Transparent interpretation
How Utah Water Quality works
Rails owns source ingestion, geography, status meaning, provenance, and indexability. Astro turns those reviewed backend facts into substantive, accessible static pages.
How are city and ZIP providers matched?
Rails intersects official Utah place geometry with public water-system service-area geometry. Every plausible overlap is retained. City and ZIP boundaries are not utility boundaries, and modeled EPA areas are estimates.
The frontend uses the backend-provided canonical route, relationship code, boundary source, confidence, and any publishable area-overlap ratio without converting that ratio into a customer share or household probability.
What does a reported status mean?
Status labels come from the backend and describe the latest imported regulatory records. “No reported open violations” is never translated into “safe,” “clean,” “good,” or “pass.” Advisories remain separate and visually outrank routine status.
Why is there no water-quality score?
Different rules use different compliance methods, units, monitoring periods, and action levels. A single score would erase those distinctions. The site keeps measurements, standards, compliance text, reports, and source timing visible.
Where can I see source freshness?
The public data-status page shows backend source checks, successful imports, authorities, and refresh cadences.