How Safe is Your Water When The EPA Fails to Update Standards?

The recent clean water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, raises the question of how safe and clean the water is across the United States and locally.

Who you ask and how closely the water gets reviewed on the microscopic level will likely determine the safety standards.

For example, Iowa's 1,084 utilities typically deliver drinking water to meet the Environmental Protection Agency standards. However, some critics don't hold the EPA in high esteem and say the utilities across America are producing drinking water with unsafe levels of multiple contaminants. Many of which are byproducts of the water treatment process itself.

Meanwhile, environmental activists are also highly critical of drinking water oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, saying the federal agency is less than reliable. As a result, there is a call for stricter standards and increased federal funding to improve water quality.

On June 16, 2020, the City of Dubuque issued a press release stating,

"The City met all state and federal water quality requirements and had no drinking water violations in 2019."

City of Dubuque Water Department Manager Denise Ihrig said in the release, "Providing high-quality drinking water to our community is a tremendous responsibility. Our Water Department staff takes care in treating and distributing the City's water supply, and pride in delivering it to our customers at an affordable cost."

One critical organization is the Environmental Working Group based in Washington, DC.

Since 1993, the EWG has attempted to hold the Federal government accountable by arguing that the government's legal limits are not health-protective enough. They point out that the EPA has not set a new tap water standard in almost 20 years, and some measures are more than 40 years old.

EWG President Ken Cook explains the mission and history of the Environmental Working Group. www.ewg.org

EWG also provides a dynamic website to search for drinking water reports based on zip codes. Of course, it's always good to read the fine print of the info concerning the water debate. But still, there's nothing more vital to human health than clean drinking water, so why not consider the objectives, agendas, and sources of information?

To see how your community water measures up, visit the EWG Tap Water Database.