Reconciling Science and Policy in Setting Federal Drinking Water Standards - Four States′ Perspectives

Home Water Treatment Habits and Effectiveness in a Rural Arizona Community

“…Home treatment use has been both positively [ 13 ] and inversely [ 22 ] associated with maternal education, suggesting that how the level of education of adults is measured may impact the result. However, these other studies only investigated treatment habits of residents using private wells, while our study and others have shown that homes on small municipal providers may also need home water treatment [ 2 – 4 ]. In our study, owners of older homes were less likely to treat water, a hypothesis we believe has not been tested before.…”

“…Implementation of these guidelines for public water systems is the responsibility of individual states and often falls on local municipalities. Very small municipal water suppliers (serving <500 people) are more than twice as likely to violate microbial and chemical contaminant guidelines compared to larger municipal utilities [ 2 – 4 ]. In states with more rural or decentralized populations, a larger fraction of the population is served by small providers.…”

“…Thus, complying with drinking water guidelines is ultimately the responsibility of the individual well owners. In the United States (US), approximately 13 million unregulated, unmonitored private domestic water wells provide potable water to 43 million people (15% of the population) [ 2 , 7 ]. Considering increased contaminant guideline exceedances in smaller municipal water supplies and lack of regulation of contaminants in private well water, sizeable populations, often in rural areas, may be exposed to waterborne contaminants above health-based guidelines.…”

“…Contaminants found at levels above guidelines were most often naturally occurring inorganic chemicals, such as metal(loid)s [ 8 ]. In areas with endemic high concentrations of natural contaminants (often inorganic chemicals), reaching compliance can be difficult for both municipal and in-home treatment systems using proven contaminant reduction technologies, as contaminant levels in untreated water may be too high to be reduced by treatment systems [ 2 , 3 , 9 ].…”

At the crossroads: Hazard assessment and reduction of health risks from arsenic in private well waters of the northeastern United States and Atlantic Canada

“…In the U.S., testing for As in private well water is the responsibility of the well owner because there is essentially no regulation of the quality of the well water, as there is for public drinking water supplies, which are regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. It is estimated that there are over 13 million private wells in the U.S. (Hutcheson et al, 1995), and that about 15 percent of the U.S. population, or over 43 million people, rely on private wells for their drinking water (Hutson et al, 2004). To what extent households in the U.S. have tested their private wells for water quality, including As, and have employed a household water treatment method to ensure drinking water safety if necessary, has not been evaluated systematically (DeSimone et al, 2009).…”