Montgomery County Water Report

Montgomery County's drinking water earned a C grade, scoring 55.1 out of 100. Over the past five years, EPA SDWIS records 36 health-based violations — a pattern that public water utilities are required to disclose and correct.

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 24.3% of assessed waterways carry an impairment designation (17 of 70 water bodies) across Montgomery County's watersheds. The leading impairment causes are sedimentation/siltation and nitrate/nitrite (nitrite + nitrate as n). 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 2026-05-14T13:30:00.000-05:00) puts RED RIVER at 229.0 cfs — well below its long-term average at 16% 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. Montgomery County has moderate coverage with 39 active monitoring sites with 5,601 recent measurements on record. Predominant monitoring categories include physical and inorganics, minor, metals. 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.