User:Girlie1366/Wellhead protection program

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Article Draft
National Regions Most Susceptible to Contaminated Drinking Water:

Contaminated drinking water poses a large threat to communities' public health, and several vulnerability factors, which include community water sources and demographic characteristics, are heavily associated with violations to the Safe Drinking Water Act and its amendments outlined in the Wellhead Protection Program. Identifying the violations between "hot spots", spatial clusters of health based violations, and vulnerability factors allows for public policies to be enforced and target the reasons the community water sources get contaminated. Rural areas of the country are heavily impacted by violations to community water sources, and coliform violations are most prevalent in the West and Midwest regions of the country. In addition, low income, minority communities face higher rates of violations in their community water sources including coliform. Throughout the nation, over 21 million people that rely on their community's water sources have experienced safe drinking water violations on health based quality standards.

Implications of Drinking Water Access and Consumption:
Safe drinking water in several, typically rural, areas of the United States is a not so recent crisis within the Country. Most urbanized counties have access to clean, safe drinking water, however this is not the case in every county, especially states with a more rural landscape. There are over 150,000 public water systems in the United States, and a majority of the population, about 94%, relies on these systems for a portion of the water they use on a daily basis. The quality of drinking water is heavily correlated with the characteristics in source-water, which is extremely contaminated by human activity and pollution. The U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversight on these public water systems, and they are required to regulate the amount of contaminants in drinking water and source water. The Toxic Substances Control Act acknowledges over 80,000 unregulated chemicals that are used within the United States, posing an enormous threat to safe drinking water, and may be associated with health risks. These unregulated chemicals pose challenges for the EPA's approach of maintaining the safety of water within the public water systems.

The State of California enacted the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund in 2019 to target the drinking water systems that exposed over one million residents, primarily in the lower socioeconomic and agricultural areas of the Central Valley, to unsafe water. The goal of this act was to reduce the contaminants in drinking water and source water in community water sources. The Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund arises from the long-term issues of exposure to harmful contaminants, most experienced by those inhabiting the lower part of the Central Valley known as the San Joaquin Valley. Communities in the Valley with fewer economic resources are not only exposed to higher levels of arsenic from the environment, they are also being supplied with drinking water systems that have maximum contamination level violations. A majority of where violations to the Safe Drinking Water Act primarily occur in water systems that serve smaller areas. Lower socioeconomic status individuals and minority groups are associated with an increase in and repeated drinking water violations.

Societal and Justice Impacts of Contaminated Water

As previously referenced, a majority of individuals who lack safe drinking water represent marginalized communities. There is a sociodemographic pattern of racial, economic, and geographic disparities which represent a safe water supply. The safe and equal access to water is a fundamental right for all individuals, however, there is an increasingly large number of individuals and communities in the United States who continue to be stripped of this right and face a water crisis. Historically, there has been and continues to be a disproportionate access to safe drinking water for underprivileged, underpopulated, and underrepresented communities. With urbanization accelerating at an accelerated rate, it is crucial to take into consideration the access to safe water that still must be provided for all communities.

When you add to the actual page use "Copied work from sandbox. User:Girlie1366/Wellhead_protection_program "as the edit description

Feedback from instructor
This is a good start! Be careful about making health claims about the health impact of drinking contaminated drinking water - these will need to be supported by citing review articles rather than individual articles (review the training on "Editing health and psychology topics" in week 6 of our course dashboard for more info on what a review article is).

Second, there is a lot of scholarship on drinking water contamination and its environmental justice implications in California that you might consider incorporating. Take a look at this search on Google Scholar, for example.Saguaro23 (talk) 04:36, 14 March 2024 (UTC)