If you have ever looked up your water system on a government database, or read a site that scraped one, you have probably seen a number like "123 violations" next to the name of the utility you drink from. It is an alarming way to present a number that mostly is not alarming.
We pulled the raw records to find out what is actually in them.
What we did
Every public water system in the United States has a federal identifier called a PWSID, and every violation filed against it lives in the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System. We queried that database for the 15 public systems serving Mobile and Baldwin County and read the category code on every record rather than counting rows.
The result:
- 819 violation records on file across the 15 systems
- 2 of them are health-based
- The other 817 are monitoring-and-reporting failures
That is 99.8% paperwork. Two records in the entire two-county set involved a contaminant limit actually being exceeded.
The distinction the word hides
SDWA violations carry a category code, and the codes mean genuinely different things:
- MR — monitoring and reporting. A required sample was not collected on schedule, or a report was filed late, or a notice was not distributed on time. Nothing about the water is asserted.
- MCL — Maximum Contaminant Level. A measured level exceeded the legal limit. This is about the water.
- MRDL — the same idea for disinfectant residual.
- TT — a required treatment technique was not followed.
Only the last three describe the water. The EPA flags them separately with a health-based indicator, which is how we counted them.
A utility with an excellent treatment record and a thin administrative staff can accumulate dozens of MR records. A utility with a genuine contamination problem might have two. Counted as "violations", the first looks fifty times worse.
What it looks like locally
The highest count in the two counties belongs to South Alabama Utilities: 123 records, spanning 2016 to 2023, none of them health-based. Every one is a monitoring or reporting failure. North Baldwin Utilities has 122 on the same pattern. Robertsdale has 101, Orange Beach 99.
Meanwhile Gulf Shores Utilities and the Town of Loxley have zero violations of any kind — not zero health-based, zero records at all.
If you ranked these systems by their violation count, you would rank them almost entirely by how punctually their staff file paperwork.
Where it does matter
None of this means the records are worthless. Two things in them are worth your attention:
Health-based violations, when they exist. They are rare here and they are specific. They tell you a limit was exceeded, when, and for what.
Unresolved records. SDWIS carries a return-to-compliance date, and 244 of the 819 records have none. That does not mean the problem is ongoing — records lag, and an old late report may simply never have been closed out — but it is a much better question to ask your utility than "why do you have 123 violations."
What this changes for you
Honestly, not much about your water. It changes what you should do with a number someone shows you.
A violation count is a measure of administrative punctuality with a health-sounding name attached. If you want to know what is in the water at your house, the record cannot tell you — it describes the system, and averages across a whole distribution network at that. Pipe material, plumbing age and distance from the plant all change what arrives at your tap.
We publish the compliance record for every water system in Mobile and Baldwin County, split into health-based and paperwork, with the PWSID and a link to the EPA source on each one so you can check our arithmetic. And if you would rather skip the averages entirely, a free in-home test reads your own tap.
Figures pulled from EPA SDWIS on 19 August 2026 for the 15 public water systems serving cities in our coverage area. Counts change as records are filed and closed; the per-system pages carry the PWSID so you can verify the current number yourself.