Water safety demands action before another crisis

Legionnaires’ disease in Cuyahoga County.

How did we get here? Two new reports do a good job answering that question. First, the Government Accountability Office found that less than half of the schools in the U.S. test their water for lead. Nearly 20 percent didn’t even know whether they were doing testing to protect students.

Just as worrisome was a second report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general. Focused on the crisis in Flint, the report faults officials at all levels — local, state and federal — for a failure to follow the rules or act on the crisis even when they knew about it. “While oversight authority is vital,” EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins said, “its absence can contribute to a catastrophic situation.”

This is a reality that shouldn’t be acceptable to any of us. That’s why the time is now to call on elected officials at all levels to turn the tide on this crisis. This means enhancing rules that aren’t working and enforcing the ones that are, as well as embracing next-generation tools and technologies that can better inform and protect all of us.

At its core, it also means that we need more transparency — regulators, public water systems, federal and local officials, and yes, we as citizens, all need to understand the state of our water infrastructure. Restoring faith in American water systems starts with understanding the challenges we face, and then having the political will to take them on.

Some states are embracing this call to action and taking the lead in making their water systems safer. Here in Ohio, state officials have taken an important first step by revising the Lead and Copper Rule that prioritizes public safety and transparency. Among the most important changes, public water systems must notify customers within two days of the results of any lead testing. While these new rules add a cost burden to local water systems, the payoff — more-frequent testing and more transparency for customers — is worth the added expense.

Unfortunately, the states taking aggressive action are in the minority. Time and again, the headline-grabbing tragedies we’ve seen in places such as Flint start with a lack of transparency. As the EPA inspector general’s report noted, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality for years failed to comply with requirements aimed at protecting drinking water.

This must change, and that starts with all of us. The time for our schools, homeowners and local governments to understand our water systems is before a crisis even occurs. The allure of the status quo can be enticing; not knowing about potential problems provides cover to avoid being proactive. But such an approach cannot hold. As a growing number of tragic examples have shown, a failure to proactively understand, conduct testing and analysis, and then act on water issues can have outsized human, political and economic consequences.

Thankfully, there are steps all of us can take to move this in the right direction. Taking an active role in compelling elected officials to embrace a proactive stance on water issues is critical. That means insisting on transparency when it comes to water issues, demanding better communication between local, state and federal officials and urging lawmakers to embrace the latest tools and technologies that can help protect our water systems before there’s a crisis.

While expansive, and not necessarily easy, these actions are grounded in the reality of the challenge our country’s water systems face today. But the alternative is Americans across the country continuing to wonder whether their drinking water is safe, and that’s a reality we need to change.