Our Tap Water Is Not As Safe as it Should Be -- But Don't Panic, Here's How We Can Fix It


By Peter Gleick
Pacific Institute
January 5, 2010


The Safe Drinking Water Act regulates 91 chemicals. Yet there are tens of thousands of chemicals that can contaminate our waters and that haven't been assessed for their risks.


In general, tap water in the United States is remarkably safe -- the envy of people in much of the rest of the world. The water-related diseases that still kill millions of people throughout the world, like cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and more, were effectively eliminated in the United States 100 years ago when we started treating our water with filtration, chlorination, and other modern water-treatment systems.

But our tap water isn't as safe as it should, and can, be.

A December 16th article in the New York Times by Charles Duhigg called new attention to challenges facing the country's municipal tap water system. We have known for a long time that the Safe Drinking Water Act -- the nation's law regulating contaminants in our tap water -- is in need of updating and reform. We have also known for a long time that research into the health effects of many contaminants has been underfunded, slow, and piecemeal. Such research is extremely hard to do because of the vast numbers of possible chemical contaminants and the difficulty of identifying health effects of exposures to low concentrations or complex mixes of different chemicals.

Duhigg's article also called attention to the fact that part of the current problem is the gross abuse of science and the scientific process during the Bush Administration. Duhigg noted that in 2000 the list of chemicals regulated by US water-quality laws stopped growing, not that it was growing particularly quickly under any previous administration. But under the Bush Administration, EPA scientists working on water-quality contaminants were prevented from calling attention to chemical contamination of groundwater, removed from research on hazardous chemicals in drinking water, labeled “unpatrioticâ€