Small Water Systems Found Failing to Monitor Quality

Drinking water in many small communities violates federal health requirements and in some cases violations are being hidden by improper tests or falsified records, a congressional study concluded Friday.

The General Accounting Office said an investigation of compliance to drinking water standards at 75 community water systems in six states, not including California, showed many local authorities are not complying with the federal requirements.

The study also said that efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to uncover violations and take enforcement actions against local water officials frequently are ineffective.

“We found that many water systems, particularly smaller systems, are violating requirements for monitoring water quality and meeting drinking water standards,” Richard Hembra, the GAO’s director for environmental issues, told a House Government Operations subcommittee.

The EPA acknowledged problems with getting small community water systems to comply with federal clean water requirements.

“The small communities (are) where the biggest compliance problems lie” because of a shortage of money and technical people to operate water systems, said Lajuana Wilcher, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water issues.

She also acknowledged that some violations of federal drinking water standards go unreported because of erroneous information from local officials or inadequate monitoring by states.

But Wilcher maintained that the most serious violations have been resolved and available reports showed that 73% of the community water systems, serving 183 million people, were complying with federal health standards for drinking water in 1989.

According to the GAO report, however, those statistics may overstate compliance nationwide.

The GAO study said investigators found that local water officials frequently test water samples incorrectly because employees are not adequately trained to deal with increasingly technical federal regulations.

At other times, the report said, samples are deliberately falsified.

“While the extent of this problem is unknown, we found that falsifying data and manipulating test results are relatively easy to accomplish, and ample evidence exists that the practices are occurring,” Hembra told the House subcommittee on environment, energy and natural resources.

The GAO report cited examples where local water officials were told to eliminate bacteria by boiling or microwaving water samples before conducting tests.

The report examined water systems in Massachusetts, Vermont, Oklahoma, Texas, Oregon and Washington. It did not identify the individual communities.