The Growing Crisis Behind Your Faucet
Picture this: you turn on your kitchen faucet expecting crystal-clear water, but instead, what flows out carries invisible dangers that have been accumulating for decades. This isn’t a distant dystopian fantasy – it’s happening right now in American cities across the nation. What started as whispers about water quality has evolved into a nationwide crisis that’s forcing millions to abandon their tap water in favor of bottled alternatives.
The numbers are staggering. At least 45% of the nation’s tap water is estimated to have one or more types of the chemicals known as per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience – it’s a health emergency that’s hiding in plain sight.
Jackson, Mississippi: When an Entire City Ran Dry
When torrential rainfall in August 2022 pushed the Pearl River in Mississippi to surge well beyond its banks, floodwaters spilled into the suburbs of Jackson and led an already-hobbled water treatment plant to fail. It was the final stroke in what experts described as a yearslong issue in the making, which eventually left tens of thousands of residents in the city without clean drinking water for weeks.
For example, historic flooding last summer damaged operations at a water treatment plant in Jackson, Mississippi, leaving more than 150,000 people without safe drinking water for weeks. The event drew national attention to Jackson, a Black-majority city, and shed light on the water issues that residents there have been shouldering for decades (and continue to do so).
The Jackson crisis wasn’t just about broken pipes. What happened in Jackson, experts say, is a bellwether for what’s to come if America continues to kick the can down the road in addressing its aging and crumbling water infrastructure. Drive-through water distribution sites became the new normal, with residents lining up for hours to get bottled water just to survive.
Atlanta’s Infrastructure Nightmare
Atlanta learned this lesson the hard way. Friday afternoon, water started to erupt from an intersection near Atlanta’s Morehouse and Spelman colleges. After eight decades buried underground, the 4-foot-by-3-foot metal pipe had corroded to the point of failure. The cascading failure that followed paralyzed nearly half the city.
The system’s pressure dropped, prompting officials to warn nearly half of the city not to drink the tap water. And then it got worse. Like a cascading effect, a second major line broke a few miles north in the city’s busy Midtown neighborhood.
A few blocks over at Grady Memorial Hospital, tractor trailers full of water crowded the curb. The hospital canceled all elective procedures. The city’s response was telling – they knew their backup systems couldn’t handle the crisis. Like many cities, Atlanta’s pipes date back a century or more, well beyond their useful life spans.
The Silent Contamination Spreading Across America
While dramatic pipe failures grab headlines, a more insidious threat lurks in water systems nationwide. The new data, along with reporting from states and other sources, confirm 165 million people in communities throughout the U.S. have drinking water that has tested positive for PFAS. That’s roughly half of America’s population drinking contaminated water every single day.
USGS scientists tested water collected directly from people’s kitchen sinks across the nation, providing the most comprehensive study to date on PFAS in tap water from both private wells and public supplies. The study estimates that at least one type of PFAS – of those that were monitored – could be present in nearly half of the tap water in the U.S.
The contamination isn’t random. Most of the contamination came from water sources near urban areas and in areas that generated PFAS, like manufacturing that uses the chemicals in its products or sites where waste was collected. The highest concentrations of PFAS in drinking water were found in the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the Eastern Seaboard and Central/Southern California, the study said.
The Invisible Threat: What’s Really in Your Water
The health implications are terrifying. PFAS exposure is linked to problems such as cancer, obesity, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, decreased fertility, liver damage and hormone suppression, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. These aren’t theoretical risks – they’re documented health consequences affecting millions of Americans.
Over 56% of Americans have been drinking tap water with lead in it. He added that microplastics found in bottled water become nanoplastics because they don’t biodegrade, and individuals consume about one credit card’s worth of plastic every week.
The contamination extends beyond PFAS. Meanwhile, lead, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as PFAS, industrial pollution, and agricultural runoff are contaminating the drinking water for hundreds of millions of people—and many don’t even know it. It’s a toxic cocktail that’s been brewing for decades.
Mexico City: A Glimpse Into America’s Future
Mexico City, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 22 million people and one of the world’s biggest cities, is facing a severe water crisis as a tangle of problems — including geography, chaotic urban development and leaky infrastructure — are compounded by the impacts of climate change. Years of abnormally low rainfall, longer dry periods and high temperatures have added stress to a water system already straining to cope with increased demand.
The parallels to American cities are chilling. Mexico City, by some estimates loses about 40% of its water that does enter its system, whether it’s through leaky pipes or being stolen…. Mexico City, by some estimates loses about 40% of its water that does enter its system, whether it’s through leaky pipes or being stolen.
