
Nobody would knowingly drink or eat poisonous substances, but most of the public is fairly ignorant about the unseen dangers lurking in our water supplies. It's up to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that all water supplies won't harm anyone, although especially strict standards are placed on drinking water for obvious reasons. Everyone knows that lead paint is dangerous – that's why it's not supposed to be used anymore. However, many people don't realize that a fifth of their exposure to lead comes from natural lead in drinking water. The EPA ensures that drinking water quality is always safe enough for consumption, and everyone can drink without being worried about any contaminants that might come out of their kitchen sink.
Regular Drinking Water Tests
Drinking water quality is protected through a number of steps. Drinking water quality standards must be established before the quality of water supplies can be determined, and extensive research has culminated in solid guidelines for all water supplies across the country. Proposed legislation, if passed, will tighten the guidelines further, making any tap water safer to drink. Older legislation known as the Safe Drinking Water Act established solid drinking water quality based on the research of the time, but now the EPA is requiring that the max levels of arsenic be just one fifth of what they used to be.
Having drinking water quality be protected just makes sense. Yes, it costs you, the taxpayers, a little money to maintain, but without these levels of protection, drinking water would be filled with pollutants, and then we would have a serious problem on our hands. Research from the past few years has shown that medicinal traces are becoming a problem in our water supply, threatening our drinking water quality. It will cost money to research the problem, develop a solution, and implement the necessary upgrades to the water treatment facilities, but is it worth it? Most certainly, unless you fancy the idea of drinking some of your neighbor Joe's high blood pressure medicine.
The best way to protect drinking water quality in your neighborhood and across the country doesn't require you to change your lifestyle. Instead, support legislation that limits the amount of pollutants in the water supply. The better we protect our supply of water now, the easier it will be to protect in future generations. We are already spending money cleaning the water of the pollutants we dumped into it from years ago, so the problem will only compound itself if no action is taken.