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State drinking-water office says it is building a centralized repository for unsafe-water notices
Summary
Division of Drinking Water staff told the Monitoring Council they are beginning to centralize boil-water and other unsafe-water advisories into the Safer Clearinghouse to improve public access, but warned the work will take time and resources to expand statewide.
The Division of Drinking Water (DDW) said it has started consolidating boil-water notices into a single, searchable location to make public advisories easier to find.
"We have transitioned to starting to collect boil-water notices in a centralized location in the Safer Clearinghouse," said Karen Nishimoto, section chief for quality assurance at DDW. She added the division plans to expand that to cover all unsafe-water alerts but that doing so will “take time to move from dispersed data collection to a centralized data collection.”
The topic arose after academic member Steve Blumenshine described a national project to scrape and assemble boil-water advisories and asked whether California has a comprehensive public repository for drinking-water advisories. Christine Satello, who represented the Division of Drinking Water at the meeting, said DDW supports the idea of a consolidated database "depending on how much resources and time that would take for us." Satello also introduced Nishimoto to explain DDW’s current work on notice centralization and quality controls.
Council members and public commenters raised accessibility and follow-up notification as priorities. Several speakers emphasized that advisories should be written in formats the public can understand and follow with a clear notice when water is again safe to consume. "When a notice is issued, it's supposed to include an expectation of when it'll be lifted," a council member said, adding that communities need the secondary notice that confirms water is safe.
DDW described next steps that include improving the Safer Clearinghouse entries, expanding beyond boil-water alerts to other unsafe-water notices, and refining quality checks so that notice records include start and end dates and related quality-assurance documentation. Staff said the division will continue to consult partners — including local district offices that historically maintained many of the alerts — as it moves toward a statewide system.
What happens next: DDW staff plan iterative work with regions and local agencies to expand the Safer Clearinghouse’s coverage and usability. Council members asked staff to return with additional details about how the new repository will support integrated reporting and regional data submissions.
