Source Water Protection Susceptibility Analysis and its Relationship to Priority-Setting Under Statewide Watershed Protection Approaches

Under the 1996 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the States have been delegated the responsibility to implement Source Water Assessment Programs to analyze the relative susceptibility of public water systems (PWS) to contamination. The States have developed a variety of approaches to support these assessments, ranging from detailed, numeric rankings of contaminant threats to simple, narrative assessments of PWS vulnerability. In a similar fashion, Clean Water Act (CWA) programs have also begun developing priority-setting and assessment protocols to support Unified Watershed Assessments, grant-making decisions, and other watershed management goals. For example, many statewide watershed protection frameworks incorporate a priority-setting and targeting mechanism to focus resources on watersheds requiring the highest degree of management to remediate existing problems or address emerging threats. This paper describes the manner in which the SDWA and CWA susceptibility analysis and priority-setting approaches being developed by the States can interact to support common water resource assessment and protection goals.