Included in the February 19, 2026, biweekly update 

Despite being one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the United States has a water and sanitation access problem. Media reporting on high-profile cases like Flint, Michigan; Lowndes County, Alabama; Appalachia; and Jackson, Mississippi, to name a few, has tended to present this issue as area specific, or on a case-by-case basis, obscuring the fact that millions of Americans, represented in all 50 states and U.S. territories, lack access to clean drinking water and proper sanitation systems. 

Currently, the water crisis in the U.S. is not fully understood due to limited or insufficient data. There are significant gaps in how information on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) access in the U.S. gets collected and reported. These shortcomings are what researchers at Michigan State University, Stephen Gasteyer and Autumn Bland, in collaboration with Kimberly Slinde Lemme of the nonprofit DigDeep are working to address. 

In an article published online February 3, Gasteyer, Lemme, and Bland highlight important weaknesses in four data sources that have traditionally been used to estimate WaSH access in the U.S.—the American Housing Survey (AHS), the American Community Survey (ACS), the EPA Environmental Community Health Online (ECHO), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA). Limitations include:

• The AHS’s focus on metropolitan areas, largely excluding rural localities;
• The ACS’s focus on households, meaning much of the homeless population is unaccounted for; 
• ECHO’s use of data that measures the quality of drinking water and wastewater in utilities only, excluding those who rely on private wells or onsite wastewater systems; 
• And NAWQA’s reliance on data from USGS and partner sampling locations, excluding areas where no sampling occurs.

Gasteyer, Lemme, and Bland have proposed an alternative. A national dashboard they’ve co-created with the Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at MSU called (Dis)closing the Water Gap. It combines information from the four sources mentioned above with community stories and local reporting into one online resource. The goal? To better track the location of people and communities who lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation in the U.S.

“Right now, activists must do the work of combining data from the multiple existing sites to comprehensively address access to WaSH in the U.S.,” the authors said. Current data initiatives address specific issues (water quality, plumbing access, affordability), or are limited to certain states, but a comprehensive nationwide system does not exist for all U.S. populations lacking adequate WaSH access.

Across the country, research shows that the most severe drinking water and sanitation access issues occur not in cities or public water systems, where data are frequently collected, but in historically marginalized communities, particularly underbounded or unincorporated areas. Native, Hispanic/Latinx, and Appalachian communities are more likely to lack access to safe drinking water because they are not connected to these systems. This disparity also extends to household plumbing access. Native American households are 19 times more likely, and Black and Hispanic/Latinx households twice as likely, than White households to lack complete plumbing. These numbers are likely higher than reported when gaps in data collection that keep communities “hidden” are considered.

Because WaSH access is a widespread, systemic issue, not an individual one, it requires national-level attention and holistic solutions. The authors argue that an all-inclusive dashboard, like disclosingthewatergap.org, could streamline data tracking and reveal geographic areas where households are struggling with plumbing and sanitation, water quality, and water affordability in the U.S. 

Read the full research article: “Fluid data: The problem of accurately estimating household access to water and sanitation in the United States”

Visit the (Dis)closing the Water Gap dashboard