Researchers: Grace Harrison, Gregory Pierce, Lena Schlichting, Laura Landes, Steve Wilson, Hideyuki Terashima, and others
Led by Rural Community Assistance Partnership Incorporated, LCI and partners will conduct 10 assessments for drinking water quality/compliance in 10 states over the next four years. This report will enable water system managers to identify solutions and access federal funding for much-needed water quality improvements.
Researchers: Emily V. Bell, Katy Hansen, and Megan Mullin
Funder: U.S. Geological Survey
The authors find that 1) fragmented data across state agencies reduce the ability to assess a community water system’s overall condition, 2) identifying relationships among different dimensions of performance can help assess system resilience, 3) balancing affordability with reliability over time is an ongoing challenge, and 4) focusing only on safe drinking water compliance in research and oversight may overlook other critical vulnerabilities.
Researchers: Emily V. Bell, Katy Hansen, and Megan Mullin
Funder: U.S. Geological Survey
This study focused on understanding correlations among different dimensions of drinking water system performance and resilience. The researchers present a network-based method to describe the relationships between dimensions within and across systems. They find that in North Carolina community water systems face tradeoffs in water affordability and long-term reliable service.
Researchers: Itzel Vasquez-Rodriguez and Gregory Pierce
Distrust of tap water is partly driven by undetected issues with “premise plumbing;” the pipes that move water from a distribution network to the tap in a home, school, or business. In partnership with the Los Angeles County Chief Sustainability Office, LCI researchers developed 22 specific recommendations, presented within five policy briefs, to guide 1) Los Angeles County; 2) the State of California; 3) landlords; 4) community water systems; and 5) advocacy organizations on how to reduce premise plumbing issues and help improve trust in tap water.
Researchers: Silvia R. González, Ariana Hernandez and Gregory Pierce
This exploratory study presents research with parents and caregivers in Kern County on tap water usage, water disuse, and solutions to address distrust, including a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. It finds that ~77% of all surveyed caregivers felt concerned with the safety of the tap water in their homes.
Researchers: Arianna Hernandez, Gregory Pierce
This study uses the 2019 American Housing Survey to produce the first joint, nationally representative analysis of household reliance on wells and septics in decades. Researchers find that there are lower proportions of U.S. households in the regulated water grid than other contemporary estimates.
Researcher: Megan Mullin
This discussion of the local political economy of drinking water provision reveals the constraints on community water systems that affect their performance when confronting drought hazards. Fragmentation in responsibility for drinking water contributes to disparities in drought vulnerability, preparation, and response across households and communities.
Researchers: Gregory Pierce, Kelly Trumbull, Peter Roquemore, and many others
This assessment provides foundational information and recommendations to guide the state to achieve the Human Right to Water. The results illustrate the breadth and depth of challenges to safe and affordable water supply provision across system types in California.
Researchers: Gregory Pierce and Silvia R. González
With sponsorship from First 5 LA, LCI conducted several research and program development activities to support the implementation of Assembly Bill (AB) 2370. AB 2370, approved by California lawmakers in 2018, establishes requirements for testing lead exposure in drinking water in child daycare facilities. Our work included:
- helping to analyze the likely extent of lead issues in daycare facilities under different testing threshold level scenarios;
- hosting convenings of policy, advocacy, and community stakeholders in Los Angeles County featuring lessons learned from the lead testing in schools program, and
- analyzing existing water use practices and perceptions among daycare facilities to inform program design.
(2018 event and current project)
Lead researcher and organizer: Gregory Pierce
Mistrust of tap water by residents is greater in Los Angeles County than in most of the U.S. Part of the reason is that there are well-documented accounts of discolored, foul-smelling, and poor-tasting water coming from taps in some communities ─ largely low-income communities of color across the county ─ served by publicly-regulated drinking water systems.
To address both real and perceived risks, in 2018 LCI convened more than 100 community members and other stakeholders to discuss challenges and actionable next steps necessary to monitor, improve, and increase trust in tap water quality in the L.A. region for a more equitable and sustainable water future. The discussion, At the Tap, was made possible by support from the Water Foundation and the leadership of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, Environmental Justice Center for Water, Environment Now, LCI, and these units at UCLA: the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, Sustainable LA Grand Challenges, the Water Technology Research Center, and the Water Faculty Group.
As a next step, LCI launched a working group to develop policy solutions to address drinking water contamination and mistrust due to premise plumbing, i.e., pipes that run from the lot line of a property to the tap which are the responsibility of property owners. With participants from water systems, state agencies, the county, and nonprofit groups, the working group plans to identify (a) the legal authorities of tenants and regulators to intervene in cases of premise plumbing contamination, and (b) financing program models targeted toward landlords to incentivize them to upgrade their premise plumbing infrastructure.
(2019 report)
Author: Peter Roquemore (advised by Professor Gregory Pierce)
Only about a third of Americans say they usually drink straight from the tap. There are costs associated with mistrust of tap water. This report, which focuses on tap water mistrust in the city of Los Angeles, found that L.A. households purchasing bottled water pay 25 to 125 times the cost of tap water. This can add thousands of dollars to household expenses each year. While recent research indicates that tap water is safe for customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the L.A. region has one of the highest rates of tap water mistrust in the nation. This report identified that the main cause of water aesthetic issues is plumbing in the house and that the majority of complaints have low-cost solutions.
(2018 article)
Authors: Ariana Javidi and Gregory Pierce
This study generated the first national estimates of the use of drinking water alternatives among households who perceive their tap water to be unsafe. The researchers found that minority households more commonly perceived their tap water to be unsafe and chose bottled water because of it. While the perception of unsafe tap water is most prevalent among Hispanic households, among the population perceiving their tap to be unsafe, Black households more commonly buy bottled water.
The researchers estimated the minimum annual expenditure by all U.S. households who perceive the tap as unsafe and buy bottled water to meet necessary consumption standards at $5.65 billion annually. Novel secondary treatment interventions and education campaigns are needed to address the perception of tap water as unsafe and consequent alternative source reliance, while additional research is needed to document the active trade‐offs households make to manage their water sources, and to better understand determinants of the perception of tap water as unsafe within minority groups.
(2016 article)
Authors: Gregory Pierce and Silvia R. González
This study provided the first national, rigorous assessment of individuals’ perception of their public drinking water supply. The researchers found strong evidence that perception of water quality is most influenced by individual and household indicators of socioeconomic status — education level, household income, racial or ethnic minority status, and most importantly, foreign-born nativity, especially from Latin America. The article outlines the implications of the study for proponents of enhanced tap water consumption, including public drinking water systems, county public health agencies, and environmental justice nonprofits.
