As substituted by the Committee on Natural Resources and amended on the Floor. As Guam's population and economy continue to grow, the Island must develop new sources and improve existing sources of drinking water.
Important deficiencies remain, however.
In particular, there is no standard for collecting and interpreting geologic data on new wells drilled on Guam. Such data are crucial for locating new sources of fresh water and for determining where the fresh-water lens is vulnerable to contamination by salt water or surface contaminants. The most important deficiency, however, is that Guam has no permanent program in place to consolidate and preserve the data that are being collected so that they can be readily retrieved to support local scientific and engineering analyses, or other needs of local decision-makers and citizens for timely information on Guam's water resources. Data collected by the USGS are currently archived in Hawaii or on the Mainland. Data collected by local agencies currently accumulate in various repositories without being systematically cataloged or archived so that potential users can find it when they need it, or even determine what data are available.