One place for every boil water notice
There is no national list of boil water advisories. About 50,000 community water systems issue their own, and each state publishes them differently — a web page, a map, a news release, or not at all. We gather them into one map, keep every one we find, and tell people when their area is affected.
Where notices come from
- State drinking water programs that publish current advisories, as lists, maps or feeds.
- Water systems and local health departments that post notices on their own sites and feeds.
- Our own staff, who enter notices that aren't published anywhere we can read automatically — and correct ones that are.
Each advisory links to where it came from. We check most sources every few minutes to every hour.
How to read it
- On the map, a county is shaded when at least one advisory in effect reaches it. Most advisories cover part of a county — a few streets, a subdivision, one water system — so a shaded county doesn't mean all of it is affected. The advisory says who is.
- “Lifted” means the water system ended the notice. When a source simply stops listing a notice without saying it ended, we mark it lifted on the day it disappeared and say so.
- “Unconfirmed” means the source still lists a notice as in effect, but it is far older than that source's notices ever really last and no lift has been posted. Most such notices ended long ago without the source recording it, so they are listed apart, left out of the counts, and hatched on the map where nothing else is in effect. Nobody has said the water is safe, though: if one names your water system, ask the system.
- Dates: many sources give only the day a notice was issued or lifted, not the time; those are shown as dates.
- History: nothing is deleted. Pick any date on the map to see what was in effect that day.
Sources
The state programs we read today: West Virginia's Office of Environmental Health Services, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the Arkansas Department of Health, the Maine CDC Drinking Water Program, the Washington State Department of Health, the New Mexico Environment Department, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, the Oregon Health Authority, the Mississippi State Department of Health and the Rhode Island Department of Health. Water systems are matched to the counties they serve with EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System.
Missouri's notices come from data.mo.gov. As its data policy asks: this site uses data modified from its original source, the State of Missouri, which makes no claims as to the completeness, timeliness, accuracy or content of data the site shows.
What it can't tell you
Notices can reach us late, or not at all — especially in states that don't publish them. If your water system, your landlord or a door hanger has told you to boil water, do it, whatever this site says. When an advisory here and your water system disagree, your water system is right.
For developers
The same data is available as JSON at /api/map, /api/advisories and /api/timeline, and as an Atom feed (add ?state=TX for one state). Please keep to a few requests a minute.
Missing a notice?
Tell us about notices we've missed, or sources we should be reading: notices@boilwateradvisory.com.