When Hurricane Helene swept through Asheville, North Carolina, the storm took roads, electricity, homes, and lives. Even after the floodwaters receded and recovery was weeks underway, Asheville residents still lacked access to our most essential resource: clean drinking water. 

When running water returned to taps, residents still had to boil water and buy plastic bottles for drinking and cooking. Helene had dumped massive amounts of dirt into the reservoir that the city draws on for water, overwhelming filtration systems. 

With a growing climate crisis and aging infrastructure, we can expect even more crises like this. Right now, millions of people in the U.S. are at risk of losing access to clean drinking water during a flood. To defend our access to safe, clean water, we need to stop climate-wrecking pollution and invest in our nation’s infrastructure.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is working toward the complete opposite. Its unfettered support for oil and gas will supercharge floods, while its defunding agenda will leave our water systems in greater peril.

Trump’s latest defunding scheme — through the annual spending bill currently moving through Congress — would yank billions of urgently needed dollars from our nation’s water infrastructure. 

How Flooding Threatens Essential Water Infrastructure

Our water infrastructure covers everything from the treatment plants that clean our drinking water and process our wastewater, to the pipes that carry clean drinking water into our homes and sewage out, to the vast network of stormwater drains designed to divert water and reduce flooding. All of this is threatened during massive floods. 

This past February, heavy rainfalls in Kentucky hit the state’s water and wastewater systems hard. The storms left more than 17,000 people without water and more than 28,000 under boil water advisories. Dozens of drinking water and wastewater systems were left operating at limited capacity. Some Kentuckyans couldn’t get water from their taps nearly two weeks after the storm.

Multiple issues can contribute to crises like this. Storms and floods can knock out the electricity that our systems rely on. They can also damage pipes, pumps, valves, and other equipment, and destroy roads, blocking repair crews. In Asheville, Helene’s flooding washed away major pipes that brought water from treatment plants to the rest of the system. The storm also damaged 1,000 miles of smaller pipes carrying water throughout the city.

At the same time, storms can also push pollution into water sources, from human and animal waste to industrial chemicals to fertilizer runoff. This is especially dangerous for the 43 million people in the U.S. who aren’t connected to municipal water systems and instead draw water from private wells, which aren’t monitored and regulated by federal agencies.

After Hurricane Helene, E. coli and coliform bacteria contaminated 40% of private wells tested. And back in 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded dozens of factory farms and their manure lagoons, releasing millions of gallons of raw sewage into North Carolina waterways. Wells there also saw major spikes in E. coli and fecal matter contamination.

Florida Water Systems Face the Highest Risk

Right now, flooding threatens to take clean water from millions of people across the country. We mapped high-flood-risk land served by large community water systems (serving over 100,000 residents) in the U.S and found that 15 large water systems have over half of their service area in “high-risk”¹per FEMA, which labels an area “high-risk” when it has a 26% chance of flooding over the span of a 30-year mortgage flood zones. These highest-risk water systems provide drinking water to more than 5 million people.

Five of these systems are in New Jersey, Louisiana, and Massachusetts. Massachusetts Water Resources Authority in Boston, MA alone serves 2.5 million people, with almost 70% of its service area deemed high-risk for flooding. The rest are in Florida, with 1.8 million Floridians relying on these 10 systems for safe drinking water.

The Sunshine State is no stranger to devastating storms, hurricanes, and floods. Just last year, residents weathered Hurricanes Milton and Helene within days of each other. 

The region’s drinking water took major hits from these storms. During Milton, a water main break in St. Petersburg led officials to shut down water service for fear of contamination. With Helene’s high storm surges, the city shut off its sewer treatment plant and warned residents of potential sewage backups. 

Helene put 20 Florida counties under boil water notice; Hurricane Milton, 11. Even a week after Helene, Floridians in Bradenton still relied on bottled water after salty storm surges contaminated the city’s drinking water reservoir.

Milton, meanwhile, overpowered stormwater systems in its path. With typical rains, these systems can prevent flooding. However, officials emphasized that they were never designed for such extreme storms.

Trump Fuels Climate-Driven Flooding and Attacks Clean Water Funding

Our water systems already lack the resources needed to keep water both safe and affordable. Many are unprepared for our climate-changed world. The EPA has estimated that water and wastewater systems need $1.3 trillion just to comply with existing laws — never mind adapting to growing climate disasters.

Clean water takes investment. Asheville, NC officials say they knew what the town needed to prevent what happened to its water after Helene: a pre-filtration system that almost every U.S. water system already has. But the equipment costs nearly as much as the entire city’s budget. 

Because of this, federal support is essential to ensure clean, affordable water for all. Without that support, local utilities must cover the cost themselves and pass those costs onto ratepayers, which means higher water bills.

Yet, amid this growing crisis, Trump is hellbent on making things even worse. He’s lavished handouts on the very corporations driving the climate crisis that is worsening the number and intensity of floods. He has torn down regulations on the fossil fuel industry, ordered agencies to fast-track new fossil fuel projects, and mandated more oil and gas leases on public lands and waters.

At the same time, Trump has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, the main federal regulator and defender of clean water. He has also proposed eliminating the EPA’s State Revolving Funds, the primary source of federal funding to water and wastewater infrastructure. Meanwhile, his cronies in Congress are pushing billions of dollars in cuts to the State Revolving Funds through this year’s annual spending bill.

Join Our Fight to Defend Our Water from Floods!

Right now, we have a critical opportunity to fight Trump’s agenda and defend our water as Congress negotiates the spending bill. The bill needs bipartisan support to pass, and seven Senate Democrats can stand strong against any deal that includes devastating cuts to clean water. 

Together, we can pressure these lawmakers to defend clean water funding (and block House Republicans’ sneaky backdoor scheme to claw back funds they might pass).

Long-term, though, we can’t just preserve existing funding. We need massive federal investments in our water infrastructure to prepare it for a climate-changed world. Without action, storms and floods will continue to threaten our water supplies. People will be forced to depend on expensive bottled water or simply go without during catastrophic events. 

With the WATER Act, reintroduced in Congress this year, we can ensure the funding we need. Moreover, the bill would safeguard this funding from annual spending battles and more threatened cuts.

We all need water to survive, and we all have a right to it. To ensure that right amidst bigger and bigger floods, we must invest in our water infrastructure. Without that funding, millions of people are at risk of losing their water during their next storm.