Drinking Water

Stronger Efforts Needed to Protect Areas Around Public Wells From Contamination Gao ID: RCED-93-96 April 14, 1993

In recent years, groundwater across the country has been threatened or contaminated by harmful pollutants discharged into areas surrounding drinking water wells, often referred to as wellhead protection areas. As a result, some communities have had to shut down their drinking water wells permanently or pay tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs. Several barriers hinder states' efforts to develop wellhead protection programs, including (1) opposition at the local level against states' enactment of land-use controls and (2) a general lack of public awareness about the vulnerability of drinking water to contamination and the need to protect wellhead areas. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state officials, however, point to a shortage of money as the major obstacle. This shortage also explains the lower priority accorded the wellhead protection programs. One way to alleviate the funding barrier is for states to integrate their wellhead protection program with their comprehensive programs. GAO believes that a further enhancement would be for EPA and Congress to reassess the absence of federal appropriations for wellhead protection programs, in light of their preventive orientation, and focus on protecting precious drinking water supplies.

GAO found that: (1) only 26 states and 1 territory have complied with the 1989 legislative requirement that states develop and implement EPA-approved WHP programs; (2) no state has completed the key WHP program elements in accordance with the legislation or defined all of its WHP areas; (3) 21 states are developing WHP programs and 3 states have no plans to develop WHP programs; (4) barriers that hinder states' efforts to develop and implement WHP programs have included a lack of WHP funding, the low priority of WHP programs, states' reluctance to enact local land-use controls, a lack of public awareness regarding the need to protect wellhead areas, and a shortage of technical data and expertise to properly delineate WHP areas and identify sources of contamination; and (5) options to resolve WHP program funding problems include greater program integration between federal WHP programs and comprehensive state groundwater protection programs and assigning a higher funding priority to all WHP programs.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone:


The Justia Government Accountability Office site republishes public reports retrieved from the U.S. GAO These reports should not be considered official, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Justia.