What makes Mexico City’s situation particularly alarming is how it mirrors problems in American cities. But in the meantime, tensions are rising as some residents are forced to cope with shortages, while others — often in the wealthier enclaves — remain mostly unaffected. There is a clear unequal access to water in the city and this is related to people’s income.
The Racial Disparity in Water Access
The water crisis disproportionately affects communities of color. Jackson is 80 percent black, Flint is 60 percent black. Benton Harbor, Michigan, another city with lead contamination problems, 80 percent black. This isn’t coincidence – it’s the result of decades of systemic underinvestment.
And then I would say that environmental racism and what we’re seeing with communities who are disproportionately impact. It’s quite evident since that the historical disinvestment in communities of color really mirrors the institutional racism and other barriers that have become existed in our country in the troubled history.
The consequences are devastating. Poor drinking water quality has plagued Puerto Rico for years. In 2015, more than 3.4 million Puerto Ricans, 99.5 percent of the island’s population, drank from water supply systems with violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).
The Billion-Dollar Band-Aid That Won’t Work
Politicians promise solutions, but the reality is stark. Unfortunately, although this is probably the most resources and finance that have been put toward and directed toward this problem in a number of years, unfortunately, that 55 billion is not going to be enough. It literally is just a drop in the bucket because the cost of fixing America’s drinking water infrastructure will be nearly $480 billion over the next 20 years.
In 2023, the EPA determined that the U.S.’s water infrastructure requires $625 billion over a 20-year period to address the issues, according to the Infrastructure Report Card. From the governmental side, whether it’s federal or municipal, nobody can solve our infrastructure issues in one or two terms.
The infrastructure crisis goes deeper than money. Some progress is expected as billions of federal dollars begin flowing to states for improvements to local water systems—including the replacement of dangerous lead pipes that run from public water lines to buildings’ plumbing. But money alone cannot solve larger structural and systemic issues afflicting the nation’s thousands of aging public and private water and wastewater systems, experts say.
When Cities Start Sinking
The problem isn’t just contamination – entire cities are literally sinking. According to a recent study published in the journal Nature Cities, 28 of the most populous U.S. cities are sinking. It’s due to a phenomenon called land subsidence, exacerbated in many cases by humans extracting too much groundwater from underground aquifers.
The earth itself sometimes sinks, but the issue here with humans is that we’re extracting too much groundwater. When that happens, think of an aquifer underground, like a water bottle. You take too much water out and it’ll actually crumble.
The consequences are irreversible. There are parts of California that have sunk by 30 feet, which is just this giant dimple in the landscape that causes, of course, lots of infrastructural problems. Because it’s really hard to actually reinflate that land once it has sunk.
The Bottled Water Deception
Many Americans have turned to bottled water as their solution, but this creates its own problems. Perhaps even more egregious, about 25% of water sold in a plastic bottle is just tap water. Sometimes it’s treated, but not always.
Bottled water isn’t as safe to drink as some may think. States are responsible for regulating bottled water that is produced and sold within their borders, but one in five states don’t actually regulate bottled water. While tap water in most cities is disinfected, tested for viruses, and filtered to remove contaminants, bottled water doesn’t always have these same measures in place.
The recalls tell the story. In 2024 alone, several brands had to recall millions of bottles of water. Berkeley Club Beverages Inc. had to recall 1,034 bottles due to testing positive for coliforms, FIJI Water recalled more than 78,500 cases of water, or almost 1.9 million bottles due to manganese and three types of bacteria, and Waiakea Hawaiian Volcanic Water had to recall more than 3,800 cases due to “floating particles.”
The Economic Reality Nobody Talks About
The shift to bottled water isn’t just about health – it’s economically devastating for communities. The water access gap is costing the US economy around $8.6 billion each year and remains unsolved. However, we also found that there is hope: for every dollar invested in closing the water gap, the US economy would see a nearly five-fold return.
Too many Americans still face water insecurity due to groundwater exhaustion, infrastructure challenges, climate change conditions and contamination, resulting in devastating effects on public health and community prosperity. In response to water scarcity issues, some communities are adopting off-grid solutions to manage and provide access to water.
The individual costs are staggering. Self-Help provides hauled water assistance to nearly 2,000 households, bottled water assistance to 4,000 homes and conducts regular water quality testing for 100 families. Families are spending hundreds of dollars monthly on bottled water just to survive.
