What's in Bowie, MD tap water?
Bowie runs its own water system for much of the city, and the rest is on WSSC Water, which serves Prince George's County from the Potomac and Patuxent rivers. EWG's testing of the city system flags chlorination byproducts and radium above health guidelines.
City of Bowie water quality report, explained
What City of Bowie's own test results show for Bowie, compared with EWG's health guidelines. Every result here is within EPA legal limits.
Surrounding county addresses
WSSC Water
Potomac River + Patuxent River
Bowie itself is on its own treatment plant — see above. Addresses just outside the city line are on WSSC Water.
11
over guideline
Zip codes covered: 20715, 20716, 20720, 20721 and surrounding Bowieareas. “× over” compares the detected level to EWG's health guideline, not the federal legal limit.
Measured by the EPA · Bowie, MD
Bowie, MD runs its own water system — and it has not been tested for PFAS.
Bowie draws its water from the ground rather than from a river, through a small system serving about 31,000 people. Well water arrives with whatever the rock it sat in put into it, and small systems test less often than large ones.
Groundwater does not carry the chlorination byproducts that dominate river supplies, because it needs far less disinfection. What it carries instead comes out of the rock: arsenic, radium, manganese, and nitrate where there is farming above the aquifer. Boiling concentrates all of them rather than removing them.
Belair-Bowie Water Treatment was not part of the EPA's most recent national PFAS monitoring round, so there is no federal PFAS result for it. Nobody has looked, which is not the same as nothing being there. No lead or copper results appear in EPA's published record for this system. It has no violations on file.
Belair-Bowie Water Treatment, on the EPA's record
- Source
- groundwater
- People served
- 31,000
Source: EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System record for Belair-Bowie Water Treatment (PWSID MD0000710). Systems outside the UCMR5 sample are not required to test for PFAS.
4 contaminants above EWG's health guidelines
Everything EWG found above its guideline in Bowie's water, from testing in 2013-2024. A level can be under the legal limit and still be listed here: EWG's guidelines are set to protect health, not to be easy to meet.
| Contaminant | In this water | EWG guideline | Times over |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total trihalomethanes (TTHMs) | 4.85 ppb | 0.15 ppb | 32× |
| Haloacetic acids (HAA9) | 1.13 ppb | 0.06 ppb | 19× |
| Radium, combined (-226 and -228) | 0.70 pCi/L | 0.05 pCi/L | 14× |
| Haloacetic acids (HAA5) | 0.717 ppb | 0.1 ppb | 7.2× |
Source: EWG Tap Water Database, City of Bowie (MD0160002).
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Bowie water quality FAQ
Is Bowie, MD tap water safe to drink?
Water from City of Bowie meets all federal EPA legal limits. However, independent EWG testing finds 4 contaminants above its stricter health-based guidelines, including total trihalomethanes (TTHMs) and haloacetic acids (HAA9). Legal compliance and health-optimal water are not the same thing.
What contaminants are in Bowie water?
The most notable contaminants above EWG health guidelines are total trihalomethanes (TTHMs), haloacetic acids (HAA9), radium, combined (-226 and -228) and haloacetic acids (HAA5). These are largely disinfection byproducts and trace metals common to the region's water sources.
Does a reverse osmosis system remove these contaminants?
Yes. A reverse osmosis system like the Sanavia Hydra uses a 0.0001-micron membrane plus multi-stage carbon filtration to reduce every contaminant class detected in Bowie water, at your tap, regardless of what the utility does upstream.
The contaminants flagged in Bowie water
Plain-English guides to what WSSC Watertesting turns up above EWG's health guidelines — what each one is, and what actually removes it.
Reverse osmosis in Bowie, MD
WSSC Water treats this water to the federal standard, yet the contaminants listed above still exceed EWG’s stricter health guidelines — Haloacetic acids (HAA9), Haloacetic acids (HAA5), Total trihalomethanes (TTHMs) and 8 more. Most of them either pass straight through treatment or form after the plant, in the pipes between it and the tap, which is why the fix has to be at the tap as well.
Trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids are not in the river — they form in the pipes, after treatment, when chlorine meets the organic matter it is there to deal with. That is why they are worst at the far end of a distribution network, and why filtering at the tap catches them where testing at the plant cannot.
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