Emily Kumpel

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Massachusetts Amherst

Measurements of household water consumption are extremely difficult in intermittent water supply (IWS) regimes in low- and middle-income countries, where water is delivered for short durations, taps are shared, metering is limited, and household storage infrastructure varies widely. Nonetheless, consumption estimates are necessary for utilities to...

Universal access to safe drinking water is prioritized in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Collecting reliable and actionable water quality information in low-resource settings, however, is challenging, and little is known about the correspondence between water quality data collected by local monitoring agencies and global frameworks fo...

Intermittent water supplies (IWS), in which water is provided through pipes for only limited durations, serve at least 300 million people around the world. However, providing water intermittently can compromise water quality in the distribution system. In IWS systems, the pipes do not supply water for periods of time, supply periods are shortened,...

Drinking water distribution systems throughout the world supply water intermittently, leaving pipes without pressure between supply cycles. Understanding the multiple mechanisms that affect contamination in these intermittent water supplies (IWS) can be used to develop strategies to improve water quality. To study these effects, we tested water qua...

Establishing and maintaining public water services in fragile states is a significant development challenge. In anticipation of water infrastructure investments, this study compares drinking water sources and quality between Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and Monrovia, Liberia, two cities recovering from political and economic instability. In both cities,...

Very small drinking water systems in the United States can face challenges in complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act, resulting in a need to improve existing infrastructure. This study applied a triple bottom-line approach to compare modeled health, environmental, and economic impacts of improving existing centralized water treatment systems to...

Intermittent water supply (IWS) is found in many parts of the world, especially in low- and middle-income regions, and is characterized by a loss of distribution system pressure, periods of stagnation, the intrusion of contaminants, repressurization of the piped system when service is resumed after a no-supply period, and the need for consumer wate...

Exposure to lead through drinking water is of concern for children, particularly at schools and early education and care facilities (EECFs), where they spend much of their time. We use lead and copper data from monitoring in schools and EECFs in Massachusetts (USA) and create risk indices based on the percentage of fixtures in a school above three...

Rainwater collection systems often include a first flush system to divert contaminants away from collected and stored rainwater. These have traditionally been designed for a set volume, to capture and divert the first 1–2 mL of rain deposited onto a roof. However, environmental and collection system parameters can vary the volume of the first flush...

Small drinking water systems in the United States often suffer from repeated Safe Drinking Water Act water quality violations that necessitate upgrades to the existing centralized systems to achieve compliance. Community water systems (CWSs) need to evaluate the tradeoffs between public health, environmental and economic impacts when choosing these...

We present a data-driven typology framework for understanding patterns in drinking water accessibility across low- and middle-income countries. Further, we obtain novel typology-specific insights regarding the relationships between possible explanatory variables and typology outcomes. First, we conducted exploratory factor analysis to obtain a smal...

This book brings together cutting-edge studies and reviews on the water-related health aspects of SARS-CoV-2, contributed by our research community. The contributions are related to the potential risk of waterborne COVID-19 transmission, household water uses, and hygiene during the pandemic, and surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. In Focu...

More than one billion people worldwide receive intermittent water supply (IWS), in which water is delivered through a pipe network for fewer than 24 h/day, limiting the quantity and accessibility of water. During the COVID-19 pandemic, stay-at-home orders and efforts to limit contact with others can affect water access for those with unreliable hom...

While the past decades have seen substantial gains in access to safe drinking water around the world, the challenge over the next 50 years will be to maintain and expand these gains. Ageing infrastructure, deferred maintenance and financial woes, combined with shifting demands and climate change, threaten the functioning and long-term sustainabilit...

Water sector reforms have assumed importance with water crisis becoming acute and drastically affecting availability to domestic, agriculture and industrial sectors. Inefficiencies observed in the distribution and management of drinking water backed up by inability of public sector to make huge investments has attracted private participation. User...

Water quality monitoring programs are developed to meet goals including attaining regulatory compliance, evaluating long-term environmental changes, or quantifying the impact of an emergency event. Methods for developing these programs often fail to address multiple aspects of development (hazard identification, parameter selection, monitoring loca...

Chloride exports from the widespread application of road salt serve as a primary contribution to water body salinity in cold climate regions. Road salt pollution is a concern in drinking water supplies due to the relationship between chloride concentration and water corrosivity. In the Northeastern U.S., researchers and water quality managers are i...

Most countries maintain regulatory requirements for testing of drinking water supplies to guide treatment procedures and ensure safe water delivery to consumers. It is unclear, however, if water quality data are always used effectively, particularly in low-resource settings. Efforts to improve the use of water quality data will benefit from a compr...

Drinking water suppliers around the world are required by regulations to sample and test water quality in their distribution systems with the intention of generating information that can be used to protect human health. Requirements for where samples must be collected can vary and guidance on how to select locations to meet these requirements are l...

Piped water supplies that deliver water only intermittently serve more than one billion people around the world. Measuring the continuity of these intermittent water supplies (IWS) is necessary for tracking utility performance and understanding the impact on consumers. We compared reporting of IWS continuity between utility benchmarking data on hou...

