Tampa Bay Water’s top priority is providing high-quality, clean, safe drinking water for our member governments – Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties, and the cities of New Port Richey, St. Petersburg and Tampa. The water we provide is safe and meets or is better than state and federal drinking water regulations.
On a federal level, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforces laws to protect the sources of our drinking water under the Clean Water Act, which establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters.
EPA also regulates and enforces the quality of drinking water in the United States under the Safe Drinking Water Act. These stringent health standards aim to ensure the water coming from your tap is safe. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, EPA identifies contaminants to regulate in drinking water to protect public health and sets regulatory limits for the amounts of certain contaminants in public drinking water systems. EPA currently sets limits on more than 90 contaminants in drinking water.
Tampa Bay Water and your local utility continually monitor your drinking water to ensure it is high-quality and meets federal and state laws, rules and regulations. The results of this monitoring are presented annually in water quality reports, known as consumer confidence reports, which are required by law.
Read your utility’s Consumer Confidence Report:
Each year Tampa Bay Water performs more than 45,000 water quality tests in a state-certified laboratory using more than 3,500 water samples from several hundred regional water quality monitoring sites to ensure the safety and quality of the water we deliver to our members.
Trace amounts of naturally occurring or man-made substances can sometimes find their way into drinking water supplies, and not all are currently regulated by EPA. Today’s advanced analytical methods can detect contaminants at trace levels, but the presence of trace levels does not necessarily pose a safety concern.
EPA continually studies unregulated contaminants under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR) to collect data for contaminants that are suspected to be present in drinking water but do not have health-based standards set under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The UCMR provides the scientifically valid data needed to regulate, previously unregulated, contaminants in drinking water. EPA regularly monitors and evaluates water quality data and human health effects studies involving these unregulated contaminants to ensure safe drinking water standards. Learn more about unregulated contaminants from EPA.
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, every five years EPA issues a list of unregulated contaminants for which public water systems must monitor.
The fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 5) was published Dec. 27, 2021. UCMR 5 requires sample collection for 30 chemical contaminants between 2023 and 2025 using analytical methods approved by EPA. It can be a lengthy process to set drinking water regulations, but it is important that EPA completes its thorough, scientific process to fully understand the potential health impacts, maximum contaminant levels, analytical methods, and treatment methods to provide public utilities with proven, consistent standards.
The most notable contaminants being studied in UCMR 5 are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS. Tampa Bay Water and its member utilities are participating in EPA’s nationwide, UCMR 5 study to identify PFAS concentrations, which involves testing treated drinking water. This helps EPA set regulations for PFAS. We will keep residents informed of the samples, testing and results.
Tampa Bay Water’s testing is scheduled to begin in July 2023. We will post more information on the UCMR 5 process on this page, including the testing schedule when it is confirmed with EPA.
Click on the links below for more information on notable contaminants, both regulated and unregulated:
