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Water Resources

Water is essential for life and plays a vital role in the proper functioning of the Earth's ecosystems. Water pollution has a serious impact on all living creatures, and can negatively affect the use of water for drinking, household needs, recreation, fishing, transportation and commerce.

Back to Learn About Water page.

On this page:


Drinking Water

Learn about your drinking water supply, how to monitor its quality and how to help keep it clean.

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Wastewater

Learn how pollutants can get into the water supply, and actions or treatment to remove them.

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Water Bodies

Learn about EPA's work to protect and manage water resources and what you can do to help.

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Water Quality

Find out whether waters near you are clean and safe for activities such as swimming and fishing.

  • Beach Closures
  • Fish Advisories - A compendium of information on locally issued fish advisories and safe eating guidelines.
  • How's My Waterway?See if your local waterway was checked for pollution, what was found, and what is being done.

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What You Can Do

Read about actions you can take to protect water at home and in your community.

  • Adopt Your Watershed - Learn about opportunities to get involved in activities such as volunteer water monitoring, stream cleanups, and storm drain marking. 
  • Emergency Preparedness - Natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods can disrupt your drinking water supply and your wastewater disposal systems. Learn some of the issues you may face preparing for, during and after an event that directly threatens your health and the health of your family.
  • How to Dispose of Medicines Properly (2 pp, 498 K, About PDF) - Medicines disposed of improperly may end up in our drinking water sources.
  • Maintain Your Septic System - If you’re not properly maintaining your septic system, you’re not only hurting the environment, you’re putting your family’s health at risk—and may be flushing thousands of dollars down the drain.
  • Prevent Polluted Runoff - What you can do to prevent pollution caused by rainfall or snowmelt moving over and through the ground.
  • Volunteer Monitoring - Across the country, trained volunteers are monitoring the condition of their local streams, lakes, estuaries and wetlands.
  • WaterSense - Save water and protect the environment by choosing WaterSense labeled products in your home, yard, and business and taking simple steps to save water each day.

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