MICHAEL PHILLIS, TRAVIS LOLLER and M.K. WILDEMAN Associated Press
More than 50 years after the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed to assure Americans of safe water, millions of people living in mobile home parks can't always count on those basic protections.
The Associated Press looked at an Environmental Protection Agency database on violations by water systems across the country, ranging from the tiniest up to major metropolitan areas. AP also surveyed states for their oversight of water systems.
Here's a look at key findings from the AP report:
Violation rates
Almost 70% of mobile home parks that run their own water systems violated safe drinking water rules over the past five years. That's well above the rate for cities (48%) and larger towns (57%), according to EPA data.
The U.S. has about 50,000 water utilities, most serving small towns and rural areas. Many struggle to find expert staff and funding, and they violate clean water rules more often than the handful of large utilities that serve cities. But even among the hard-pressed small utilities, mobile home parks stand out.
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The AP analysis found that more than half of these parks failed to perform a required test for at least one contaminant or failed to properly report the results, in the past five years. They are far more likely to be repeat offenders of safe drinking water rules overall.
Some go unmonitored
The problems could go beyond what the figures show. Some parks don't appear in EPA's database at all and might go completely unregulated.
For example, EPA officials investigated high levels of cancer-causing arsenic in tap water at a Southern California mobile home park in 2021 when they realized there were several others in the area that weren't in their records, said Amy Miller, a former EPA head of enforcement in the region.
Some were found to have high levels of arsenic that residents drank for years.
It's impossible to know how many under-the-radar parks there are. Most states aren't actively looking for them and say they don't find very many.
There's another way that problems with mobile home park water can escape attention. Some mobile home parks get their water from an outside source -- a nearby town, for example. That water can be safe when it reaches the park boundary but become contaminated if the park has substandard or poorly installed piping.
Jake Freeman, the engineering director at Central States Water Resources, a Missouri-based private utility company that specializes in taking over small water systems in 11 states, said substandard and poorly installed pipes are more common to see in mobile home parks.
"A lot of times, it's hard to find the piping in the mobile home parks because if there's any kind of obstruction, they just go around it," he said. "It's like spaghetti laying in the ground."
The EPA doesn't generally track water once it's on private property, so those problems can go unseen.
"If you look back at the history of the Safe Drinking Water Act, like in the '70s when they were starting, it was, 'Well, as long as the source ... is protected, then by the time it gets to the tap, it'll be fine.' And that's just not how it works," said Colt Smith of Utah's Division of Drinking Water.
It may not be easy to escape bad water
Bad water isn't always unsafe. Residents of mobile home parks in Michigan, Iowa and elsewhere reported taps that frequently ran dry or problems with discolored water that looked like coffee or tea, stained their laundry and made them fearful to open their mouths in the shower, for example.
If residents are unhappy with management's response to such problems, it can be difficult to leave. That's because "mobile" homes aren't all that mobile. Residents often own the homes but rent the land they sit on, and it's difficult and expensive to move them.
Esther Sullivan, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, calls residents "halfway homeowners" because of this dynamic. She said they often put up with problems because of the difficulty in moving.
Almost 17 million people in the U.S. live in mobile homes.
Some states act
Utah is the rare state that enforces safe drinking water standards even within parks that get their water from another provider, according to AP's survey of states.
Colorado passed a law in 2023 that requires testing the water in every mobile home park. It gives health officials the ability to go beyond federal law to address taste, color and smell that can make people afraid to drink their water, even when it's not a health risk.
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