Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [40]
When the chemists and microbiologists find contaminant levels above regulatory standards, they start investigations and sometimes issue boil-water alerts. Until upgrades were made in New York’s system, mercury from pressure gauges and seals got into the watershed; so did PCB-laden oil, from gears that open gates and sluiceways. In the late eighties, a high E. coli count led to the discovery that a shed on a reservoir’s edge had collapsed in a heavy rainstorm, dumping years’ worth of encrusted bird poop into the water. The shed was fixed, extra chlorine went in, and miles of monofilament were strung over the reservoir to keep the creatures from landing.
Tooling around the city’s watershed, in the company of civil servants responsible for its health, I see why our water tastes good. The DEP frightens migratory waterfowl off reservoirs, it fixes up homeowners’ septic tanks, it collaborates with dairy farmers to control manure runoff and protect stream banks. Most important, it is constantly trying to buy more land, to keep it from the hands of those who would pave and pollute.
But what about the water in cities that control none of their watershed, cities that drink from an enormous river system that serves hundreds of industrial and agricultural communities upstream? What is it like to drink that end product? I decide to visit Kansas City, where the public utility sucks from the Missouri River something that resembles chocolate Yoo-Hoo and turns it into water so good that national magazines shower it with awards and even the locals buy it in bottles.
All natural water has terroir, but the water of the Midwest may have a bit more than one might prefer. Pumped from the Missouri, the Mississippi, or any of the Mississippi’s many, many tributaries, the water of the heartland is redolent of industrial agriculture, feedlots, ethanol plants, and random industrial enterprises that happen to feed the world. There’s grandeur, of a sort, in every gallon. I raise a glass of the Missouri in Kansas City—crystal clear and odor-free—and imagine a beaming row of hardworking civil engineers, chemists, and microbiologists raising their own in salute.
The Kansas City Water Works lies hard by its muddy and meandering source, on the north side of town. Seen from the air, the seventy-acre campus is mostly water: in circular tanks, concrete sluiceways and flumes, and sufficient rectangular pools to cover the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Through massive pipes, the plant gulps the Missouri, which looks opaque and smells of muck and fish, and holds it for four hours in basins two stories deep. Operators add ferric sulfate and a cationic polymer, which have a positive charge, to neutralize the sediments’ electrical charge. The particles clump together and sink. The water’s cloudiness—or turbidity—starts to drop from as high as 10,000 NTUs (nephelometric turbidity units) to 50. “If we didn’t constantly rake out the sediment, the tank would fill up in a day,” Mike Klender, a stocky civil engineer who manages the plant, tells me as we gaze into an empty basin receiving its biannual power wash.
The water leaves the primary tanks in a flume, where potassium permanganate is added to counteract bad tastes and smells from, well, everything upstream. Then a disinfecting cocktail of chlorine and ammonia—called chloramine—is added, then lime, to soften the water and raise its pH, which helps particles coagulate and settle out. Now whitish gray, the water spends some time in softening basins, where organics and chemicals combine to form a froth of floaties, which look like clumps of sheep’s wool. The floaties contain viruses and bacteria. “They get bigger and bigger until they sink,” Klender says. Reconsidering his description,