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The Safe Water Project is a team of volunteers at Code for Boston who are using data modeling and machine learning to predict the presence of hazardous drinking and surface water contaminants in the United States. Our goals are to identify at-risk communities, hazards and risks posed by water contaminantion, and health concerns related to contamination of drinking water.

We are interested in collaborating with health and environmental organizations.

Representatives for nonprofit organizations and government agencies interested in our work should contact Andrew at [email protected]. Please feel free to also join our Slack channel at Code for Boston and meet the team.

Our Work

Institutional Partners

The Safe Water Project works with two Boston-based community partners: the Charles River Watershed Association and the PFAS Project at Northeastern University. These organizations have lots of needs related to data and data science, and we provide our expertise in assisting them.

Exploration of EPA Data

We are interested in data that helps identify hazardous drinking water. Our analyses primarily utilize the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) as our violations data; this data contains information about drinking water violations for public water systems across the United States. In addition to SDWIS, we are interested in any data that may help better predict drinking water violations when combined with violations data, such as rainfall data and demographic data.

Most volunteers work in python with pandas. Some volunteers also use R.

Project Materials and Communications

• Slack channel: #water
  • Join Code for Boston's Slack Workplace
• Project Board
• Google Drive - Notes and Research

Join Us

If you are interested in volunteering for the Safe Drinking Water Project:

• Join the Slack. The #water channel has various pinned items that will be of use for getting started.

• Read the docs. The docs/ folder contains more information about the project, plus steps on how to set up the project so you can start contributing. Click here for the docs.

• Meet us on Tuesday nights. We would love to meet you! We meet alongside other Code for Boston teams every Tuesday in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Sign up to attend Code for Boston events here.