Early Implementation of Safe Drinking Water Act

[00:00:07]hello my name is ardan Calbert and I will be serving as moderator for this oral history of the early implementation by EPA of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 let me begin with a brief biography I retired from EPA in 2001 after 31 years in several EPA programs including working in the resource management unit of the drinking water program during the 1980s since retirement I've been teaching a course on the relationship between science and environmental policy at several colleges I hold a bachelor's degree in government from Hamilton College and a master's degree in political science from the University of Toronto this oral history of the early implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act has brought together a number of senior professional managers who played Major roles in these activities between 1975 and 1985 itively these individuals have provided more than 200 years of experience in managing Environmental Protection and public health programs our goals in this video are four folds first to set the historical context in which the program was launched and outline the major elements of this historic legislation second describe the scientific Technical and political challenges we faced third recount how we undertook to implement the new program and with the benefit benefit of hindsight fourth identify the factors that we believe contributed to our successes in implementing the federal drinking water program it is our hope that some of the lessons learned through our experiences may be of interest to historians and useful to Future managers of environmental program before we begin with the details let me introduce Vic Kim and ask him an opening question Vic led the drinking water program from its initiation in 1975 through 1985 he was a longtime career manager at EPA and subsequently served another 10 years as a senior career official in the office of pesticides and toxic substances which control the use of industrial chemicals and the licensing of pesticides he is an environmental engineer by training having received bachelor's and master's degrees from Manhattan College and New York University and also studied economics and policy development at Princeton University so Vic what were you thinking when you were faced with the daunting task of leading the creation of a brand new agency still trying to find its footing good morning arton I'm very pleased to join the panel and talk about the early days of the drinking water program I was very pleased to be offered an opportunity to lead this new program just as it was getting underway I had joined the agency at its Inception in 1970 where I served as the deputy in the policy shop in that position I got to know the virtually all of the senior managers in the agency but more importantly recognized the new agency culture which was very open to Innovation and for that reason it was a fun place to work and a fun place to think about developing a new program in addition when I looked at the legislation which had a strong proclivity for State Management I was very sympathetic with that as an approach that was based on my belief that lasting changes are only only likely to be sustained if you can impact the local institutions this belief was a result of two separate but extensive experiences I had had in the 60s I served in the early 60s for a number of years in Latin America as a volunteer an asot generation volunteer if you will uh doing Community Development work and in the latter part of the decade I served as a an official in the anti-poverty programs doing civil rights work in the South and in both of these sets of circumstances I came to a strong conviction that lasting change could only come through institution building and that that was really the name of the game and so it was with real enthusiasm that I accepted the the the appointment uh I began the job thinking that this would be a great adventure into the future but in fact I had very little uh real knowledge of the kinds of challenges we would face as we implemented the new program back to you Warden thank you Vic before discussing the program itself we would like to provide some historical context what is the link between drinking water quality and public health to do this we have ask Dr Joseph to tro to speak next joose served as the Director of the standards division for its first 12 years of the program and has had extensive worldwide experience with risk assessment Public Health standards and water treatment technology Joe holds an undergraduate chemistry degree from Cleveland University and a PhD in chemistry from Ohio State go thank you well there is a longstanding historical concern about drinking water quality goes way back well before the Romans even but the Romans were particularly adep to managing drinking water we know they uh built um aqueducts shipping water for miles from the Hills even though most of their settlements were on Rivers so they understood that uh uh it wasn't always good idea to drink the water that was readily at hand the actual concerns about public health and drinking water actually took a lot longer time to U evolve because that linkage was U not obvious in the midle 1800s Jon Snow famously did perhaps the first real epidemiology study and he applied it to drinking water the famous Broad Street pump incident where there was an outbreak of colera in London at the time and after a lot of work and a lot of leg work on his part he convinced the authorities to take the pump handle off basically not allow people to use that water that pump and it's not that uh they were all in agreement there was a tremendous amount of disagreement but eventually it happened and eventually the disease outbreak ended and uh that's the history of the beginning of of the understanding of a linkage between drinking water and health but at that point there was not an understanding of microbial disease bacteria were not understood it wasn't until about 30 years later that Lou pastu and Robert cook U ident ified bacteria actually identified some of them in drinking water and uh verified essentially what snow had discovered but even at that uh water treatment didn't get instituted quickly uh again toward the ends of the 1800s the engineers who were processing water uh began to introduce filtration and it wasn't until 198 actually in the United States States in New Jersey for chlorine was first applied to drinking water treatment as a disinfectant and even that was met with a lot of skepticism and in fact lawsuits trying to prevent it but ultimately once a number of water systems were upgraded to the point of having filtration and disinfection the uh incidence of waterborne disease and sanitation related diseases uh began to drop pretty rapidly and by the 1920s or so uh really bottom lined consistently the the background of all this is that there were very significant risks from people consuming surface drinking water in those days in the early 1900s and 1800s and before uh in the United States if you lived in a major city on a major river in the East particularly uh are uh your child wouldn't make it it was about one in five deaths occurred to young children during that time period and of course that's been reverse significantly so uh many people have said that the introduction of chlorine is perhaps the greatest Public Health breakthrough of the 20th century thank you go can you um talk a little bit about the historic Federal role in drinking water the uh it's it's it is interesting by the way that the Safe Drinking Water Act didn't pass until 1974 about 200 years after the uh formation of the country up until that time uh drinking water was managed at the state level States uh determined appropriate specifications sometimes and uh provided some oversight but it wasn't uh given a great amount of priority especially as we approached the uh middle to the of the 20th century ACC 1914 there was an understanding of the need to U improve the quality of drinking water so that interstate commerce could be protected and so what are called uh major watering points uh major transportation centers were uh covered by standards produced by the United States Public Health Service ultimately those standards in fact were adopted for National drinking water standards after the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act so Vic how did the federal role in drinking water quality change the um new legislation significantly changed and elevated the federal responsibilities dealing with drinking water quality but first let me say a little bit about where the institutions were in the in the 70s through the time frame in which the legislation was actually enacted for their part the the State Health departments that had led the reform of Waterworks practices in the early Decades of the 20th century they felt that they had had a significant success they had virtually eliminated the classical waterborne diseases like caror and typhoid and then as they went along they shifted their priorities to other needs they saw and reduce the amount of resources devoted to oversight of the year Public Water Systems