It seems that stories of water are everywhere. Thousands have just died in Burma, many of them essentially washed away in a deluge of floodwater. Thousands more will now almost certainly die for lack of safe drinking water.
Those of us in the pampered developed world take our supply of water completely for granted. We turn on our taps and generally expect what comes out to be drinkable. We water our lawns and even flush our toilets with the same precious stuff. We seldom think of what goes down our kitchen or bathroom drains, and the effect it has on water supply. One treatment with a lindane based lice treatment (easily available in Canada) poisons 22,000,000 litres of drinking water, in spite of the fact that headlice don't really do all that much harm and can be treated in other, much safer ways. Clever new nanotechnology designed to decrease foot odour (the bane of civilized life, one must think) will kill off aquatic ecosystems.
I spent a few minutes on the weekend sitting down with one of my neighbours, a retired land surveyor for the city, talking water. The water to my house, it turns out, is at the very end of a long supply line which originates at five large wells located about 5 km from here. In 2004, the wells were temporarily closed because of the discovery of high levels of 1,4 dioxane -- an industrial solvent that causes eye and lung irritation, nervous system and kidney damage, and cancer. What's especially interesting is that my water supply is on what is called a "stump" meaning that the pipes that come to my house are just beyond the last fire hydrant in the supply line before the pipe ends. This means that when the pipes are flushed to clean them out, my "stump" is left out of the equation.
What astonishes me the most about all of this is that I knew nothing of it until this weekend, when I learned of the city's plan to replace our water mains next summer (though I imagine that we will still be on a "stump" we will at least then have lead-free pipes), I knew nothing at all of where my household water came from and assumed that it was completely safe.
Many of us are becoming more careful about food - reading labels, considering the geographic origins of our food, reducing the oil cost of nutrition whenever we can. But water, because it looks more or less the same everywhere and because the taste differences from place to place are (hopefully) only subtle, is easier to consider a placeless commodity.
But it's not.
How does water get to your home?
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