NOVEMBER ROUNDUP
The Water & Health Advisory Council recently submitted a public comment on the World Health Organization’s guidelines for drinking water quality. We commend the WHO for tackling the complex PFOA/PFOS issue with a thoughtful and balanced assessment of the available data and arriving at a reasonable and practical conclusion in their recent draft guidelines. Read more in our full public comment.

Water Advisory Insights

Council Members Chad Seidel and Manny Teodoro were recently featured in an AP News article that highlighted the challenges that small communities face related to resource allocation for water systems and subsequent access to clean drinking water. While water systems in larger cities tend to gain more attention and attract more resources, water providers serving smaller cities in the U.S. tend to violate twice as many health standards than bigger cities.
Council Member Joe Cotruvo recently submitted a letter to the editor of Chemical & Engineering News on the EPA’s drinking water health advisories for PFOA and PFOS, relative to the World Health Organization’s standards. Cotruvo, along with his co-authors Susan Goldhaber and Andrew Cohen, implores the EPA to “reexamine its assessments to provide a more credible scientific basis for its health advisories.”

Our nation’s water treatment systems were established decades ago and many systems require continued maintenance and investments to function properly. Check out how Council Member Chad Seidel explains how to prioritize our nation’s water infrastructure.
Our nation’s drinking water infrastructure is in desperate need of attention. This is not breaking news. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave our underground water system a C- and their economic study found that the annual drinking water and wastewater investment gap will eventually grow to $434 billion by 2029. Visit our Water Infrastructure page to learn more.
Water News
The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Jackson, Miss., for failing to provide safe drinking water and secured an interim agreement for the appointment of a third-party manager to maintain and oversee the system, after residents were left without reliable water earlier this year. City officials this summer were unable to deliver water to the roughly 160,000 residents in Jackson and the surrounding area. The city had previously issued a boil-water notice in July before floods devastated the city’s already-fragile water system.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced more than $105 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) funding to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, Oklahoma Water Resources Board for water infrastructure improvements. The grants are part of the nationwide distribution of water infrastructure funds following the passage of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 
The 2.2 million people in Texas’s largest city – and the US’s fourth most populous – were placed under a boil water notice, after a power outage caused water pressure to drop at a purification facility. Some residents expressed anger at being alerted of water safety issues several hours after the outage while others complained about finding out through social media. 
Drought, human-caused climate change, invasive species and a “legacy” of environmental issues are permanently altering California’s landscape and placing some communities and ecosystems at increasing risk, a panel of experts told water officials recently. 
Invasive species and decades of disruptions from massive land and water developments are partly responsible for a continuous decline in native California species, experts told the California Water Commission on Nov. 16.
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