If you live in an urban area or city, then you may be familiar with paying a water bill for the water you utilize in your home. For the most part, this water bill covers the cost of water testing, treatment, and transportation from your regional water facility to your home. When you look at the life cycle of your tap water, the journey it takes to make it to your home is quite amazing.
For the most part, we screen for contamination that is or has been known to
The goal of the UCMR program is to identify any potential hazardous contamination before it affects the lives of US citizens. An example of the disturbing impacts unregulated contaminants can have on our lives is found in the 2018 investigative documentary “The Devil We Know”. This documentary shows how per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) released in the environment had severely impacted the lives of a community in West Virginia. At the time, PFAS compounds were not routinely monitored for in the environment and therefore information on our exposure to these contaminants was poorly understood.
We are now entering into the fifth assessment program for unregulated compounds, UCMR 5. This program will collect and analyze water samples from thousands of municipalities across the nation from January 2023 – December 2025. The UCMR 5 list contains 29 PFAS contaminants which are suspected to be present in the environment and could eventually end up in our drinking water supply. This program will require over 10,000 US public water systems (PWS) to collect several samples each year over the course of 3 years. To perform the PFAS testing for UCMR 5, laboratories must be able to run both EPA Method 537.1 & 533. The data received from the assessment will provide a baseline understanding of the current levels and distribution of PFAS contamination across the nation.
So how will the UCMR 5 program help determine if your drinking water is safe?
Well unfortunately in environmental science, what you don’t know could hurt you. The UCMR program allows chemists to learn more about contamination in our environment, especially when the compounds are not currently regulated. The severity of PFAS contamination in North America needs to be documented to assess the impact it will have on the public health of US citizens. In the past, the UCMR program has helped drive updates to the maximum contamination levels (MCLs) and the regulation of other compounds. I hope that the UCMR 5 program will provide the information needed to help environmental authorities improve the safety of drinking water in the United States, as seen with previous UCMR programs.