Pulaski County Water Report

Pulaski County earns an A grade for drinking water quality, scoring 86.0 out of 100. EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) records zero health-based violations over the past five years — a strong compliance signal for a heavily urbanized county.

Under the Clean Water Act §303(d), EPA ATTAINS tracks whether waterways meet quality standards for drinking, recreation, and aquatic life (reporting cycle: 2022). A notable 10.8% of assessed waterways carry an impairment designation (58 of 539 water bodies) across Pulaski County's watersheds. The leading impairment causes are dissolved oxygen - critical and ph. Impairment does not mean tap water is unsafe — it measures ambient waterway conditions upstream of treatment, not finished drinking water.

USGS NWIS gauge data (as of 2010-04-27T23:00:00.000-05:00) puts Arkansas River at 27.3k cfs — well below its long-term average at 48% of mean — low-flow conditions worth noting for water-dependent ecosystems. Streamflow is a leading indicator of drought stress, sediment load, and dilution capacity: low flows concentrate pollutants and warm water temperatures, stressing aquatic life and, in surface-water-dependent systems, the source water quality for treatment plants.

EPA's Water Quality Portal (WQP) aggregates monitoring data from federal, state, and tribal agencies. Pulaski County has moderate coverage with 41 active monitoring sites with 39,892 recent measurements on record. Predominant monitoring categories include physical and nutrient. More monitoring sites generally indicate greater scientific attention to local water conditions — and provide the baseline data that regulators use to set future impairment listings.