A hundred years ago, America invested heavily in its water infrastructure. In 2025, this infrastructure is aging and based on outdated standards. As a result, aging water systems across the country fail to provide the high quality of water many Americans assume they are receiving from their taps.
The most newsworthy example of this problem is the situation in Flint, Michigan. In 2014, Flint switched its water source from the Detroit water system to the Flint River. But the Flint River water was corrosive and Flint’s older pipes contained lead. When you run corrosive water through lead pipes, some of the lead enters the water.
Inadequate testing of the city’s water meant that residents were served high quantities of lead in their drinking water. In 2014, residents complained that the water smelled and tasted bad. Soon, children in the city showed highly elevated levels of lead in their bodies. Lead is so neurotoxic that it can cause children to be inattentive, hyperactive and irritable. Higher levels can cause problems with learning and reading, delayed growth, and hearing loss.
America’s Water Purity Problems Extend Far Beyond Lead
Lead is only one of the problems plaguing American water supplies. Our aging infrastructure falls short of being able to control stormwater and wastewater systems as well as drinking water supplies.
- Some systems may be forced to use a higher quantity of chlorine disinfectants to eliminate bacteria and other microorganisms. This can result in the creation of more toxic disinfection byproducts such as trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids.
- Aging wastewater treatment plants can contaminate rivers, lakes and coastal areas with harmful pathogens.
- Overflows during heavy rainfall can release untreated sewage into the environment.
- Heavy rainfalls can also overwhelm stormwater capacity, increasing the risk of urban flooding.
- Outdated treatment technology may be unable to remove pollutants that were not even recognized as dangerous when these systems were built.
Ronnie Levin, an instructor in the Harvard Department of Environmental Health described the way recent advances in technology are missing in these older systems: “[S]cience has moved on—we’ve found things in our drinking water that we thought weren’t bad, like PFAS, that turn out to be biologically active at very low levels. Lead, arsenic, and nitrate cause health effects at lower levels than we knew when we set the standards decades ago. We now need to catch up.”
The Cost to Update America’s Infrastructure
The Pew Charitable Trusts took all of America’s water infrastructure into consideration to come up with the total cost to repair and update our water equipment. To comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2022 guidance on water quality, the bill will be more than $1.2 trillion. This is the price of not only updating drinking water equipment but also stormwater and wastewater management. California, New York, Florida, Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia by themselves accounted for 42% of the national total. Even if the money were available immediately, the repairs and upgrades would take years.
For this reason, it’s vital for families supplied by municipal water supplies to monitor their own water quality and take steps to purify it as needed. Municipal service providers may not be able to keep up with purity demands unless and until their water treatment and wastewater plants are updated.
The Best Way for Families to Ensure Good Water Quality
Improving a household’s water doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. The steps are simple.
- Start with a comprehensive test of the home’s drinking water to find out what contaminants are present.
- Based on the specific profile of your water supply, design a water filtering or treatment system that removes unwanted contaminants. Ensure that any business selling you this system matches its capabilities to the water test report you have on hand.
- Repeat the water test annually to detect water quality changes.
ETR Laboratories Provides Fast, Accurate Water Tests
Tens of thousands of households across the country have relied on tests from ETR Laboratories to ensure they have the purest water possible. Cities, counties, states and industries that rely on pure water also trust ETR Laboratories for their testing. Choose from ETR Laboratories’ most popular water tests to get started on cleaner, purer water for your family.
