Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [43]
I look at the basin where the carbon goes in. “What do you do with the atrazine once you filter it out?”
“We put it back in the river.” It will be the city of Boonville’s problem next.
A public road and a thin band of woods parallel the settling tanks. “We once had a deer in the tank,” Klender says. “It jumped over the fence and Rusty”—a large man with ranch experience, currently poking at a weir with a long tool—“lassoed him out.” Did you have to clean out the tanks?
“Nope.” Again, volume.
Colleen Newman, a public information officer who’s tagging along with Klender and me, remembers another intrusion. “A car went by and someone lobbed a small object into the secondary tanks. We had to shut them down for two days while we ran all the tests.”
“What was it?”
“A Baby Ruth bar.”
She says it so straight-faced, I don’t have the nerve to ask if she’s referencing the scene in Caddyshack where a Baby Ruth in a pool is mistaken for fecal matter.
Fouling a system this large isn’t something the waterworks frets about. “You’d need barges and barges of contaminants to affect the system,” Klender says. When I’d arrived this morning, a security guard stopped me; after I told him my name, he moved two plastic cones so I could drive in.
From the final basin, post-atrazine-treatment, operators add fluoride, then another polymer to bind bits of calcium carbonate to each other so they can be filtered. Next comes sodium hexametaphosphate, to halt that reaction: Klender wants to keep some lime in solution so it can coat distribution pipes, a prophylactic against the leaching of lead and other metals. And then it’s on to the grandly named filter gallery, where Kansas City’s drinking water drops slowly through forty-two inches of gravel, torpedo sand, and filter sand before coming to rest in multimillion-gallon underground reservoirs. The water is about to disappear from my view, so I take a good look at the filter area. As microbes and other debris collect atop the sand, which I can’t actually see, they form a thick layer that was called, years ago, a Schmutzdecke—German for “filth cover.” It sounds gross, but it’s essential for the filter to work properly. Like nothing else in the plant, I realize, the filtering process mimics, in a supercondensed time frame, the purifying processes of nature. It’s the same ecosystem service provided for free in such places as Fryeburg, Maine, by glacier-made beds of sand and gravel.
After four to eight hours in the underground reservoir, during which time the chloramines blossom to their fullest disinfecting power, Klender’s water is pumped north and south to Missourians up to forty miles away.
Before saying good-bye to my guides, I take a quick sip from an indoor fountain, serving possibly the freshest water (short of rain) in Kansas City. I think about all the trouble the utility takes to clean the Missouri River, and I wonder how many of its labors could have been avoided—with better land-use planning, better agricultural practices, and a lot more monitoring and enforcement upstream. After all, if the bad stuff didn’t go in, we wouldn’t have to take it out.
As I refill my water bottle for the road, I realize that what had once seemed so simple and natural, a drink of water, is neither. All my preconceptions about this most basic of beverages have been queered. Soon, they’ll be turned upside down.
Chapter 6
AFTERTASTE
ALMOST ALL U.S. communities with a public drinking-water supply are required by the EPA to publish annual consumer confidence, or “right to know,” reports. They contain a lot of technical language about microbial parameters and maximum contaminant levels and goals, and without an understanding of government rule-making—and excellent eyesight—it’s natural to assume that everything is fine. After all, 89.3 percent of the country’s nearly fifty-three thousand public water systems met or exceeded federal standards for health and safety in 2006. We haven’t had a major outbreak of waterborne illness in fifteen years, and you