About 2 million people nationwide — equivalent to Nebraska’s entire population — do not have running water, and this lack of basic drinking water services tends to occur in clusters, the study authors determined.
Wyoming County, West Virginia, topped the list, whose public water utility boasted the highest number of infringements in a single water system, according to the study published Tuesday in the international journal Risk Analysis.
“This high number is neither equally nor proportionally distributed across the population,” they wrote.
With another 30 million people reliant on drinking water systems that violate safety rules, the researchers sought to determine what types of systems are most prone to these deficiencies.
Many experts have proposed water privatization — the transfer of public water systems to the ownership or management of private companies — as a potential solution to making U.S. water cleaner and safer.
Yet at the same time, the authors explained, opponents have argued that such a switch could cause companies to prioritize profits over public needs.
The researchers, therefore, decided to investigate how the implementation of private versus public system operations impacts water quality and accessibility.
To do so, they mapped out the country’s distribution of system ownership, violations, water injustice, and perceptions of water access among residents.
Among the violations included in the research were failures to abide by regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act, such as exceedances of maximum contaminant levels, non-compliance with required water treatment protocols, and the absence of monitoring schedules or communication with customers.
“Our results suggest that privatization alone is not a solution,” lead author Alex Segrè Cohen, an assistant professor of science and risk communication at the University of Oregon, said in a statement.
“The local context, such as regulatory enforcement, community vulnerability, and community priorities, matters in determining outcomes,” Segrè Cohen added.
The study displays each US county’s water violations score, with darker shades corresponding to counties ranked in the highest percentile for average annual violations (accounting for each system’s number of facilities and years reporting violations). A county’s score (i.e., its percentile ranking) represents the proportion of counties equal to or lower than a county of interest in drinking water violations. Counties with a score in the highest quartile (above 85.7%) mean their average annual water violations were higher than 85.8% of all other counties in the United States.
The study listed the top 10 counties with the highest percentile ranking for water violations in descending order:
The researchers defined water injustice as “the unequal access to safe and clean drinking water that disproportionately impacts low-income households and people of color.” They thereby formulated a county-level score based on a combination of water system performance and community social vulnerability.
Water injustice hotspots were more often situated in regions with lower private system ownership and stronger public system presence — suggesting that public systems are not necessarily superior at curbing violations, the authors concluded.
The data also showed that residing in a county that has both increased water injustice and a higher proportion of privatized systems was linked to a stronger perception of vulnerability around water access and security.
Going forward, the authors expressed hope that lawmakers and regulators would be able to utilize the research to inform their water management strategies and narrow down their areas of focus.
“Policymakers can use our findings to identify and prioritize enforcement efforts in hotspots, make improvements in infrastructure, and implement policies that ensure affordable and safe drinking water — particularly for socially vulnerable communities,” Segrè Cohen said.
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