what that meant in practice was that the uh there wasn't a lower level of supervision and that get picked up in some of the later studies for the Waterworks managers they had pretty much the same perception that is they saw that they they saw or believ that the major real threats were behind them they focused on contemporary problems and so their priorities really related to providing consistent and and effective service with through aging infrastructure structure with a significant effort to maintain the bacteriological quality of of the drinking water they were supplying and with minimizing costs and being perceived as as effective managers within the Waterworks professionals however there were a number of other more serious concerns that Wen being uh addressed or being discussed and these related largely to a public health service Community Water Survey of 199 of 69 which looked at more than a thousand systems across the country and concluded one that the state supervision programs were very uneven and often lack and two express concerns about the bacteriological quality of the water particularly among small systems that appeared to be not doing the monitoring the routine monitoring that the then in in place rigs required in addition to that the environmental Community came forth with the not only did they have the general concerns about public health protection but they raised the Spectre of a potential link between organic contaminants and drinking water and cancer rates and just as the Congress was about to address the new legislation EDF published a statistical study that did in fact seem support that proposition that there was a link between organic contaminants and cancer rates in the City of New Orleans the study received a tremendous amount of medeor attention and I'm sure contributed to the enactment of the bill and then finally at at that point in in in time I think most Americans believe that their water was safe uh and so that created for us as we began the program a bit of a communication problem and that we would wanted to address specific problems without M undermining their General belief that drinking water in the United States was among the safest in the world and then finally I think we need to look at the what was going on in Congress during during these years that is the 70s saw the Congress Elevate Federal roles in a variety of pollution control programs uh dealing with air pollution and water pollution and so I think no one really should have been surprised that as the drinking water program came to their attention that they would enact similar legislation back to you w so what were the major provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act the Safe Drinking Water Act did very uh clear job defining roles and responsibilities it stated that EPA would be responsible for generating scientifically based standards that would be applicable to all water supplies that serve 25 or more customers it set in process for setting new standards that would include interim standards based on the most recent Public Health Service standards 63 I believe and secondly that we would contract with the National Academy of Sciences for a major study of contaminants and drinking water that might have health significance and third that we would issue revised regulations once the nas report was at hand that would significantly expand the number of contaminants for which standards would be generated the ls indicated quite clearly that the utilities were people expected to do the monitoring and to comply with the new standards similarly it expressed a very strong preference that the states uh reassume or re uh build their capacities to fulfill the oversight function and to that end they included a large new Federal grant program to the states uh I believe it was 20 million in the first year but this was the wherewithal to take those programs of hire new professionals expand the Laboratories and do all of the things necessary to to to complete the oversight function the law also made it quite explicit that EPA would only take on this oversight role where states were either absolutely unwilling or unable to take on that responsibility again showing a a strong preference and finally among other Provisions the statute included a requirement for public notice and this was uh a the first step in what generally became known as Community right to know legislation that was picked up in subsequent legislation in a number of areas but as related to the drinking water program it meant that the util ities had an absolute responsibility to notify the customers if they exceeded standards now in fact that provision led to one of the few lighter moments that we had in the first year of program and that was when I received a letter from the warden of the State Penitentiary who indicated he had read the law and that if public notice was ever required at his facility he hoped that I would join him in the yard and explain to the inmates that the drinking water was not safe to drink this uh was received with a good deal of humor by my friends and uh staff and uh fortunately never really happened anyway back to you w thank you Vic so what were the challenges that you faced during this initial implementation period well as we began the program we made a number of discoveries that significantly impacted our priorities for the first few years to begin with we looked at the basis for the old Public Health Service standards and they were really the product of a different era they included an expert panel coming together and issuing the standards without any scientific justification or background documents and with no Provisions for the due process and public participation what this meant in practice was that for whatever regulatory activities we were going to take on we're going to have begin with an empty site and we were going to have to require the exhaustive technical justifications and the extensive due process Provisions that apply to all new regulations at that time the second challenge that we recognized as we began to deal with the states it was clear that they did not have inventories of all of the Public Water Systems covered by the new law this meant that we had to sit down with the 50 states and work out a new National inventory fortunately we're able to use automated data processing systems that were becoming available at the time but it was a large task but it was absolutely necessary to Define who in fact were the the regulated Community another area was our effort to say well what data is there to show us uh what contaminants that are present in drinking water that aren't presently regulated and here our activities are really caught up in a technological change which is a quite common phenomena but in the early 70s there was an analytical breakthrough that enabled chemists to identify contaminants in water that at levels that were previously undetected but these were essentially Advanced Technologies that were applied in research and Research Laboratories but they had not been applied to drinking water at the utility level in large measure because most of the utilities did not yet have the sophisticated analytical tools that it took to to undertake this work and here again it set for us a national priority that we had to come up with national surve surveys that were statistically significant using the new technology to get a better handle on what actually was what contaminants are actually occurring in drinking water about this time it became clear to us that the resources we had available to us were not adequate to the tasks in front of us and so we began an effort to try to increase our resources we began the program with enough resources to cover a about 50 work years in headquarters 20 positions in 11 in Cincinnati and about three dozen Public Health Service offices in epa's regions and most of those folks had been associated with the Public Health Service inter state carrier program at any rate the business of attracting more resources meant that we had devot significant time to the briefing other people in the agency to dealing with the Office of Management budget and then finally dealing with the congressional committees uh while it took some time and effort those efforts were were quite successful I think we talk a little bit more about that later in the day and then finally the work with the inventories and the states got us to focus on what we termed the small system problem and here the the The Facts of Life were the vast majority of of Americans were served by a relatively small number of large systems that were professionally managed but the vast majority systems were small and many of them were uh did not include Waterworks any professional Waterworks managers an example of that would be something like a trailer park and so for these systems we had a unique challenge that is we couldn't just assume that they would add treatment because that was probably not feasible for these smaller systems developed a strategy indicating compliance was feasible through a number of other relatively straightforward me mechanisms building a new well hooking on to a Newby system that that did have