If you're concerned about water quality in your area, the EPA now has a website for you !

 For those who are concerned about pollution in the stream, rivers, ponds and lakes near their home, the EPA has a handy resource for you. Yesterday, in a news bulletin entitled “U.S. EPA Administrator Jackson Takes New Steps to Improve Water Quality”, it is stated that:

             reports  and data on water enforcement in all 50 states. This is part of

            Administrator Lisa P.  Jackson’s larger effort by to enhance transparency,

            promote the public’s right to know about water quality and provide information

           on EPA’s actions to protect water under the Clean Water Act.   

The reports and data have been collated into a nifty website which you can view here:  http://www.epa.gov/owow. Having spent some time there, I can safely say that it does contain a wealth of knowledge.  I was able to find out which sites in my watershed (the area that drains to a common waterway, such as a stream, lake, estuary, wetland, aquifer, or even the ocean) were contaminated and (usually) with what. Sometimes the data was a bit incomplete or censored. In one such case I found out a particular stream was considered polluted. However, the pollution was described as “unknown” and the cause was described as “unknown”. But this is somewhat rare. The web page has data going back all the way to the early 1900s. 

An interesting feature of this site is a function called “EnviroMapper”. This is like the EPA’s version of Mapquest. You can look up polluted sites with various criteria and see the results on an interactive map. Something else I found interesting was a link called “Climate change” which led me to a report entitled: Possible Water Resource Impacts in North America . Though containing limited information, if nothing else the page signaled to me the about-face stance the government has taken with the climate change issue (regardless of cause). Indeed, the news report issued by the EPA yesterday claims to be working on increased transparency, effectiveness and public awareness.  

I would suggest as a next step the EPA disclose data on drinking water, including levels of such pollutants as birth control, medications, steroids and other unnatural compounds. These are taken by people, but not completely absorbed by the body and make it into the water system, in spite of treatment.