"It's just one more example of Bush officials using cooked-up numbers to try to prove what a great job they're doing," said Erik Olson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). "But the reality is we've got serious problems in our drinking water quality nationwide, and the EPA's negligence could be putting millions of Americans at risk."

Lead, arsenic, bacteria, pesticides, fecal matter, radioactive contaminants -- all are among the 90 pollutants that states are required to filter from drinking water to meet national standards (standards which, in the case of arsenic, the Bush Administration tried to weaken, before public outcry forced it to retreat).

The OIG report -- delivered by Kwai Chan, the EPA's assistant inspector general -- documented a pattern of false statements about drinking-water quality released by EPA to the media. Between 1999 and 2002, EPA publicly boasted that it met its goal of supplying safe tap water to 91 percent of U.S. residents -- up from 79 percent in 1993.[1]

Then, in a June, 2003 press release, the agency bumped up the purity estimate a notch higher: "In 2002, 94 percent of Americans were served by drinking water systems that meet our health-based standards -- an increase of 15 percent in the last decade."

So convincing were these claims that The New York Times published an editorial on the day the press release was issued: "Fully 94 percent of Americans are served by drinking water systems that meet federal health standards," it said.[2]

But the OIG report asserts that "due to missing data on violations of drinking water standards, the agency did not in fact meet its drinking water performance goals." The EPA's conclusions were based on "flawed and incomplete" information, said the OIG.

According to the agency's own data, 35 percent of known health standard violations nationwide have never even been entered into the EPA's compliance database. Of even greater concern, the agency's regional inspections of drinking water quality have plunged by more than half during the Bush Administration's three years in office -- from 488 in 2000 to 228 in 2003.

"All these numbers we're looking at are EPA's own," said NRDC's Olson. "It's not like they're debatable, or environmentalists are making them up."

"There's been a severe breakdown in the regulatory process," said Olson. "The gears have been stripped because EPA is not insisting that the states do their job of accurately monitoring and reporting their water quality."

Olson added that though the OIG report does not quantify precisely how exaggerated the EPA's estimates have been, water scientists within the agency have told him that in 2002, only about 81 percent of the jurisdictions monitored had safe drinking water -- 13 percent lower than what the agency reported.

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SOURCES:
[1] "EPA Claims to Meet Drinking Water Goals Despite Persistent Data Quality Shortcomings," OIG Report, Mar.5, 2004.
[2] "An Environmental Report Card," New York Times, Jun. 26, 2003.