Our Work
We help communities across the country build and sustain facilities to provide the highest quality water and wastewater services.
Disaster Preparedness
In 2017, Hurricane Irma set a dangerous course toward American Water’s Tampa desalination plant, which supplies about 10% of the drinking water for the Tampa Bay area. By the time the storm arrived, our emergency plans were in place and the plant experienced minimal damage. Our successful preparations for the worst potential outcomes freed our employees to aid in recovery efforts throughout the community.
That same year, as Hurricane Harvey barreled up the Gulf, the storm deluged a military base served by American Water with up to 20 inches of rain. American Water employees implemented emergency response plans and worked steadily to keep operations flowing without interruption.
American Water doesn’t let natural disasters stop us from fulfilling our mission to provide clean water to our customers. We invest millions of dollars a year on our system resiliency. During flooding events along the Mississippi River, American Water employees worked around the clock to continue providing water service to affected customers.
American Water doesn’t wait until disasters strike to prepare and respond. We regularly take proactive steps and preventative measures to ensure that our customers consistently receive the water they need. In Iowa, for example, American Water contributed to infrastructure resiliency through a capital project constructing a floodwall to mitigate the effects of hurricanes and rising water levels.
Leveraging Scale
When American Water partnered with residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania, to provide wastewater services, we used economies of scale to fund a mandatory environmental federal compliance project, pay off existing debt and spread new capital expenditures more equitably across the total customer base.
We are among the largest U.S. owner-operators of water desalination, as well as water recycling and reuse, with more than a dozen advanced facilities including a reverse osmosis plant in Tampa that generates more than 25 million gallons per day.
Innovation and Efficiency
Customers expect their water to be safe, clean, reliable and affordable. American Water’s rates across the country are 58% lower than the EPA’s water affordability index.
American Water continually investigates new substances and contaminants with state-of-the-art technologies to identify threats to our water supply, act on emerging regulations, respond to new health advisories and evaluate the benefits of alternative or advanced treatment technologies.
Lifting Up Communities
American Water strives to make sure that communities are better because we are there. Working with American Water means that communities and municipal leaders have the ability to focus on meeting the unique needs of their residents by allocating funding for community priorities, and that their customers have information about their water utility at their fingertips.
In Haddonfield, N.J., following the sale of the water and wastewater system, new American Water customers experienced better quality, improved reliability and lower rates in the long-term to the residents of the community.
Village wells in Ranson, Ill. were supplying poor quality drinking water and could not be utilized in the future without mitigation to eliminate high radium levels exceeding US EPA standards. Officials determined that selling the system to Illinois American Water would efficiently address water quality challenges and meet EPA requirements.
In order to address customer inquiries on American Water’s community efforts, American Water began brainstorming ideas on how to utilize geographic information system (GIS) tools to improve interdepartmental and customer communication of utility data. Now, American Water customers can view details about these infrastructure projects and other capital investments thanks to a new interactive map recently launched by American Water subsidiaries in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
American Water offers communities a range of opportunities all while offering a higher level of customer service and increased investment to allow for the delivery of safe, clean, affordable and reliable water and wastewater services.