SBC Water Quality Dashboard
Our Santa Barbara team has the great pleasure of living and working in the Santa Barbara region, while also interfacing with our teams working in the northern Rockies and in southern Baja California Sur. While far apart, all the communities we work with are facing the worst drought in the historical record, exacerbating long term challenges around water quality and water supply. Frustratingly, it can be remarkably difficult to get straightforward data on the state of our water.
Natalie Orfalea, co-founder of the Orfalea Foundation and her partner Lou Buglioli, shared that frustration and saw an opportunity to make a difference. Inspired by apps that allow one to quickly check air quality, she thought we should be able to do that for drinking water. Natalie had seen the Community Data Dashboard, a public-private partnership launched by LegacyWorks to aggregate and share Santa Barbara countywide COVID-19 data, and was curious if we could take a similar approach with water quality data. So in April of 2021, she, Lou and foundation director Marybeth Carty reached out to LegacyWorks and we launched a partnership to develop a water quality data dashboard for Santa Barbara. With the help of Foundation funding, we embarked upon a year-long effort to understand regional water quality data - how it is collected, stored and shared and where it is lacking.
Our work revealed that data availability varies widely depending upon where you live in Santa Barbara county and how you source your water, and that most of the county lacks ready access to drinking water quality data. Some residents receive water from managed water systems, while others, usually in less densely populated areas, from groundwater wells. Larger water systems are highly regulated, continually monitor water quality to address issues as they arise, and reliably deliver safe drinking water, collecting vast amounts of data along the way. Despite that, only 15 of the county’s 62 water systems release an annual Consumer Confidence Report, with the vast majority of those-not-reporting serving rural and under-resourced communities. While all systems report their data to the state of California, the state database is difficult to access and even harder to interpret. Meanwhile groundwater well testing is spotty at best, with no data available for large swaths of the county.
The absence of data affects family decision making and wellbeing. Without accurate information, residents can either lack confidence in high quality water, unnecessarily purchasing filtered or bottled water at significant expense; or have too much confidence in poor quality water resulting in impacts to their health and wellbeing. To meet the need for better data access that enables informed decisions, we are happy to share the launch of the new Water Quality Dashboard at sbcwaterquality.org. It aggregates data, when it exists, from water system managers and from state sources and it makes it clear where data is lacking. Sometimes it’s just as important to shine a light on what’s missing so that we can identify the gap and work together to fill it.
The new Santa Barbara Water Quality Dashboard is another important step in the journey of finding and sharing data that can guide us in building a healthy and resilient community. We hope the dashboard informs decisions and inspires data sharing, investment in monitoring, and action at state and regional levels to make water quality data far easier to access and interpret. In Santa Barbara, we look forward to working with elected leaders, water systems managers, researchers and community based organizations to make that happen in the days ahead. As Natalie said to us, “Water is an essential building block to life. Everyone has a right to know the quality of their drinking water”.