This month, USEPA announced what it characterizes as a new regulatory strategy for drinking water. It will focus on four points:
1. Address potential contaminants as groups of similar contaminants, rather than one at a time.
2. Foster development of new, efficient drinking water treatment technologies.
3. Use regulatory authority under multiple statutes to protect drinking water sources of supply. Examples of such statutes include the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, Rodenticide Act and the Toxic Substance Control Act.
4. Partner with the states to share more complete data from monitoring at public water supplies.
Some contaminants in drinking water are naturally occurring, such as iron, manganese and radium found in ground water. Other contaminants may be pollutants discharged to ground water or surface water by human activities, such as pesticides and fertilizer nitrates. Disinfection by-products are the result of chlorination at a treatment facility.
The federal Safe Drinking Water Act, administered by USEPA, places on water utilities the burden to remove contaminants from drinking water sources of supply even if they are caused by polluters' discharge to ground water or surface water. For example, utilities must remove nitrates in river water supplies although caused by fertilizer runoff from farm fields.
The necessity to treat water to remove contaminants caused by others, of course, imposes additional costs on water utilities--costs which ultimately must be paid by customers in higher rates. Most of USEPA's new "strategy" would seem to be things that it should have been doing all along. However, perhaps the most encouraging point is its proposal to use its authority under other statutes to possibly control contamination caused by others.
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