idoitoutdoors

If you happen to live in California there are several different sources for checking water quality. If you have a municipal water connection (you pay someone for your water), they are required to perform water quality tests periodically and release consumer confidence reports. Google “PDWW” and you can search for your system. It’s a fairly old site so I recommend using as few terms as possible (e.g., only search by county at first) so you don’t accidentally omit results by having incorrect search terms.

If you are on a well then you can look up nearby water quality using the Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment (GAMA; bit of a forced acronym) mapping tool: https://gamagroundwater.waterboards.ca.gov/gama/gamamap/public/

Other states/countries may have similar programs/tools as well.

Most definitely. For being absolutely necessary, the water sector is notoriously cheap (as I’m sure you are well aware of) which makes it difficult to regulate out providers that act in bad faith or customers/shareholder that refuse rate increases to properly maintain their infrastructure. CA now actively discourages the creation of new mutual water companies for precisely this reason, there are a lot of small entities with aging systems at risk of failure due to improper maintenance.

According to the most recent data I got last week from the State Water Resources Control Board Division of Drinking Water (SWRCB DDW) there are 4,956 registered systems in CA. 2,867 of those are classified as a community water system.

Your post is timely because I’m working on a farm worker housing development project for a client in Southern California and we have to try to connect to another water system before we can establish a new system for the reasons discussed previously. You have to look within a 3 mile radius of the proposed location and we found 14 different water companies. They are all over the place.