If you do any research on the quality of your tap water, you’re sure to come across the Safe Drinking Water Act at some point. This law is supposed to ensure safe drinking water for all public water systems in the US, but does it do a good enough job? Today we’re going to help you figure that out by answering the question, “What is the Safe Drinking Water Act?”
What is the Safe Drinking Water Act?
The Safe Drinking Water Act (often abbreviated as SDWA) is a federal law that went into effect on December 17, 1974. Its purpose is to set regulations for drinking water quality in the United States in order to protect the public from waterborne illnesses. The key highlights of the SDWA include:
- Putting the EPA in charge of setting standards for drinking water quality and enforcing those standards for all states, localities and water suppliers.
- Requiring all public water systems to regularly submit water samples to EPA-certified laboratories that test for contaminants using EPA-approved testing methods.
- Requiring all public water systems to send Consumer Confidence Reports to their customers once a year that identifies contaminants in their water supplies and explains the potential health impacts of those contaminants.
Is the Safe Drinking Water Act enough to protect our water supplies?
Throughout the years since the Safe Drinking Water Act’s inception, the law has been criticized by a number of different scientists, health agencies, researchers and news outlets for its limitations and lack of enforcement. Many of those concerns were reported on in the New York Times’ Toxic Waters series. Some of the key arguments against the SDWA include:
- Limited regulation of contaminants. Although there are more than 60,000 chemicals used within the United States, the SDWA only regulates around 100 of them. Studies have associated hundreds of those unregulated chemicals with the risk of cancer and other diseases even at small concentrations when consumed in drinking water.
- Lack of updates to the law. Recent studies have concluded that some of the contaminants that are regulated by the SDWA can pose health risks at lower levels than those that are set by the law. Despite these findings, most of the minimum concentration levels of regulated contaminants have remained unchanged.
- Lack of enforcement for violations. The New York Times reported that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that violated the SDWA were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials between 2004 and 2009.
- Overall ineffectiveness. Even with the SDWA in place, more than 49 million people were exposed to water that contained illegal concentrations of chemicals between 2004 and 2009.
Install a water filtration system to make up for the Safe Drinking Water Act’s shortcomings
If you’re concerned about the shortcomings of the SDWA, the best thing you can do is install a water filtration system in your home. These systems will filter out all of the dangerous contaminants in your home’s water no matter where they came from or how well they are regulated.
If you have any questions about what the Safe Drinking Water Act is, or if you’d like a water treatment system serviced or installed in your home, contact North Carolina Water Consultants. We provide service all over the Carolinas, including towns like Clemmons, Statesville and Belmont, NC.