a better quality water Etc but once we had a strategy it was clear to us we needed to communicate with that portion of the regulated universe and so in the first few years of the agency a number of our staff found themselves going to meetings of uh trailer park managers to explain to them one they were Public Water Systems under the law uh two that they had requirements to conduct monitoring particularly the bacteriological monitoring and three the good news was that in most places the states would analyze those samples for free so it wouldn't be a big cost item for the utility for the trop parks to begin to come into compliance at any rate um despite all of these problems we were able to maintain an extraordinary level of enthusiasm among the staff I think they saw themselves as professionals pursuing a significant public health goals and I think this uh attitude among our staff across the board helped us gain a lot of public support as we began implementation activities back to you Arden faced with all of this did you have some sort of strategy for implementation in mind well let me try to briefly describe the major elements of our implementation strategy we began by publishing a a a strategy called one step at a time in which we said in view of the challenges uh implementation would have to be incremental that we would begin with what we saw as the largest public health issues first uh second we would use transparent processes so that people could input our deliberations and third we would take costs and feasibility into account in any setting any new requirements uh this in fact was required by the statute we also uh began with focus on communication strateg that we identified a number of critical stakeholder groups and then for each group we ident we developed the strategy about how would we communicate with them how would we try to draw them into our deliberative processes among the critical stakeholders obviously the regions and States because if they didn't share in developing the requirements since they shared implementation responsibilities we we would not be able to get the program up and running as quickly as we would have liked secondly we focused on the utility manages since if these are the folks who have to comply with the regulations to the degree that they understood the requirements Etc we thought that would enhance our ability to get the high levels of compliance that we were after third we had obviously had a responsibility to deal with the public and here we ried principally on the major media speeches that kind of thing to begin to get our word out about what we were all about and then another element of our communication strategy and it may not have been apparent uh but at that time the Committees that authorized legislation assigned staff to monitor implementation and so we had a an absolute requirement to go and talk to Congressional staffs as we began the program as we found problems and as we implemented Solutions and then finally we made a decision to invest heavily in the National drinking water advisory Council lots of statutes call for independent advisory C councils as the drinking water program did but they are for the most part in my experience ceremonial we decided no that we would try to make them substantial and substantive and invest in them heavily in the beginning of the program the council was composed of 15 members uh they came from nominations from the National Academy of Sciences and they included a wide range of expertise we committed to having them meet often uh every few months months we had the meetings not only in Washington but we had them around the country and we devoted significant resources to having our sen managers uh present to the council here's the problems that we're dealing with here are the solutions we're developing or here the actions that we plan to take and again we discovered that this was very effective in a number of of community met a number of our communication needs uh first it it guaranteed the regional meetings guaranteed that the local media would kind of focus on the the proceedings and begin asking questions about the local drinking water issues which was helpful secondly these uh the council meetings became a very effective way of aring what we call the trade media at that point there were a number of private newsletters that circulated among Public Health officials and among drinking uh water uh practitioners that purported to track what the government was doing in there fields of interest and again this turned out to be an effective another effective way of getting anyone who was concerned with the program to understand the evolving nature of what we were undertaking back to you Warden thank you Vic so what were the regional concerns about headquarters as the program began for this question we turn to Jack Hoffer a public health officer and the head of epa's regional drinking water program in Denver Colorado Jack was a leader among the Regional Supply staff and in his post-retirement went on to become the executive director of the water supply professional association the American Waterworks Association in that position which he held for 14 years he led a major transformation of the group's interest in modern management practices among his many accomplishments he was part of the first class of Peace Corp volunteers working in the mountains of Peru Jack holds a Bachelor of Science and a master's of Science in chemical engineering from Oregon State University and an MPA from the University of Colorado thank you Ardon as Vic mentioned before the creation of the of the drinking water program the interstate carrier program was being implemented by a group of uh commissioned officers of the US Public Health Service both in the regions and in headquarters this was a very we were a very close n group for a couple reasons number one there weren't very many of us and number two we strongly believed in our common mission of of Safe Drinking Water we had forged very very strong working relationships with utilities and with the States during implementation of the of the program uh and we'd all work together on the uh Community water supply survey that Vic mentioned we really did have to work together very in a very Cooperative fashion because we didn't have very much legislative Authority and so to get any improvements made we had to work closely with the states and the affected utilities so when this new group showed up to form the drinking water program we didn't know who they were uh and they were saying the right things about involvement of the regions involvement of the states working together to get a good implementation process underway however we were pretty skeptical because of our previous uh experience with both the water pollution control program and the air pollution control program which were both tightly controlled uh by headquarters so you can imagine our pleasant surprise when these folks actually began uh walking their talk uh and forming uh work groups with both States and and some utilities and the regions fully involved and they were really uh doing what they said they would do regarding cooperation so we felt that we could work this out so obviously we didn't agree on everything and everything wasn't Wine and Roses but just based on our initial working relationship we felt that as time went on we could work The Kinks out uh and proceed with effective implementation this was very critical since the state drinking water programs were severely understaffed and severely underfunded and there was no way they were going to be able B to proceed with implementing this program on their own without some very major handholding and uh headquarters as for their part had really done the job of getting us some badly needed resources that we really needed in order to do that major handhole uh during the same time the water utilities actually were more interested in the the standard setting process rather than who was actually going to uh enforce these regulations but uh eventually they came around and and supported primary enforcement responsibility for the states uh primarily because they would rather they realized they would rather deal with somebody they knew and had been working with for some time rather than some distant regional office now the environmental groups during this time were pretty much a mixed bag uh they also were primarily interested in the actual standard setting process uh and in some cases particularly in our region they actually um oppose primary enforcement responsibility because they simply didn't trust the states to implement the program properly but all in all because of the strong uh headquarters and Regional commitment to uh Communication in involvement we eventually turned the tide in all but one state so Aron what started out as skepticism turned into a strong working relationship that I think was highly successful thank you Jack now let us turn to John wise for additional comments from a regional perspective on early implementation activity John joined the EPA San Francisco office at its Inception in 1970 and served as as a drinking water branch chief from 1975 to 1984 he subsequently