Using an AI assistant with this site

You can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or any other AI assistant about a water system in Mississippi and have it read the records here to answer you. Here is how, and how to tell whether the answer is real.

The short version

Paste this into your assistant, then ask your question in your own words:

Use the drinking water records at https://alpha.dww-next.mswater.us — read https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/llms.txt first. Cite the page you used.

Then ask something like who supplies the water in Olive Branch, and where does it come from? — and open the link it gives you.

How it works

Give your assistant the address

Assistants answer better when they are told where to look. Without an address, an assistant answers about Mississippi water from whatever it absorbed during training or finds on the open web — often a third-party copy of a federal extract that is months or years behind the agency's own record.
Ask in ordinary words

You do not need the system's ID number. The water company in Olive Branch or a county name is enough — the site can be searched by name, number or county, and your assistant will do that search for you.
Ask for the link, and open it

Every answer should come with a link to a page on this site. Open it. The page is the record; the assistant's summary of it is not. If it cannot give you a link, treat the answer as something it made up — because it probably is.

Questions that work well

A water system's record describes a utility — who runs it, where its water comes from, how many people it reaches, what the agency has recorded about it. Anything in that description can be asked about:

Which public water systems serve DeSoto County, and which is the largest?
Where does the water in Olive Branch come from?
How many people does that system serve, and through how many connections?
Does this system buy any of its water from another system?
Is this system still active, and who is listed as the contact?
What has the agency recorded about this system, and when?

What was measured in the water

Sample results are here too. These work:

What analytes have ever been detected in Olive Branch’s water, and when?
What were the most recent coliform results for this system?
What lead and copper summaries are on record, and for which monitoring periods?
What has this system been tested for, and how often?

This site publishes no verdict on whether a result is safe. Where the agency records a designated level for a facility and an analyte, this site shows it as the agency’s own record — named as a maximum, a minimum or an average — and that is a fact about what was designated, not a judgement about a result. Whether a result breaks a drinking-water standard is the agency’s determination and it is recorded separately. An assistant that calls a number safe or unsafe has gone past what this site says — ask it which page the judgement came from.

Four questions to ask the assistant back

Assistants are fluent about records they have half-read. These four follow-ups catch nearly everything that goes wrong.

“Which page did you get that from?” A confident answer with no link behind it is the most common failure there is, and it does not look like one.
“When did that happen?” Much of what is on these records is years or decades old. Without its date, an old entry sounds like today.
“Which reading is that number?” Each count on these pages says what it counts in the words beside it — a water source reading “n active of m on record” is two counts of sources, not one. Quote the number with its words.
“Is it not there, or is it not published here?” Those look identical to an assistant, and only the first is a fact about the agency’s records. It can check: the service publishes its own limits.

One warning worth carrying over from the record itself. Codes on these pages describe the record — what the agency wrote down — not the condition of the water, and not whether anything was put right. The help text published with these pages puts it this way:

Please note: some of these violations may have been resolved and/or returned to compliance.

If something is wrong with your water

If you think there is something wrong with your water right now, do not ask an assistant. Contact your water system or the Mississippi State Department of Health directly.

What is served here, what the agency publishes that is not here yet, and what nobody publishes are all listed at https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/coverage. Records not yet carried here remain on the agency's current Drinking Water Watch.

If you are building something

Every page on this site that shows records has a JSON twin, and each page names its own — in a Link header and a <link rel="alternate">, so a client can find it without guessing. This page is not one of them: it is guidance rather than a record, and the machine-readable counterpart to it is the llms.txt linked at the top. For the City of Olive Branch record:

The page: https://alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/water-systems/MS0170015
The JSON: https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/v1/water-systems/MS0170015

Nothing negotiates on Accept. Each host serves one representation and advertises the other, so follow the link rather than rewriting the address.

https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/ — the front door: what the service is, its limits, and where everything else lives.
https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/llms.txt — the same thing in prose, written for a model's context.
https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/openapi/index.json — every endpoint in one line each, so you can fetch only the part you need.
https://api.alpha.dww-next.mswater.us/coverage — what is served, and the two different kinds of absence.

There is no API key, no registration and no rate limit to apply for. It is a public record.