NYT water-quality database lets you surf contaminant levels before you drink

The state of the nation’s water is a glass-half-full-or-half-empty situation: we have federal standards for water quality, but they’re decades out of date. The makes the question less philosophical and more straightforward: Did you really just drink that half-glass of water? The New York Times has a story and an online national water-quality database.

The NYT’s data, collected by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, is available by counties within  states, and water systems within counties.

In Minnesota, for example, you can check water quality for 29 water systems in Washington County, where contamination by toxic chemicals from 3M plants has been in the news for five years. However, the tests on which the NYT data are themselves four or five years old in some cases.