served as Deputy regional administrator from 1984 until his retirement in 2001 he was very active during the formative years of the drinking water program and was a major contributor to many of our Innovative initiatives education includes a Bachelor of Science in Sanitary Engineering and business finance from the University of Colorado a Masters of Science in engineering and economic planning from Stanford University John well thank you arton as Jack has just noted in 1974 very few States had the capability to implement the new Safe Drinking Water law the Regional Offices working very closely with headquarters had to develop and customize a drinking water program for each state this began the classic triangulation headquarters regions and states that enabled new drinking water programs to be built from scratch that could meet Federal requirements the program grants that EPA offered to the states in the very early years were instrumental in helping the states build the needed capacity and the capability to be certified for primary enforcement Authority and so over time we had 10 regions working with 50 different states that forged one consistent National program this was an extremely successful model of implementing a national law through the states our [Music] partners this is the second installment of the oral history of the drinking water program at EPA we'll have a discussion on the first task the new Safe Drinking Water Act set for the office of drinking water named setting enforcable public system standards do tro could you tell us more about that the law passed in 1974 and required publication of intern standards very shortly thereafter and there were interim standards published in 1975 proposed and ultimately promulgated they were derived directly from the 1962 Public Health Service standards included uh 10 inorganic chemicals six pesticides several uh microbial risk related uh items like coal forms and turbidity and later on uh a year or so later comprehensive standards for radio nucleid were produced so these were familiar to the industry generally and so there actually wasn't too much of a concern expressed with the release of those standards however the Congress also built in a process for moving toward the revised standards the actual ultimately the national drinking water regulations they required that the agency contract with the National Academy of Sciences to do a thorough review of potentially all that they could learn about drinking water quality and to provide that report to the agency and the agency EPA was required by the law to within 100 days of release of the report propose new standards well the National Academy report didn't quite have the kind of information that Congress expected for one thing there really wasn't a lot of information available on drinking water quality they did their best that grows to comprehensive report perhaps the uh most important part of the report was that it describ some methodologies for doing risk assessments for chemicals that were carcinogens and so we use that information that's part of methodology for establishment standards but the agency had to go back and actually develop all of the basic information to reduce the revised regulations so edman going back and doing comprehensive National Monitoring surveys which we did in concert with the research and development people in Cincinnati and and our drinking water lab also in Cincinnati the first major part of that involved the recently identified trihalomethanes chloroform and related chemicals which just a year or two before had been identified in drinking water initially by a brewery chemist in the Netherlands But ultimately U followed up on by our research people at in Cincinnati Laboratories and methods were developed to do the analyses comprehensive National St national uh survey was conducted and uh we learned that every water supply that chlorinated had at least some trihalomethanes and some had quite a lot simultaneously uh there was a release of uh a bioassay study conducted by the national toxicology program on chloroform where they dosed the animals at very high doses as they normally do and determined that there were cancers found in rats and mice in that study from long-term exposure at high doses so with those two pieces of information essentially the the occurrence of the trial methes and the fact that at least one of them was carcinogenic under the ntp iosa screening test uh we use that to construct trial methanes regulations those were proposed in 1978 they included a methodology that was very different from what was followed with the interim standards the agency had the responsibility to produce all of the supporting information and in quite considerable detail and use that information be it toxicology analytical chemistry occurrence treatment technology costs economic impacts to craft a regulation for the triol methanes so that was really the First new drinking water regulation and the particular complexity of that resulted from the fact that it came from disinfection from the use of chlorine which was really a very significant Public Health measure so it was really important that that regulation be crafted in such a way that it would not inadvertently cause people to reduce the technology the treatment that they were using for disinfection to reduce microbial risk and at the same time reduce the risks of these byproduct of chemicals that were being generated at the same time so uh that regulation was prepared and proposed before we go into that let me just ask you if the nas report couldn't provide what it was charged to that seemed to leave you in the program a bit in the Lurch and you were really sort of required to invent out a whole cloth the process of integrating the toxicology the analytical methods even the technology to make judgments on what the standards were is that a fair summary yes that's right uh we we had to develop the information from all of those aspects but we also had to develop the methodology to apply it into a regulation and of course when you produce regulation it has to withstand judicial review and so uh that required a lot of complexity and a lot of detail that was never done in the case of the interim regulations okay well simultaneously with the THM regulation we also were working in the direction of trying to see if it was possible to deal with the the aggregation of industrial chemicals that were being released into surface waters particularly and which were discussed to some degree in the nas report and um keep in mind at that time this was really relatively shortly after the the major Clean Water Act revisions before pre-treatment requirements before eent guideline requirements so there really was a greater concern about industrial chemical discharges into surface waters we knew from some of our work with our colleagues in Europe that Gran of carbon was a possible way of dealing with them and it was determined to create a proposal that would involve the use of granular carbon in at least those what you might call vulnerable Public Water Supplies on Industrial rivers to try to reduce the variety of synthetic organic chemicals that could be found in number of those rivers and the idea was that um in the United States there there was a little bit of experience with granular carbon being put into sand filters most all surface water supplies virtual surface water supplies had sand filters but in some cases the sand was taken out and granular carbon was put in with that limited experience with granular carbon use in the United States in in shelter beds or chased Odor Control it was decided to attempt to produce regulation that would involve installation of more of those kinds of facilities in some of these vulnerable surface water supplies in other words replacing the sand in existing filters with rular carbon now that is certainly not an ideal technology from a from a practical operational perspective because in those cases the carbon was added and it might have stayed there for five years or more but in the case of synthetic organic chemical removal it very likely is going to be necessary to replace or reactivate that carbon much more frequently the logistics of doing that in sand filter would be very difficult including some other problems the industry of course was uh the water industry was very uh concerned about that very incense about it and uh tremendous public comment period the thousands of comments literally thousands of comments came in essentially all negative to the effect that uh it wasn't feasible it was expensive it wasn't proven technology and um ultimately we rethought the issue we looked at uh some of the Practical problems as well as some unknown issues about the use of granular carbon and accumulation and then even release of chemicals so the agency ultimately decided to go ahead and promulgate the trialing regulation but withdraw the proposed granular Cardon regulation and in retrospect fact I think that was exactly the right idea the right decision because indeed uh that was not a very practical way of trying to treat organic chemicals in water supplies and I think the good news is that since that time with