Sanitary inspection is used in low-, medium- and high-income settings to assess the risk of microbial contamination at water sources. However, the relationship between sanitary inspection and water quality is not well understood. We conducted a critical literature review and synthesized the findings of 25 studies comparing the results of sanitary i...

Intermittent piped water supply is common throughout urban India, but continuous, fully pressurized supply (“24x7 water”) is the Government of India service norm. We compare eight wards with intermittent water supply and eight wards that were upgraded to continuous supply in a demonstration project in Hubli-Dharwad, Karnataka. We employed a matched...

Despite recent progress extending access to drinking water supplies globally, ensuring long-term functionality of rural water infrastructure remains challenging. Past research on rural water project outcomes has used two principal approaches: large-N statistical studies estimating average effect sizes, or case studies providing causal description....

Intermittent piped water supply impacts at least one billion people around the globe. Given the environmental and public health implications of poor water supply, there is a strong practical need to understand how and why intermittent supply occurs, and what strategies may be used to move utilities towards the provision of continuous water supply....

This study investigated the effectiveness of Water Safety Plans (WSP) implemented in 99 water supply systems across 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. An impact assessment methodology including 36 indicators was developed based on a conceptual framework proposed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and before/after data were collected betw...

Background: Water quality testing is critical for guiding water safety management and ensuring public health. In many settings, however, water suppliers and surveillance agencies do not meet regulatory requirements for testing frequencies. This study examines the conditions that promote successful water quality monitoring in Africa, with the goal...

Current guidelines for testing drinking water quality recommend that the sampling rate, which is the number of samples tested for fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) per year, increases as the population served by the drinking water system increases. However, in low-resource settings, prevalence of contamination tends to be higher, potentially requiring...

In microbiological water quality testing, sample dechlorination with sodium thiosulfate is recommended to ensure that results accurately reflect the water quality at sample collection. Nevertheless, monitoring institutions in low-resource settings do not always dechlorinate samples, and there is limited research describing how this practice impacts...

Intermittent water supply (IWS) is prevalent throughout low and middle-income countries. IWS is associated with increased microbial contamination and potentially elevated risk of waterborne illness. We used existing datasets to estimate the population exposed to IWS, assess the probability of infection using quantitative microbial risk assessment,...

Microbial water quality monitoring is crucial for managing water resources and protecting public health. However, institutional testing activities in sub-Saharan Africa are currently limited. Because the economics of water quality testing are poorly understood, the extent to which cost may be a barrier to monitoring in different settings is unclear...

Information about the quality of rural drinking water sources can be used to manage their safety and mitigate risks to health. Sanitary surveys, which are observational checklists to assess hazards present at water sources, are simpler to conduct than microbial tests. We assessed whether sanitary survey results were associated with measured indicat...

Measurements of household water consumption are extremely difficult in intermittent water supply (IWS) regimes in low- and middle-income countries, where water is delivered for short durations, taps are shared, metering is limited, and household storage infrastructure varies widely. Nonetheless, consumption estimates are necessary for utilities to...

We compared dry and rainy season water sources and their quality in the urban region of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Representative sampling indicated that municipal water supplies represent < 1% of the water sources. Residents rely on privately constructed and maintained boreholes that are supplemented by commercially packaged bottled and sachet drinki...

Anthropogenic climate change will likely increase diarrhea rates for communities with inadequate water, sanitation or hygiene facilities including those with intermittent water supplies. Current approaches to study these impacts typically focus on the effect of temperature on all-cause diarrhea while excluding precipitation and diarrhea etiology wh...

Water quality information is important for guiding water safety management and preventing water-related diseases. To assess the current status of regulated water quality monitoring in sub-Saharan Africa, we evaluated testing programs for fecal contamination in 72 institutions (water suppliers and public health agencies) across 10 countries. Data we...

Intermittent delivery of piped water can lead to waterborne illness through contamination in the pipelines or during household storage, use of unsafe water sources during intermittencies, and limited water availability for hygiene. We assessed the association between continuous versus intermittent water supply and waterborne diseases, child mortali...

Water quality monitoring is important for identifying public health risks and ensuring water safety. However, even when water sources are tested, many institutions struggle to access data for immediate action or long-term decision-making. We analyzed water testing structures among 26 regulated water suppliers and public health surveillance agencies...

Supplying piped water intermittently is a common practice throughout the world that increases the risk of microbial contamination through multiple mechanisms. Converting an intermittent supply to a continuous supply has the potential to improve the quality of water delivered to consumers. To understand the effects of this upgrade on water quality,...

Haath Mein Sehat (HMS) is a student-led project bridging students from the US and India to improve health through community-based hygiene education and provision of safe water through point-of-use treatment in slums in Mumbai and Hubli, India. The activities of the organization directly link research to development practice. HMS has a volunteer-led...

Households around the world access water through an in-termittent piped water supply; however, delivery of water in these systems is often unpredictable, creating a bur-den for households waiting to collect water and utili-ties managing its distribution. We present NextDrop, a system that allows water operators to report information through existin...