New Project: National Drinking Water Explorer Tool
Hello and welcome to my first EPIC blog! My name is Kameron, and I am excited to join as EPIC’s first Services and Systems Designer. My background is in technology delivery as a product designer and experience researcher. I’m passionate about people and the planet. I am joining EPIC from the White House Council of Environmental Quality’s Office of Environmental Justice where I focused on delivering policy oriented technology solutions like the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, the Environmental Justice Scorecard, EJ.gov, and the Justice40 Initiative. In this blog, I’ll be announcing EPIC’s plans to design and develop a National Drinking Water Explorer tool and inviting interested folks to get involved and provide feedback along the way.
All Americans deserve safe, reliable, and affordable drinking water. But making sure that everyone has access remains a challenge that requires untangling a complex web of interdependent factors. Key questions that need to be answered when determining if people have access to durable water infrastructure include: Where are communities getting their water from? Is that water both safe to drink and affordable? Are utilities financially equipped to provide water supplies now and into the future with the potential for rising costs, climate change impacts, and shifting populations? How are policies to provide safe drinking water being implemented?
In 2024, EPIC had good success in answering some of these questions through our Texas Water System Prioritization Tool. This tool is an interactive, web-based application that displays drinking water data that can be used to improve drinking water quality and access for Texans. Texas is a state that has high demand for water infrastructure that significantly outpaces the amount of available resources for investments made by the state. EPIC is planning to scale this tool nation-wide in order to support communities, map the utility landscape across the U.S., and help states to prioritize investments and technical assistance.
As we start to design and develop this new National Drinking Water Explorer tool, we want to ensure that:
The tool works for YOU!
Insights from the tool are easy to understand, useful, and usable in your work, research, advocacy, and policy making.
The tool is built in the open, community driven, and fosters innovation.
We hope to achieve these goals by developing the tool using open source principles and giving you the chance to get involved and provide feedback along the way. We are currently planning on hosting multiple engagements during which we hope to learn more about the needs across the ecosystem of community members, utilities, and state legislatures, the tools and resources you currently use to get informed and take action, and what you would hope to see in a National Drinking Water Explorer tool. We will also have opportunities to use early versions (or prototypes) of the tool and give feedback on the planned features and functions, designs, data sets, and more.
Why develop a National Drinking Water Explorer tool?
While working on our project in Texas we learned that:
We can better position stakeholders to dive into the complex factors that influence the quality and long-term durability of drinking water.
We can bring together robust water drinking sources that enable water utilities, advocates, policy makers, and community members to take action to advance equitable increases in funding, prioritize highest impact interventions, and develop coalitions who can advocate for better outcomes.
We can provide this data to support coordination between technical assistance providers to help guide future decisions and inform policies and programs that support communities.
We are so excited to be able to scale this work to more communities across the nation and can’t wait to engage with you to ensure that the tool meets your needs, is easy to use, is different than other tools, and helps you to have a better understanding of the drinking water in your community and in communities that you care about.
