California Water Data Hackathon

The Division of Data Sciences at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Institute for Data Science are hosting the California Water Data Hackathon to challenge students by finding innovative ways to increase community access to safe drinking water, understand vulnerabilities, and identify and deploy solutions. The California Water Data Hackathon is one of the efforts that is supporting the California Safe Drinking Water Data Challenge. On any given day in California, around 200,000 Californians turn on their taps and the water that comes out is unsafe to drink and may be unsafe to use for basic needs like bathing. Annually, up to 1 million Californians lack access to clean, safe drinking water at some point during the year. Droughts and other disruptions in water supply can limit or eliminate access to safe drinking water for days, months, or years. Some communities have been exposed to unsafe water for more than a decade. Small water systems and domestic well users are particularly vulnerable to disruptions in their access to safe drinking water. While the most publicized examples are in rural areas of the state, delivering sufficient, safe, and affordable drinking water poses a challenge to small systems and domestic well users in almost every region of the state. Many of the most vulnerable systems and domestic well users rely primarily on groundwater for their water supply. More details here about the challenge: http://waterchallenge.data.ca.gov/