| Abstract |
The National Public Water Systems Compliance Report for 2002 describes how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its state and tribal partners are meeting the goal of ensuring that Americans receive safe drinking water from public water systems. The report also discusses the data we use to measure our success and the progress we are making in our efforts to increase its reliability and completeness. EPA prepares a National Public Water Systems Compliance Report for every calendar year. The report is 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 information from the Safe Drinking Water Information System/Federal Version (SDWIS/FED), EPA's national database, to provide a national picture of the maximum contaminant level, treatment technique, significant monitoring and reporting, significant consumer notification and variance or exemption violations the states and tribes with primacy reported to EPA for 2002. EPA aggregates these reported violations at all public water systems in states, commonwealths, territories and in Indian country to present a national summary of violations, and then presents summaries of significant monitoring and reporting violations, significant public notification violations, and violations of health-based standards at the different kinds of public water systems. The second part of this report presents information on public water systems in Indian country. A glossary of terms used in this report appears in Appendix A. Summaries and evaluations of completeness of the states annual public water systems reports for 2002 are presented in Appendix B. |
