
				Pat Quinn, Governor

Agency Links

Info Centers

To report
environmental
emergencies
only, call the
Illinois Emergency
Management Agency
800-782-7860
217-782-7860
(24 hrs/day)

Environmental Progress - Summer 2003

Drinking Water Contaminant Monitoring Data Now Web Accessible

U.S.EPA site makes compliance information available for downloads

New web accessible tools referred to as "pivot tables" are now available at http://www.epa.gov/OGWDW/data/pivottables.html to obtain and download drinking water compliance monitoring data for public water supplies. The program has been developed by U.S. EPA's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water (OGWDW).

The web site requires MS Excel 97 or 2000. Detailed instructions are available for downloading, and summary instructions are included in each PivotTable. No prior knowledge of spreadsheets is required.

PivotTables® are multidimensional databases that provide online analytical processing. They enable users to quickly summarize, cross-tabulate, and analyze large amounts of data. Viewers can pivot, or rotate, rows and columns to see different summaries of the source data, filter the data, and drill-down to the details in the underlying source data.

For example, a user can easily find the number of systems reporting a certain type of violation, in a certain year, for a certain state. To see the data in context, viewers can compare the results to those of other states, or to other states in the same region. To look for trends it is possible to build a graph to compare the results across several years. To investigate an unusually high or low result, it makes it possible to see if the problem stems from a certain contaminant or rule, within a certain system type, size category, or primary source. By using the PivotTables described in these instructions, U.S. EPA assures users they "could probably perform this analysis in less than 15 minutes."