Drinking Water Quality in The United States - Consumer Confidence Reports

Consumer Confidence Reports

EPA's Consumer Confidence Rule of 1998 requires community public water suppliers to provide Consumer Confidence Reports (CCR), also known as annual reports of drinking water quality, to their customers. Each year by July 1 anyone connected to a public water system should receive in the mail an annual water quality report that tells where your water comes from and what's in it. Consumers can find out about these local reports on a map provided by EPA. According to the science writer Elizabeth Royte these consumer confidence reports, written by utilities, "can be flawed, and some are essentially propaganda. They report yearly averages over time and, with some contaminants, over multiple locations within a system, which can obscure spikes." In addition, they don't necessarily list contaminants that aren't regulated and say nothing about contamination that may occur within the plumbing system of a building. A study of the 2001 water quality reports of 19 cities published by the Natural Resources Defense Council gave two of them--Newark and Phoenix—a failing grade for "burying, obscuring and omitting findings about health effects of contaminants in city water supplies and printing misleading statements." Even the cities to which the study assigned grades of "Good" and "Fair" included some false claims, errors and misleading data.