Drinking Water Week takes place during the first week of May — from May 3 to 9 this year. The theme is "Protect the Source." In our daily lives, we drink water without thinking about where it is coming from and whether it is safe for us. Polluted drinking water can be responsible for many illnesses, which is why awareness is so important.
People have been storing and distributing drinking water since the beginning of time. During the hunter-gatherer period of human civilization, river water was used as drinking water, and so civilizations were usually formed near that water source. In case there were no rivers or lakes, they used groundwater for drinking water, which was pumped up through wells. When the human population started growing extensively, the water supply was no longer sufficient, and drinking water needed to be extracted from a different source.
People developed drinking water transport systems using channels dug in the sand or rocks. Gradually, people shifted to hollow tubes for the channels. Egypt used hollow palm trees, and the Chinese and Japanese used bamboo trunks. Eventually, humans used other materials like clay, wood, and metal.
In 1804, John Gibb built the first drinking water system that supplied an entire city in Paisley, Scotland, with disinfected water. Within three years, filtered water was able to be transported to Glasgow. In 1806, Paris established a large water treatment plant. The water was settled for 12 hours, after which they filtered it using sand and charcoal. In 1829, the Englishman, James Simpson, invented a sand filter for the purification of drinking water which helped improve public health immensely.
U.S. drinking water supplies are currently among the safest in the world. In 1908, Jersey City in New Jersey was the first city in the U.S. to start the practice of routine disinfection of community drinking water. Over the next decade, many other U.S. cities and towns followed suit in routinely disinfecting their drinking water.
Beginning in 1899 several laws attempted to protect our waters from toxins. The first major U.S. law to address water pollution was the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. The law tries to protect water from polluting discharge and provides assistance to municipal water treatment facilities.
Growing public awareness and concern about water pollution led to sweeping amendments in 1972, commonly known as the Clean Water Act (CWA). Particularly influential was the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire in Ohio, when an oil slick on the river caught fire causing a conflagration. It was the 13th time the river caught fire, making headlines nationwide. This was an added impetus that helped to create the first Earth Day in 1970. 1988 Amendments to the Clean Water Act added provisions against runoff pollutants.
In 2018, Trump rolled back provisions of the Clean Water Act. In 2023, The Supreme Court weakened protections of wetlands. Many protective provisions were reinstated by the next Administration. In March 2025, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Clean Water Act by ruling that the EPA had limited authority to regulate polluters and hold them accountable. In the last few months Trump has rolled back further regulations on clean water, prioritizing industry and development at the cost of clean water and frozen billions of dollars earmarked for water infrastructure.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone. Enjoy your clean water now and pay attention to what is happening to your water quality. Hope that changes and restoration of the Safe Water provisions will restore the health of our water.