Drinking Water Regulations - The Drinking Water - page 48

announcing standards to significantly reduce our exposure to these
harmful byproducts, to give our families greater peace of mind with
their water.
The third thing we are doing today is to help communities meet higher
standards, releasing almost $800 million to help communities in all 50
states to upgrade their drinking water systems … to give 140 million
Americans safer drinking water.
Consumer Confidence Report Rule
In his comments provided above, President Clinton mentioned the require-
ment of community water systems to put annual drinking water quality reports
into the hands of their customers (see Table 3.4 ). While water systems are
free to enhance their reports in any useful way, each report must provide
consumers with the following fundamental information about their drink-
ing water:
• The lake, river, aquifer, or other source of the drinking water. Consider the
following actual report provided by a city we will refer to here as
Capital City:
Capital City receives its raw (untreated) water from eight res-
ervoirs, two rivers, and four deep wells. From these sources,
raw water is pumped to one of the Department of Utilities' two
water treatment plants, where it is filtered and disinfected. Once
tested for top quality, Capital City drinking water is pumped on
demand to your tap.
• A brief summary of the susceptibility to contamination of the local drinking
water source, based on the source water assessments by states. Consider
the following actual information provided by Capital City.
Contaminants that may be present in source (raw) water include
− Microbial contaminants , such as viruses and bacteria,
which may come from sewage treatment plants, septic sys-
tems, agricultural livestock operations, wildlife
− Inorganic contaminants , such as salts and metals, which can
be naturally occurring or result from urban stormwater run-
off, industrial or domestic; wastewater discharges; oil and
gas production; mining; or farming
− Pesticides and herbicides , which may come from a variety
of sources such as agriculture, urban stormwater runoff, and
residential uses
− Radioactive contaminants , which can be naturally occurring
or the result of oil and gas production and mining activities