Hosted by the US Environmental Protection Agency
Over 80% of the population in the United States obtains their water from one of roughly 48,000 community water systems (CWS). Under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), CWS must test and treat their water to specific standards and report results to EPA each quarter. EPA recently developed and released a national geospatial dataset of community water system service areas. This dataset allows for the accurate linkage between drinking water providers and their associated consumers, opening a wide range of potential applications by making it possible to link data reported to the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) to geographic space.
This presentation will give a brief overview about the development of the dataset, including data collection, machine learning methods, and evaluation. We will then discuss the web mapping application and demonstrate how to access the data and how it can be integrated into various areas of research, such as infrastructure mapping and public health. Finally, we will discuss how EPA is working with primacy agencies to strengthen this work going forward and plans to update and expand upon this work in the future.