It's no secret that millions of Americans get bad drinking water. Year after year, private and governmental studies find that thousands of public water systems violate safe drinking water laws by failing to monitor and control contamination. News organizations (USA Today included) give those studies plenty of coverage.
Last year, we decided to figure out how these bad water systems — from big-city utilities to mom-and-pop operations serving tiny rural communities — keep getting away with it again and again.
The answer turned out to be simple: No one enforces safe drinking water laws.
But proving it — and detailing the problem's breadth and impact — required one of the most challenging computer-assisted investigations we've ever done. We reviewed records on each of the 170,000 public water systems subject to state and federal regulation. We made FOIA requests to all 50 states and the federal government. We spent hundreds of hours compiling, standardizing and scrutinizing data. Our analysis was so thorough and unassailable that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inquired about hiring our database editor, Barbara Hansen.