Most Water Violations Get Fixed in 90 Days. These 183 Systems Have Been Broken for Over a Decade.

When a US water system breaks a health rule, it usually gets fixed fast. Across the ~62,000 systems on our map, the EPA lists 222,964 resolved health-based violations with a recorded fix date — the median took 90 days, and 9 in 10 were closed within six months.

Then there's the tail that never closes. As of the EPA's latest records, 427 systems carry a health-based violation that has been open for more than five years. For 183 of them it's been more than a decade. For 25, more than twenty years. The oldest date to January 1992 — a violation older than Google, still flagged unresolved today.

The oldest open health violations in America

System	State	Open since	Violation
Rio Embudo MDWCA	NM	Jan 1992	Surface Water Treatment Rule
La Jara Water Users Association	NM	Jan 1992	Surface Water Treatment Rule
Rose Lake Water Assn	ID	Jan 1992	Surface Water Treatment Rule
Crescent City	CA	Jan 1992	Surface Water Treatment Rule
Westchester Joint Water Works	NY	Jun 1993	Failure to Filter (SWTR)
Herkimer Village	NY	Jul 1993	Failure to Filter (SWTR)

These aren't paperwork slips. The Surface Water Treatment Rule exists because surface water — lakes, rivers, reservoirs — carries pathogens like Giardia and Cryptosporidium that filtration and disinfection are supposed to remove. "Failure to Filter" means exactly what it says.

And it isn't only tiny rural systems. Westchester Joint Water Works, which supplies suburban Westchester County, New York, has carried the same "Failure to Filter" violation since June 30, 1993 — 33 years of records, still listed as open. Herkimer Village in upstate New York has accumulated 19 separate open failure-to-filter violations, the first from July 1993 and fresh ones logged quarter after quarter through the end of 2025.

Where the never-fixed violations concentrate

Counting systems with a health-based violation open for more than five years:

Rank	State / territory	Systems	Long-open violations
1	Louisiana	85	186
2	Puerto Rico	76	76
3	West Virginia	36	59
4	New Mexico	32	96
5	Texas	22	33
6	California	21	31

Puerto Rico's place here is no surprise — more than half its systems carry an open health violation right now. But Louisiana tops this list outright, with 85 systems that have been out of compliance for over five years. When we ranked states by total open violations in June, the raw counts pointed at the big states; the stale violations point somewhere else — at the systems nobody has fixed in half a decade.

Ten of them are schools

Among the 183 systems broken for a decade or more, ten are schools or school districts that run their own water supply: Jamaica Village School in Vermont has carried a Lead and Copper Rule violation since October 1999, Berkshire Elementary School since the same month, Rau School District No. 21 in Montana since 2002, and Old Lewisboro Elementary School in New York since 2003. We looked at school water systems in depth in the school lead piece — these are the long-tail cases that never made it out of the backlog.

What "open" means here

Same definitions as every violations piece on this site. Health-based means the violation is tied to a rule the EPA wrote to protect health — a contaminant over its limit, or a required treatment step like filtration — not a reporting formality. Open means the EPA's own status field still reads Unaddressed or Addressed (not Resolved, not Archived) in the latest SDWIS records. Every count on this page comes from those federal records for the ~62,000 systems we map; the violation names come from EPA's own code definitions. Across all of them: 6,279 open health-based violations at 4,218 systems, of which 702 — about 1 in 9 — have been open for more than five years.

A decades-old open violation can mean different things in practice. Some systems are partway through a fix that takes real capital — for a surface-water system, ending a failure-to-filter violation can mean building a filtration plant from scratch. Some are small systems with no money and no operator. And some records may simply have never been updated after conditions changed. What they share: the EPA's own ledger says the rule is still being broken, and has said so for over ten years.

None of this covers microplastics. Every violation above is tied to a contaminant or treatment rule the EPA already enforces. Microplastics aren't regulated at all — a system with a 30-year-old filtration violation and a system with a spotless record are equally not required to test for plastic in the water. If you want that answer for your own tap, you have to get it yourself — a microplastics test kit does it at home in about 15 minutes.

Look up your own system

Every system named here — and every other US water system — is on the map, with its full EPA violation history: what's open, what's resolved, and how long each took. Start with New Mexico, Louisiana, or West Virginia, or search your own city.