Researchers identify US counties with worst drinking water violations

(The Hill) -- The U.S. counties with the most egregious water quality violations are concentrated in four states: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Oklahoma, a new study has found.

Standing out among the top 10 such regions was Wyoming County, West Virginia, whose public water utility boasted the highest number of infringements in a single water system, according to the study, published Tuesday in international journal Risk Analysis.

About 2 million people nationwide — equivalent to Nebraska’s entire population — do not have running water, and this lack of basic drinking water services tends to occur in clusters, the study authors determined.

“This high number is neither equally nor proportionally distributed across the population,” they wrote.

With another 30 million people reliant on drinking water systems that violate safety rules, the researchers sought to determine what types of systems are most prone to these deficiencies.

Many experts have proposed water privatization — the transfer of public water systems to the ownership or management of private companies — as a potential solution to making U.S. water cleaner and safer.

Yet at the same time, the authors explained, opponents have argued that such a switch could cause companies to prioritize profits over public needs.

The researchers, therefore, decided to investigate how the implementation of private versus public system operations impacts water quality and accessibility.

To do so, they mapped out the country’s distribution of system ownership, violations, water injustice and perceptions of water access among residents. 

Among the violations included in the research were failures to abide by regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act, such as exceedances of maximum contaminant levels, non-compliance with required water treatment protocols and the absence of monitoring schedules or communication to customers.

“Our results suggest that privatization alone is not a solution,” lead author Alex Segrè Cohen, an assistant professor of science and risk communication at the University of Oregon, said in a statement.

“The local context, such as regulatory enforcement, community vulnerability, and community priorities, matters in determining outcomes,” Segrè Cohen added.

The highest-ranking counties that exhibited water injustice issues were in Mississippi — home to eight out of the top 10 such spots — as well as South Dakota and Texas, according to the study. 

The researchers defined water injustice as "the unequal access to safe and clean drinking water that disproportionately impacts low-income households and people of color." They thereby formulated a county-level score based on a combination of water system performance and community social vulnerability.

Water injustice hotspots were more often situated in regions with lower private system ownership and stronger public system presence — suggesting that public systems are not necessarily superior at curbing violations, the authors concluded.

The data also showed that residing in a county that has both increased water injustice and a higher proportion of privatized systems was linked to a stronger perception of vulnerability around water access and security.

Going forward, the authors expressed hope that lawmakers and regulators would be able to utilize the research to inform their water management strategies and narrow down their areas of focus.

“Policymakers can use our findings to identify and prioritize enforcement efforts in hotspots, make improvements in infrastructure and implement policies that ensure affordable and safe drinking water — particularly for socially vulnerable communities,” Segrè Cohen said.