*2.1. Study Area*

The greater Roanoke area in western Virginia contains the city of Roanoke and the neighboring Roanoke and Botetourt counties. The urban and suburban area is home to roughly 227,000 people, the majority of whom are white (78%), lower-middle-class (median

income from \$41,483 in Roanoke City to \$64,733 in Botetourt County) citizens [48,49]. Approximately 50% of households in the area are customers of the local water utility. Since its formation in 2004, the water utility that provides public water for the greater Roanoke area has had a record of safe and timely drinking water delivery that meets both the utilities' and government's standards.

Because our study focused on the decision to drink municipal tap water in the context of threats to surface water sources, we limited our population to customers of the local water utility whose water was sourced from surface water reservoirs. We formed our sampling frame using publicly available addresses, cross-listing our data with the utility to exclude residents who sourced their home water from wells. After randomly selecting a sample of 800 residents from this list and removing eight due to invalid addresses, a sample of 792 residents remained. This sample required a 40% response rate (*n* = 385) to attain 95% confidence intervals and ±5% sampling error [50].