the institution the much greater Wastewater technology at least secondary treatment in all of those Water Supplies all those Wastewater treat plants of stream um certainly pre-treatment requirements on Industries e guideline requirements on various industrial sectors the actual amounts of organic chemicals that Waters is much less so Joe would it be fair to say that basically with the dropping of the granular activated carbon or GAC approach you now were forced to deal with a whole host of different organic compound in a different way exactly and uh rather than that across the board kind of technological approach we we then uh determined that the best approach probably was to identify the chemicals concern in water and produce individual maximum contaminant levels for those and that of course uh opened up the process of essentially duplicating what was done with the triol mething regulations which was determine the occurrence determine the treatment technology determine the toxicology and health risks and analytical chemistry and economics and ultimately writing a number of individual drinking water regulations now that doesn't mean that we were abandoning the idea of group regulations because the best approach of course is is a combination where it makes sense regulating groups uh disinfection by the way is a group right ulation um and uh where it made sense regulate individual substances that were uh considered to be a potential risk to health from drinking water and reasonably widely distributed okay thank you Joe so before we leave the topic of standards of the First new standards can you comment on the significance of the whole approach that we had to evolve with respect to the entire agency yes the the major novelty you might say is the introduction of significant risk assessment into the process where once one identified the chemicals of interest and the concentrations and the exposures and their toxicology then it was a question of determining what is the appropriate way to regulate to protect public health and there really two kinds of chemicals that one would be thinking about two large groupings one of them we would call um threshold chemicals chemicals where the toxicity is unlikely to exist below a certain dose and others that are called non- threshold chemicals and that's where at least theoretically there is some finite risk from exposure at any dose and those the those non- threshold substances are uh genotoxic types of chemicals chemical that reactant with DNA and damage DNA and then result in possibly some conversion of a normal cell into a cancerous cell and so the methodologies that were described in the National Academy report actually came in very handy at that point because they dealt with non- threshold chemicals and risk assessment methodologies and what they did actually was begin with this methodology that had been applied in the past to radi nucleid which are indeed genotoxic and uh modify it and apply it to organic chemicals um it's not an exact linkage but there there are sufficient relationships that it's worth pursuing in that direction so that's what we did and we also uh created a methodology for differentiating chemicals based on the type of toxicity that could occurred classification system that we used in the drinking water SK but it was clear pretty quickly that the process of producing standards using all those methodologies was just not fast enough to detections that were being recorded and reported uh for example uh about this time things like triethylene and tlore ethylene were being found in all kinds of water groundwaters and the problem with them is they were very large volume solvents they were being spilled they were being discharged into waterways and they're not biodegradable so if they got into the water chances are if you looked you would find them and so that created a tremendous concern and so as a result of that getting together with uh Vic and and and the crew we came up with the idea of drinking water Health advisories and the drinking water health advisors are simply that they are uh assessments based upon the health risk the toxicology of chemicals without much reference to technology and analytics and they were not regulatory they were advisory there were guidelines but they did go through a review process and so they actually provideed definitive Benchmark information when one of these extraneous chemicals was being found and was not regulated so that really helped water suppliers State Regulators to make judgments about the significance of some of these detections that were occurring about 200 Health advisories have been produced uh drinking water Health advisories and then even more recently just this year the pesticide program produced 350 pesticide drinking water Health advisories so um it uh it's a good idea it provides a lot of information that helps decision makers and Regulators make decisions quickly other regulatory programs in the agency back then in fact also were able to make use of them super fund uh Solid Waste programs who were finding contaminants and groundwater provided benchmarks for them to use as to the kinds of concerns and the kinds of cleanup actions that would be appropriate for those SS thanks Joe just to clarify a couple points when you talk about differentiating the universe of chemicals that we would have to deal with the definition was based on the toxic endpoint suspected or associated with the chemical not some sort of chemical class is that correct yes the the the threshold type uh toxicant and the non- threshold type of toxicant yes and just to clarify when you say that the health advisories provided definitive data you meant definitive data that was available it basically couldn't make the ultimate call otherwise it would be a rule right the health advisories were the best available information based on the data that was available and so what we had was the Federal Government EPA epa's drinking water office evaluating that information making judgments that then provided the U authoritative sources that some of these local and state people have been used EAS thank you Joe and now let us hear from Jack Hoffer and John wise about the how the decision not to go forward with the GAC rule was received in the region and state Jack AR the decision to not proceed with the GAC rule was received with a huge Collective side Relief by utility States and and regions alike for three basic reasons the water utilities were first the water utilities were really struggling with how to deal with the other new standards and the Improvement that they were going to have to undertake to meet those standards secondly the utilities were in the midst of coping with really outmoded treatment techniques conveyance facilities and ancient Distribution Systems uh we still had slow sand filters we had wood stake pipes and we had uncovered finished water reservoirs throughout our entire region and believe me installing uh granular activated carbon filters was no was nowhere on the radar for for these utilities and finally uh the utility Personnel were pretty lery of the cost benefit ratio for GAC many had Ed powdered activated carbon for many years for Taste and Odor Control due to algae blooms but they really had not considered activated carbon for anything else so ardan uh those were the key reasons that everybody felt really good about the headquarters decision not to proceed with the GAC rle thank you Jack John well all of us headquarters and regions put a lot of time into developing the granulated activated carbon rule so-called GAC rule the GAC rule could have led to improve treatment technology for a wider range of generic organic chemicals over the longer term rather than the specific chemical by chemical regulations but at the time in region 9 as all across the country the water supply industry including the largest water utilities in California were in no position to implement such a technically sophisticated new treatment Rule and they did not have the financial resources particularly given the backlog of needed Capital Investments for basic treatment infrastructure which was profoundly lacking across the country and then remember that the drinking water State revolving loan funds were not available to help utilities with their investment needs until after 1996 and so we had a situation where the utilities simply were not ready and could not implement the rule despite the obvious ADV vages of doing so we'll pick up the discussion of how the office of drinking water pursued the development of actual drinking water programs to oversee and enforce the implementation of regulatory standards to discuss this we'll ask Alan Levan the director of our state program division from 1976 to 1982 Allan joined EPA at Inception in 1970 from the private Water Pollution Control Administration among other assignments Allen was detailed to be deputy director for environmental programs for the state of Ohio between 1973 and 1975 this experience proved the especially helpful to his role in the drinking water program he later became epa's Deputy regional administrator in Chicago and after retirement from EPA played a major role in launching