| Abstract |
1998's National Public Water Systems Compliance Report describes how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its State partners are meeting the goal of ensuring that Americans receive safe drinking water from public water systems. Limitations in the data we use to measure our success and the steps we are taking to increase its reliability and completeness will also be discussed. EPA prepares a National Public Water Systems Compliance Report for every calendar year. The report presents an annual summary of violations at the nation's public water systems. The report also summarizes and evaluates annual reports prepared by the States. The first part of this report draws from SDWIS/FED, EPA's national database, to provide a national picture of the maximum contaminant level, treatment technique, significant monitoring and reporting, and variance/exemption violations the States reported to EPA for 1998. EPA calculated rates of compliance after aggregating all reported violations at public water systems in States, Commonwealths, Territories and on Indian reservations. The second part of this report presents information on public water systems on Indian reservations. A glossary of terms used in this report appears in Appendix A. Summaries and evaluations of the States' annual public water systems reports for 1998 are presented in Appendix B. |
