Transforming access to safe drinking water across the United States: Innovative data and scalable solutions

This project will address the persistent issue of unsafe and unreliable drinking water across the United States by focusing on the widespread fragmentation of community water systems (CWS). With over 50,000 CWS, many small systems fail to meet Safe Drinking Water Act standards and lack the capacity or resources to improve. While policies promote system consolidation or treatment upgrades, the absence of a comprehensive national assessment makes it difficult to identify which systems are most in need and most likely to benefit. Leveraging national Environmental Protection Agency datasets, the team will build a scalable, data-driven model that estimates feasible compliance solutions – either treatment upgrades or system consolidation – and associated capital costs for systems in violation of drinking water standards.