the awwa research fund Foundation discussed later in this program Allan holds a degree in physical science and public policy from Temple University Alan thank you very much ardan I'm happy to be here today the centerpiece of our implementation strategy was to promote state delegations that seems like a a pretty obvious statement because we discovered early in the game that there was no way that EPA could implement the program in any number of states based to lack of resources so what we had to do was to develop a close working relationship with the EPA Regional stats Jack hoper previously had mentioned that they really didn't know us and and that's true we had a couple of maybe two or three Public Health Service offices very dedicated folks but as far as the senior staff was concerned uh they didn't know me they didn't know Vic they didn't know Joe they had resumés but as you well know a resume isn't always enough so what we did was we we began our implementation activities in 1975 with a series of bimonthly meetings around the country with the leaders of the regional drinking water programs in other words face to face our early meetings focused primarily on how best to use the available grants to promote state enforcement responsibility or as we call it Primacy and how we should respond to numerous implementation questions that we were getting during the first few years of the program so this dialogue led to for us to generate a series of program guidance memos which improve the consistencies of our activities across the regions now let me just say when we when we talk about developing program guidance we didn't just sit down at a desk and crank them out we formed small work groups and we made sure that there was a regional rep on each work group and in many cases we were also able to bring a state fellow fellow or lady in on these guidance memos and that really improved the consistency over time the lack of the travel funds forced us to reduce the frequency of such meetings to twice a year but the frequent face-to-face meetings were critical and to launching the program uh let's talk a little bit about resources the technical capacities of our regional staff were enhanced in 76 and 77 when the Office of Management and budget OMB added 100 work years to our budget and that to help the regions cope with their new program responsibilities and this not only helped them cope with new responsibilities but it enabled the regional staff to attain Branch level status and so they became more visible units within the regional structures uh these hires also enabled us to significantly strengthen the capabilities of the Regional Offices now there was a uh a former Deputy Administrator of EPA who who had kind of a neat saying which was even a blind squirrel discovers a nut every now and then uh I don't think he was talking about us because for us we felt that this was like discovering gold now getting into state grants the EPA budget first included about 20 million for state public order Supply programs and this offer the states that chose to participate with new resources to enhance their existing programs privacy or promoting privacy was further enhanced in 197 7 when Congress extended the fiscal year from the end of June to the end of September which allowed us to create three rounds of Grant negotiations with the state during the first year of the program when the statuto requirements for Grant eligibility were pretty General now this interesting opportunity which we thought was very unique was suggested by one of our regional Branch Chiefs it was John Wise from our region I and this greatly contributed to our ability to qualify the states for Primacy so so John we still thank you after all these years uh the other thing that very important aspect of the Region's participation was in conducting meaningful inventories and helping the states conduct meaningful inventories of of the Water Public Water Systems which was a critical requirement because without that we really didn't know what our universe was so we lots of kudos to the regions for doing that so so all in all over the first few years hopefully because of some of these efforts we were able to promote St State privacy to 52 of the 57 states and territories covered by the act and ardan back to you thank you Alan was there anything you did that you thought was special to promote cooperation with the yes I think there was and I I I think I think it's kind of unique uh as invitation began we conducted program evaluations of regional state performance and the common practice at that time uh was to get into a gotcha mood uh and leave a bunch of discrep a list of discrepancies for the regions to follow and then get out of town as quickly as possible but rather than using that Comm practice what we did was try to make such activities more of a learning experience and the way we did this was to include in our regional evaluation teams a representative of the last rate region reviewed and the next one to be evaluated and we we also encourage states to do that kind of practice also and it was generally successful because it shared how common problems and improved the program performance rather than just uh leaving that long list of specific deficiencies that I spoke about so Alan what kind of payoff did early implementation have well in a number of cases the regions produced some unanticipated outcomes and let me just cite one of them it was one when one of our national contaminant monitoring surveys detected carbon tetrachloride at very low levels in the Ohio River and since carbon tet is a man-made chemical of serious toxicological significance that Discovery triggered an inspection of major Upstream chemical plant discharges by our regional staff and that led to discovery of a plant greatly exceeding its water pollution permit limits and it also led to the identification of a massive and unreported spill from the same facility which more importantly impacted the number of Downstream water supply intakes so in cooperation with epa's office of enforcement the discharger was temporarily shut down until appropriate remedial treatment was installed and with a great deal of media attention and Ard before we leave this one I just also wanted to point out that this example not only helped solve a potentially uh hazardous environmental problem but it also then demonstrated how various units of EPA work together to solve a problem for the public goods so we're pretty proud of that one thanks Ard now back to you thank you Alan so let me sum up basically the uh intense outcry from the Waterworks officials about the new regulations and the upcoming GAC uh treatment of large facilities actually caus their management to come to life and overcome previous complacency and ultimately introduce novel and improved Technologies and control systems for treating drinking water to higher quality than they previously delivered uh two industry institutions uh seem to have significantly changed their focus during the mid1 1980s uh to have a major positive impact on the quality of the nation's drinking water both of them were associated with the awwa but one was an outgrowth of the uh Association proper and that was the uh Research Foundation I'm going to ask you Alan again to uh discuss uh that let me start off by giving you a little bit of of background the executive director of the organization that I'm going to discuss was Jim man wearing and this was the same Jim man wearing that that worked for us in the water supply program I did not mention that earlier but Jim came to us from Region 3 in Philadelphia and so that we were able to show all the other regions that we at least had some Regional experience in addition to my own State experience anyway uh J Jim left and went to work as executive director of an organization called the awwa Research Foundation which is now called the water Research Foundation and he was really the father of what I'm about to discuss uh Jim could not be with us for this interview due to previous commitments but he did submit an email and now I what I like to do is kind of summarize what Jim said based on my own knowledge and experience plus Jim's more developed knowledge and experience so anyway what happened was the Safe Drinking Water Act and its regulations really provided the impetus for the water IND industry's development and expansion of its own research program which is now called as I said the water Research Foundation the foundation Prov provided scientific basis for all aspects of water supply operations and management and the general enhancement of such aspects they included improved treatment technology Regulatory Compliance analytical improvements and just G General enhancement the development of the foundation was supported by EPA through joint funding of research projects and through the participation of former EPA employees now I think it's significant to point out that during the foundation's early years four of the five senior managers of the foundation were former EPA employees in addition to Jim and myself there was Jack Manion and Marty Allen uh Jack came from headquarters Marty Allen was a researcher in epa's region 6 in