Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [39]
No one likes the way chlorine tastes or smells (it’s detectable to the human nose at 1 milligram per liter), to say nothing of the hazards of transporting or working around deadly chlorine gas, but it seems to be a necessary evil in all surface-water drinking systems. (It’s easy to lose the smell: just let your water sit in a jug overnight or pour it back and forth between two containers ten times.) Before chlorine was understood to kill bacteria, people regularly got sick from drinking river and lake water. If they could afford it, they drank bottled groundwater; if they couldn’t, they boiled bad water or drank cheap spirits. The widespread use of chlorine in 1920—one of the most important advances in public health—dealt a near-lethal blow to sales of spring and mineral water in this country, but it set the stage for their comeback, based largely on snob appeal, sixty years later.
Finished with his measurements, Tiggy draws additional water samples and drives back to DEP headquarters, a looming office tower in Rego Park that’s clad in scaffolding and surrounded by a buzz of civil servants. On the sixth floor, he hands the day’s catch to a team of thirty chemists and microbiologists. It’s the micro lab’s job to find bacteria in the water. And it does—many different types, including the occasional E. coli, which is commonly found in the intestines of animals and humans. Most strains are harmless, but E. coli’s presence may indicate inadequate water treatment. If the chlorine is working, however—if it hasn’t been blocked by sediment in the water—those bacteria are dead or otherwise deactivated. Federal law allows the presence of live bacteria in up to 5 percent of samples; the city is consistently between 0.1 and 0.2 percent. In 2004, it was revealed that New York’s water also contained microscopic crustaceans called copepods, which are found in freshwater and pose no threat to human health. After excruciating debate, Talmudic scholars decided that observant Jews—forbidden by the Torah to consume creeping creatures without fins or scales—need not filter out copepods. But if they chose to filter anyway, doing so on the Sabbath would not violate the prohibition against work.
The copepod caper gave me—and no doubt others—pause. But not for long. In the back of our minds, most New Yorkers understand that we drink water in which fish have their version of sex andpine cones rot. The million-acre watershed doesn’t exist in an aseptic vacuum: people park oil-leaking cars around reservoirs, toilets flush into septic tanks that leach into ground-water, and ducks form floating rafts wherever they please. We deal with it. The city’s water is nearly pristine, Eric Goldstein, a drinking-water specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), says. In the world of drinking-water quality, pristine means there is no nuclear waste, no MBTE (a gasoline additive), rocket fuel, or landfill leachate in our water. The earth itself filters or neutralizes contaminants, and time is on our side: remember, it takes twelve long months for water to wend from the mountains to our taps.
While the microbiologists do their thing, the chemists check Tiggy’s samples for such substances as calcium, magnesium, sodium, nitrate, chloride, silver, iron, and zinc. All water contains some naturally occurring contaminants, such as arsenic or radon. At low levels,