Despite amendments and financial investment, noncompliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act persists in portions of the United States. This study hypothesizes that rural and urban U.S. residents are exposed to different patterns of drinking water violations and contaminants. Violations (n > 9,500) for 1,133 Virginia community water systems (CWSs) from 1999 to 2016 were analyzed to (1) evaluate the effects of size and rurality on compliance, (2) identify patterns in contaminant prevalence, and (3) identify gaps in consumer protection. Results indicate that very small CWSs had significantly more monitoring and reporting (MR) violations than large systems, while medium CWSs had significantly more maximum contaminant‐level violations. Isolated rural area CWSs had significantly high MR noncompliance compared with town and urban centers. This study highlights chronic MR noncompliance across rural regions of the state, which may mask consumer health concerns. Further work directly linking health records and noncompliance is recommended to quantify this risk.

Although the United States Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) theoretically ensures drinking water quality, recent studies have questioned the reliability and equity associated with community water system (CWS) service. This study aimed to identify SDWA violation differences (i.e., monitoring and reporting (MR) and health-based (HB)) between Virginia CWSs given associated service demographics, rurality, and system characteristics. A novel geospatial methodology delineated CWS service areas at the zip code scale to connect 2000 US Census demographics with 2006–2016 SDWA violations, with significant associations determined via negative binomial regression. The proportion of Black Americans within a service area was positively associated with the likelihood of HB violations. This effort supports the need for further investigation of racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to safe drinking water within the United States in particular and offers a geospatial strategy to explore demographics in other settings where data on infrastructure extents are limited. Further interdisciplinary efforts at multiple scales are necessary to identify the entwined causes for differential risks in adverse drinking water quality exposures and would be substantially strengthened by the mapping of official CWS service boundaries.

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Limited information is available describing point-of-use (POU) water quality in rural Guatemala. Source water quality in eastern Guatemala is of concern given underlying volcanic geology that can leach arsenic and the presence of large-scale mining, which can potentially exacerbate exposure. On-premise piped POU water in the rural community of San Rafael las Flores was sampled in 31 households to characterize a suite of metallic ions and E. coli, along with a survey of water uses and perceptions. Samples were analyzed via standard laboratory methods in the United States and an arsenic quick kit in the field. Fourteen household samples contained arsenic >9 μg/L and 13% of households exceeded at least one Guatemalan and US health-based water quality standard. Survey results revealed widespread dissatisfaction with water quality and service: most participants did not drink their POU water, fearing illness, and instead purchased bottled water or collected from untreated springs. Ideally, establishment of baseline water quality and an understanding of local concerns will facilitate collaborative partnerships and interventions that build community trust in appropriate water infrastructure while identifying surrounding land use impacts. This work represents the first Guatemalan study that quantifies POU contamination while concurrently examining user perceptions, preferences, and concerns.

Having recently published an article in AWWA Water Science, Cristina Marcillo answered a few questions from its editor-inchief Kenneth L. Mercer about the research.