Dallas so it wasn't by accident that we and the foundation utilized many of the approaches that were successfully demonstrated by the public water supply program at EPA namely communication collaboration and Outreach but in this case the Outreach was to the water utility Community they were were our stakeholders as we call them now funding for the foundation was provided by a voluntary subscription program whereby the the water utilities both public and private provided Annual fees to the foundation and then we designed an agenda that was aimed at common water supply issues identified by the me the membership uh at including EPA who who contributed and we had joint projects with EPA and at one point more than a thousand water utilities served more than 90% of the US population formed the membership of the foundation from its Inception in 1983 the water Research Foundation has funded more than $500 million in research encompassing more than 1,000 projects and programs it supports many national International seminars and developed into the largest research program on water supply issues in the world and Jim points out that a secondary spin-off of the Safe Drinking Water Act was the creation of the global Water research coalition now I had left the foundation before the creation of that organization but Jim has asked me to tell you what it does basically provides worldwide collaboration on water supply research throughout the world and among the 15 largest water supply research programs throughout the throughout the world EPA is a major contributor to the Coalition and it also includes institutions from the United Kingdom Europe Asia Africa and Australia as well as the US so in summary one of the benefits of epa's water supply program was the establishment of a much more Progressive water industry as evidenced in growth by the growth and development of its own research program now the creation of the foundation and the Coalition was not an element of the safe Water Act but I think it's to the agency's credit meaning EPA that they were quick to understand the importance of working with other organizations to achieve the ultimate goal of improving the quality of drinking water served to the public which is what this is all about thank you AR now that we've heard about the creation of awwa Research Foundation how did the association itself respond to the implementation of the ACT I'll turn to Jack Hoffer to answer the question who after retirement became the executive director for the awwa F first uh some background on awwa it is the historic uh Professional Organization focusing on Waterworks operations in the US and abroad it is a very large organization of water professionals within about 110 countries primarily in the US uh and it has a very broad educational Focus as well as an extensive Regional structure through which it provides a great deal of training and support but in the late 70s and early 80s awwa was struggling uh with its own issues often viewed as too negative not Forward Thinking enough and too slow to react members begin doubting whether awwa could be of any assistance at all with the implementation of the act all this when utilities face numerous challenges uh such as upgrading their inadequate treatment and Distribution Systems and the need for new monitoring systems and uh new types of treatment plus dealing with a sagging public confidence and a very skeptical public which was undermining their efforts to get the money needed uh through Bond issues and rate increases in order to make the needed improvements the last draw actually occurred when awwa had no meaningful role whatsoever in the reauthorization of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1986 which resulted in some amendments that really troubled the utilities in in the stat so as a result of that unhappiness now some new leadership emerged uh within the association uh that eventually transformed awwa uh into far more effective uh organization that provided uh valuable services that really focus on public health protection and the importance of the provision of Safe Drinking Water it is interesting to note that during this period um the PHS uh employees and the EPA employees were quite active in awwa particularly at the regional and local levels and that really helped explain the Act and the importance of implementation in addition some former uh PHS and and EPA Personnel were actually senior manager ERS during the critical part of this transformation so all in all uh Arden the awwa went from being a very slow to react organization to being an organization that was fully committed to assisting their members provide safe drinking water thank Jack we will close this oral history with a discussion of what the participants think of their efforts and achievements now with the benefit of hindsight what were the major lessons learned over the first 10 years of the sa water thank you Arden uh I think it's important to recognize that by their very nature regulatory programs focus on problem areas and they impose duties on the regulated Community to deal with those problems by their nature they're inclined to generate uh conflict between the regulated community and the the government and as such that uh conflict really needs to be managed if you're going to have an effective regulatory development process and by that what we were trying to create was an inform discussion of the underlying issues that we were trying to address and the particular solutions that we had selected and try to avoid the kind of negative comments that often come from a reluctant regulated community that doesn't really want to make change that thinks that whatever you're asking them to do is not feasible or that whatever schedul is your proposing for change are inappropriate at any rate it was toward the end of trying to promote again to the maximum degree we could in formed discussion that all of the things I talked about earlier were part of our processes one we worried about improving the the technical competency of the agency and the Anis that we put forward to support our initiatives secondly we were concerned with the communication strategy which had described at some length before but again the communication strategy was to try to get people into the process early rather than just responding to a proposed regulation uh to tail end of the process we were also very concerned with the need to uh create a number of other uh activities that took place that were very very success or helpful to the program and again I think our efforts were part of the process they weren't totally responsible but let me articulate a few changes that I think were very positive first of all we were able to get the Waterworks professionals to focus on new issues and so as the Waterworks professionals met as the program began they would have discussions about how to effectively maintain disinfection and and limit the amount of harmful levels of infection byproducts technological challenges secondly we were able to get the industry for the first time to seriously look at alternative Technologies and that was a big uh hurdle to get over because this is an industry that was essentially using the same treatment technologies that had been in in place for 50 years so this is an area of change that was uh significant third by the by the nature of the program that is a tremendous amount of monitoring of drinking water quality was undertaken uh this provided the data with which uh we had a much better understanding of the quality of the drinking water than as it was actually being delivered uh for the most part this data was very positive and helpful it did uncover a few specific areas of problems were identified but in those cases you had current and good data that made it pretty obvious that the what needed to be done another uh element that came in line during this first 10 years of the program was the impact of the significantly new roles for the State Health departments they had enhanced their programs largely due to the grants they had lots and lots more resources to oversee and help utilities come into compliance and they were able to uh develop other uh related activities like the capacity for doing risk assessments on on new contaminants of concern where they might appear and that capacity turned out to be very very helpful in the the 80s time frame when we were confronted by the detection of a large number of groundwater contamination uh with man-made chemicals uh much of them related to waste disposal practices here again the states were much better and able technically to decide how big the risks of these detections were how rigorous they they remedial actions had to be and it was a significant benefit to managing the the public health protection and again it was a a result of the institution building that we had done at the state level thanks to the the enhanced grants during the same time FR there was a significant difference or change in the way the utilities communicated with the public that is they began over that time frame a process of engaging the the customers with information about drinking water problems that they were encountering and how they