National Assessment of U.S. Community Water Systems

The Columbia Water Center recently completed a comprehensive national study of United States community water systems (CWSs), sponsored by the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI). The study was designed to: (a) assemble an integrated database of water utility characteristics, health and total Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) violations, financial data, and customer water charges; (b) examine how these performance measures relate to community demographics, water source type, system scale, utility ownership, and state context; and (c) provide a national reference for interpreting the position of Mississippi River corridor utilities. The study covers 43,532 utilities in the full sample, with nested subsets of 8,007 public utilities with municipal financial data and 1,235 public water system IDs across 242 private companies. Generalized Linear Models (GLM) and Random Forest (RF) machine learning methods were applied, providing complementary linear and nonlinear perspectives from the same data. The financial data used is for 2022. This is the largest analysis to date of the factors associated with the financial and violation metrics of US water utilities.

The findings in the report "National Assessment of U.S. Community Water Systems" [pdf] highlight demographic, financial and geographic factors associated with water charges and health violation across the utilities, and how these differ by public vs private ownership. 

An interactive dashboard that permits screening the data on different criteria and access to community water system data, including mouse overs over the graphics to identify and select individual entities was also developed, and can be accessed here.