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Vital for America's Drinking Water
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April 2026 4 min read

National forests supply drinking water to 124 million people in more than 3,400 communities. Roads are the single largest controllable source of forest sediment. Repealing the Roadless Rule puts both at risk.

Drinking Water for 124 Million Americans

The 2001 Roadless Rule is, among other things, a drinking-water policy. The 58 million acres it protects sit at the headwaters of rivers that feed municipal water supplies across two-thirds of the country. Repealing it would place those supplies — and the budgets of the cities that depend on them — directly in the path of new road construction.

How many Americans actually depend on national forest water?

The most rigorous public number comes from Dominick A. DellaSala's 2011 synthesis in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. Drawing on Sedell et al. (2000) and the Forest Service's own watershed inventories, DellaSala wrote:

In the 48 contiguous states, 15 to 18 percent of the nation's runoff is sourced from national forests, and roughly a third of that is derived from IRAs. Sedell et al. (2000) estimate that more than 3,400 communities in 33 states rely on national forest drinking water. Some of these communities are highly populous in Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, California and other states, so that modest number translates to at least 124 million people.

That figure — 124 million Americans — is more than double the "60 million" number that has circulated in advocacy materials for years. The undercount is one of the most persistent failures of the conversation about what the Roadless Rule actually does.

Major systems served wholly or in significant part by national forest watersheds include Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, plus hundreds of smaller communities in the Mountain West, Pacific Northwest, and Appalachia. Of the 354 municipal watersheds the Forest Service manages, the bulk include inventoried roadless area at the headwaters.

Roads are the dominant source of forest sediment

Roads do more than fragment habitat. They are the single largest controllable input of sediment into forest streams. Erosion rates from logging roads have been documented as much as 850% higher than from undisturbed forest soils. Sediment is the most common cause of impairment listed under the Clean Water Act for streams in forested watersheds.

That sediment doesn't disappear when it reaches the reservoir. It accumulates, displaces storage capacity, and forces drinking-water utilities to build, expand, or replace treatment infrastructure they otherwise would not need.

The infrastructure those forests have already saved

Two municipal case studies make the dollar figure concrete:

  • Salem, Oregon spent roughly $100 million on emergency water-treatment upgrades after sediment from logging-related disturbance contaminated its supply from the North Santiam watershed.
  • Seattle's decommissioning of approximately 300 miles of road in the Cedar River municipal watershed allowed the city to defer construction of an estimated $150 million filtration plant, because the watershed continued to deliver water clean enough to meet the EPA's filtration-avoidance criteria.

These are not isolated cases. They are illustrations of a national pattern. Forests upstream of treatment plants are infrastructure. Road construction in those forests is deferred infrastructure cost.

What the rescission would do

The Federal Register notice initiating the rescission contains no analysis of the watershed-protection cost of opening 58 million acres to new road construction and timber harvest. There is no estimate of the additional sediment load to municipal supplies, no estimate of the additional treatment costs that would fall on utility ratepayers, and no estimate of the long-term impact on water-quality compliance for systems that currently meet federal standards because their headwaters are intact.

That omission alone is a substantive defect in the rulemaking record. It is also the most concrete reason that mayors, water utility directors, and state drinking-water program managers are among the most consistent voices against the rescission.

The Roadless Rule is one of the cheapest, most effective drinking-water protections in federal law. Removing it does not just risk forests. It risks taps.

Sources

  • DellaSala, D. A. (2011). Roadless areas and clean water. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 66(3), 78A–79A. doi.org/10.2489/jswc.66.3.78A
  • Sedell, J., Sharpe, M., Apple, D. D., Copenhagen, M., & Furniss, M. (2000). Water and the Forest Service. USDA Forest Service, FS-660.
  • U.S. Government Accountability Office reports on Forest Service deferred maintenance and water-quality compliance.
  • DellaSala, D. A., Gorelik, S. R., & Walker, W. S. (2022). The Tongass National Forest: A natural climate solution of global significance. Land, 11(5), 717. doi.org/10.3390/land11050717
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