proposed to deal with them I believe this was largely associated with their recognition that they needed public support for the rate increases and for the bonds with which to make the the needed changes and nationally I think this had a very positive effect in getting the American public to realize that safe drinking water was not free that it had Associated costs and they would have to be generated uh one way or another from the customers and finally this period saw a huge increase in the amount of university-based research on the Science and Technology associated with drinking water and again this work over the the decade uh really was the basis for future regulatory activities and I think was very helpful all in all I think the program contributed to these improvements although we certainly weren't the only factors that that played over this decade but I think over the decade we did make significant progress in in uh thinking about the factors that that impacted our successes we will identify five of them that I'll let me run through that I think were were truly significant first clear legislative mandate for EPA set standards to oversee compliance and to take direct enforcement action where we found Public Health threatened by contaminated drinking water were very powerful tools for us to use secondly all the efforts that went into Communications and and transparent processes again I think and opened up the dialogue got the all of the institutions involved uh early in the process and I think that contributed to the the ultimate successes that we had third I think a category of activities I would characterize as the programs Integrity that is from the early days as we were in fact demonstrated that we were willing to propos actions that went beyond business as usual that took the water supply industry if you will out of its comfort zone such as the GAC ranks that we discussed at some length here and we also showed a will a common sense to back off when after a robust uh public comment period we concluded we really didn't have all of the technical justification that we would need to sustain the regulations had we promulgated them uh in view of the absolute certain litigation would follow any kind of major promulgation of a new regulation finally I think that we were blessed with an extraordinarily powerful management tool and performance measurement uh metric U because we had detailed data on compliance and therefore non-compliance for various sizes or categories of systems we had a very powerful management tool to to collect that data and to look at comparisons between um systems in in in local areas and regions and states to make comparisons across States for about non-compliance rates and the focus on non-compliance rates became a truly powerful management tool because it enabled uh State manager for example to say gee I'm looking at non-compliance of this these types of systems in our state and they are worse than they or more Troublesome than they might be in some some nearby States or near other portions of the state and thereby Focus the the oversight capacities of the states on the real problems and I think over time that capacity for an effective management tool was employed and was very successful back to you Arden thank you VC I think it's important to emphasize that at the Inception of this program as we talked about it at the beginning of this oil history the fact that the drinking water was not particularly important issue for most Americans most Americans didn't really know or were aware of their drinking water quality but by the end of the decade sometime in the middle of that 10year period public attitudes radically changed with the onset of concerns about toxic substances and all of a sudden drinking water became a major Vector for exposure and by the end of this period the drinking water program had become an important player in the agency's public health efforts we will go to uh the lessons learned from a regional perspective uh Jack can I ask you comment sure Ardon looking back I would like to focus on four key points that I think differentiated the drinking water program from others and led to its success in terms of States accepting primary enforcement responsibility first uh was that Spirit of trust that had developed between the states certain utilities and the regional Personnel working together for years on the interstate carrier program that really proved critical as we got our foot in the door to start talking about primary enforcement responsibility secondly was the collegial relationship between headquarters and the regional staff during the particularly during the early implementation of the ACT this was crucial since States and utilities were looking for cracks in a relationship and they were really uh seeing whether or not the regions and headquarters are on the same page as we progress through implementation and we proved to them that we were third was the role that actually awwa played as kind of a nonthreatening meeting ground particularly at the local level we could all kind of sit down over a couple beers and talk about how best to implement the safe drinking water and finally the support both monetary and and staff support that that headquarters provided to the states uh and a WWA and to the regions to sponsor utility management workshops operator training and to produce other tools needed to emphasize the public health importance of proper implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and that was the key Aron uh when push came to shove we all had one Mission and that was uh Public Health protection through the provision of safe drinking water thank you very much Jack uh John John wise well through the course of this uh project recording our roal history and our experiences my colleagues have shared some of the Lessons Learned I would also like to share some summ summary thoughts and reflect on Lessons Learned From my perspective we're all very proud of what we did at the time and what has become of our various policies and initiatives as they were birthed and took life within the agency the implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act was an extraordinary experience we pioneered several new and Innovative approaches that set the stage for EPA to carry out its future statutory agenda let me give five examples number one we performed a comprehensive National drinking water inventory and then we did a nationwide assessment of drinking water water quality that sounds very Elementary but the first step towards the operational Integrity of the program was to define the scope of the Endeavor and that in turn enabled the formulation of a strategic plan to set priorities and to address the most serious problems first example number two we engage stakeholders in every public collaboration communic and Outreach effort this engagement was unprecedented at the time and it served as a model for all future Outreach efforts third example we leveraged resources in a severely constrained budget through the productive use of outside grants and contracts and we integrated our internal resources in ways that had never been done before of some special significance were the utilization of Technical and scientific expertise in epa's Research Laboratories the integration of legal council into every aspect of implementation and rul making and finally the role assigned to the Regional Offices to develop State programs the fourth example I want to share is our approach to treatment techniques such as the GAC rule which we've talked about before the GAC Rule and such treatment techniques pav the way for treating classes of compounds rather than individual chemicals and it formed the basis for new policies on Source protection surface water disinfection Soul Source aler designations and the Watershed approach and out of our work on the initial implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act EPA embraced pollution prevention as an overarching guiding philosophy of Environmental Management and the fifth and final example is that we use the public disclosure obligation that requires water utilities to publicly notify their customers on the quality of the water they serve as a self enforcement mechanism this became standard procedure in the later Community right to know provisions of later environmental laws so with these five examples it helps confirm the lessons learned from our Safe Drinking Water Act experience and may help inform and guide the agency in future endeavors it was a wonderful experience we're all very proud of it and we hope the Legacy that we have offered will be of great help to the agency thank you Ardon thank you John then in conclusion I want to thank everyone for their contributions to this discussion about the early implementation of the drinking water bill I also would like to mention Dr Arnold kmac who was a prime participant in our activities who contributed heavily both in formulating policies and in the analysis that supported our activities unfortunately On's declining Health uh situation precludes him from being part of this uh recording but he certainly was a major contributor to the program in its early days