AQUELIA JOURNAL / OHIO
Ohio water quality: service lines and local records.
An inventory of service-line materials and a laboratory result provide different evidence. Ohio’s public records help put both in the right place.
What the inventory counts
Ohio EPA’s 2025 annual report records 3,496,212 service lines in the initial October 2024 inventory. Of these, 263,629 were classified as lead and 538,894 as unknown material. These figures count infrastructure categories. They do not count contaminated water samples or households with a measured exceedance.[1]
Move from the state to the local system
Drinking Water Watch allows searches by water-system name or number, county and source-water type, as well as by sample dates. That is the relevant next step for a particular locality: identify the system before interpreting the record.[2]
A separate window on PFAS
EPA’s UCMR 5 programme monitored 29 PFAS and lithium during 2023–2025; its final dataset was released in August 2026. The data finder can filter results by state and public water system. The number of substances monitored is the scope of the programme, not a count of substances found in an Ohio supply.[3]
What a statewide figure cannot answer
Ohio is a state with many supply networks. A statewide inventory cannot establish the quality of the water in a particular building. For a local assessment, keep infrastructure records, the supplier’s current report and the actual sampling results as separate pieces of evidence.
The key to reading it
Identify the local water system. A lead service-line count describes infrastructure; a water concentration requires an analytical result.
EVIDENCE YOU CAN CHECK
Sources and documents.
- 01
Ohio Environmental Protection Agency
Ohio EPA Annual Report · State Fiscal Year 2025p. 5 · Initial inventory / inventario inicial: October 2024 - 02
Ohio Environmental Protection Agency
Drinking Water WatchPublic supply-system records · Consulted: 2026-09-15 - 03
US Environmental Protection Agency
Occurrence Data from the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring RuleUCMR 5 · Samples 2023–2025 · Final dataset: August 2026
Sources consulted on September 15, 2026. Original writing and translation. Data is attributed to its publishers and does not establish the performance of Aquelia equipment.