The Safe Drinking Water Act Just Turned 50. What Does That Mean for Drinking Water?
This is a Horizons audio story. Click the play button below to listen and view the full transcript here.
I’m Chris Owen, Hazen’s director of water and reuse innovation, and in this Horizons audio story, we’re talking about a water law that recently turned 50 years old.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was signed into law in December 1974 by President Gerald Ford, just a few months after Richard Nixon resigned. It’s the main law the federal government uses to protect the drinking water of millions of Americans across the country.
I’ve been reading the SDWA since the 1990s, when I started supervising water quality for the City of Tampa, and I can’t decide whether 50 is a long time or not much time at all. I wanted to talk with some other drinking water experts to reflect on the legacy of the SDWA and how we should think about it going forward.
Much of what the Safe Drinking Water Act regulates is tied to what scientists can detect. For example, the number of organic chemicals regulated under the SDWA rose sharply in the 1990s with the development of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which allowed more of those chemicals to be identified. And six PFAS compounds were added to the list after the more recent development of reliable PFAS detection methods.
Alan Roberson, the executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA), helped me revisit the origins of the SDWA in the environmental movement and research on disinfection byproducts. Since then, the list of contaminants regulated by the SDWA has grown from 22 to more than 100. Our drinking water is safer than it’s ever been, even as science has uncovered new threats to drinking water quality like PFAS and climate change.
Erik Rosenfeldt, Hazen’s drinking water practice lead, said one of the biggest ways the SDWA has evolved relates to the kinds of contaminants it regulates. The law started out focused on bacteria and microorganisms—things that make people sick pretty quickly after they drink contaminated water—along with a few chemicals like arsenic and lead. But as drinking water science has gotten more advanced, we’ve added more and more chemicals with longer-term health risks to the list, from disinfection byproducts to PFAS. And drinking water treatment systems have had to become more advanced in order to remove those things.
Cynthia Lane manages the Platte Canyon Water and Sanitation District and the Southwest Metropolitan Water and Sanitation District, two utilities just south of Denver. She spends a lot of time explaining all the costs and risks that have to be balanced with drinking water treatment, and looking for ways to make it more affordable. Cynthia said utilities are also having to find new ways to communicate with residents—for example, through partnerships with trusted community organizations—to build trust and make sure customers are getting the information they need.
Stephanie Ishii, Hazen’s director of integrated resource technologies, shared some great ideas on where the SDWA could go next. Historically, the SDWA has looked at pollutants individually. But given how many new chemicals enter the market every year, Stephanie thinks it could be helpful to explore scientific methods to measure and study the health effects of groups of chemicals. She’d also like to see the law give utilities more authority to protect their source waters and communicate with different water users and stakeholders in their watersheds. That could help them address water quality and supply challenges related to everything from industrial onshoring and reuse to the impacts of climate change.
One of my favorite points, though, was one that every person I talked with mentioned:
There is already so much work that goes into making our drinking water safe, from cutting-edge research to routine sampling. And the result, even as our definition of "safe" keeps evolving, is drinking water that's consistently safe everywhere.
