Protecting our water supply

The EPA may not be doing such a good job.  The Safe Drinking Water Act, which was passed in 1974, explicitly prohibits injection into a source of drinking water, and requires precautions to ensure that oil and gas and disposal wells that run through them are carefully engineered not to leak. The law does allow the EPA to exempt companies from its provisions provided that the water is not being used as drinking water and that it never will be. The EPA has granted energy and mining companies more than 1500 exemptions, although the exact number is not known.  Waste can be discarded freely into these sources, and wells that run through them need not meet all standards used to prevent pollution.  As a result,  toxic material has been deposited into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water.  Most of the exemptions are for lower-quality water of questionable use, but many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it would barely need filtration.

The law allows the exemptions if the water will never be used for drinking.  However, advances in technology have raised real doubts as to whether a particular source of non-drinkable water could be made drinkable.  In many cases it can and at a reasonable cost.  

We are seeing that water will likely become a scarce resource later this century.  It does not seem to be the right thing to continue exempting companies from polluting the sources we have, no matter how poor the source is today.  But today. oil trumps water.