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Friday, January 20th, 2017

Huge Swaths Of The Country Are At Risk Of Losing Affordable Water Access

Author:    
Source:     digg
Publication Date:     Jan 18 2017, 10:01 PM
 Link: Huge Swaths Of The Country Are At Risk Of Losing Affordable Water Access
Stephan:   When I first began travelling in the world, one of the notable things about the United States was that it was one place where you could drink safe water almost anywhere. Whatever came out of the tap was o.k.. Many other places, particularly rural areas, you could only drink bottled water, although you still often had to shower in marginal water.  More than once I can remember boiling water to make it safe to wash the dishes in. Now this is becoming an issue in this country, and even more alarming, water is being privatized. Here is a fact based assessment of this trend, about which almost nothing is being said. This is not an optimistic story. Read the full paper at PLOS ONE

Access to clean water remains a huge problem around the US — while Flint has been in the headlines, thousands of other locales are struggling with similar problems. But access to clean water isn’t the only issue facing Americans — access to affordable water, period, is becoming riskier and riskier around the country. This map shows census tracts where access to affordable water is defined as either “at-risk” or “high-risk” — it’s not pretty.

Here’s how the study’s authors define “at-risk” and “high-risk”:

The high-risk group is defined as people located in census tracts with median incomes below $32,000. These are census tracts with likely concentrations of people who face affordability challenges based on current water rates. The at-risk group is defined as tracts with median incomes between $32,000 and $45,120. These at-risk tracts have concentrations of people with median incomes below the minimum income thresholds needed to afford future increases in water rates.

And they’re not optimistic about the future of water access around the country:

[W]hile water rates are currently unaffordable for […]

Read the Full Article