Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
What this is:
A pictorial representation of the data points for the last year EPA and USGS available for each 8-digit (i.e. largest size from 8,10, and 12) hydrological watershed in the country. Peach is 0 to 5. Red is 111-27925.
Conclusions:
1. Not all data out there is linked up to this collaboration. States and municipalities may not share or have their data available in a format to link up to EPA’s STORET system (and in fairness I can tell you California has its own system that should be cataloging far more data than presented her)e.
2. We are not pulling enough water samples to adequately monitor our watersheds.
Yes, we live in an era where we must mind what we spend. But this is an issue of priorities. Consider that for under $5,000, most municipalities could install a turbidimeter in one of their waterways and take a data sample every minute (0.5M data points a year). Consider that a grade schooler could get a $100 pH meter and data logger and grab a data sample every second (31.5M data points a year). A robust field work project that sends samples to labs should come back with at least 100 data points. Having an area with 50 data points over the last year is laughable. We cull terabytes of information because of a low-possibility high-damage threat of terrorism. How can the high-possibility moderate-to-high-damage threat of degraded waters be playing with a national database that cannot even break nine figures?
Concerns about water and wastewater quality are not going to be solved without a scientific understanding of what procesees are going on in a river. Indeed, one of the first few steps in developing a treatment plan in environmental analysis is to identify what data gaps exist. And as you can see above, chances are there are going to be some data gaps.
The Water Main 