that all but about l0% of the unreported violations involve failure to test properly. Many are missed deadlines or other errors that may not involve safety.
Most are resolved by “the water system and a (state) field engineer to our satisfaction” without being reported, says David Spath, head of California’s drinking water program..
In an Investigation last October, USA TODAY reviewed SDWIS data and found 40,000 water systems with violations of testing and purity standards. Of those, 9,500 systems serving 25 million people had violations that the EPA deemed “serious threats to public health.”
The new audit suggests that the violations found by the newspaper might reflect just 12% of what is really occurring: 88% are going unreported.
This (audit) is part of an overall effort that we’re making to improve our data,” the EPA’s Chuck Fox says. “The job is obviously not done yet.”
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