Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [51]
While utilities are responsible for the condition of the water they deliver to your home, the service lines that bring water up to your taps, and the water-storage system in your building, are the responsibility of the landlord. It was common, up through the 1940s, to use lead service lines to connect city water mains to residential buildings. And lead solder was used to join pipes until the mideighties, when it was banned (outlaw plumbers, of course, might still have used it). Letting the water run for five minutes at the start of the day flushes lead, but it contradicts a lifetime’s public service messages to conserve water, and it seriously interferes with production of the morning’s first cup of coffee.
Nearly every week, a town or a school or an office building discovers high lead levels in its drinking water. Residents are advised to switch to alternative sources—including bottled water—until pipes can be replaced. (Boiling water doesn’t reduce lead content.) Other minerals and metals—such as calcium, magnesium, copper, and iron—can corrode and clog pipes with structures called tubercles that can snag passing microorganisms. Imagine the lungs of a TB patient, add a lot of orange, green, and red, and you get the picture: yuck. The image was driven home when I spoke to a gentleman hawking an innovative pipe-scrubbing-and-coating system. “I’ve seen some pipes so filled with gunk,” he said, “they’re only a quarter-inch wide”—a tenth of their original diameter.
“Do you drink your tap water?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? The last time they cleaned out the water tank on my roof they found dead pigeons in it.”
Dead animals aren’t good, but most bacteria aren’t bad. Of course, their habit of multiplying and making themselves at home in water infrastructure isn’t completely appetizing. In a lecture he gave in September of 2000, Bill Costerton, the biofilms researcher, warned, “Never pull the casing on your well and look at it because you have been drinking water that has been coming over a filthy-looking mess with all kinds of oscillating slime fibers and so on. The best bet so far . . . is to keep your biofilm healthy, don’t have it coming off, keep it well fed, don’t antagonize it, don’t hit [it] with any chlorine. But it is a ticklish situation when you think about it. There is something living down there and you have to keep it happy or it will do bad things for you.”
Among the things that can live in biofilms “down there,” according to Marc Edwards, a MacArthur award–winning civil engineer at Virginia Tech, are Legionella, which causes Legionnaires’ disease, and nontuberculous mycobacterium, which can cause pulmonary disease resembling tuberculosis, and other diseases. “Hot-water storage tanks and showerheads may permit the amplification of these bacteria,” Edwards writes.
To reach the holding tanks of New York City, upstate water runs through two massive tunnels. When chemists for the Department of Environmental Protection found biofilms in those conduits, their supervisors tried to suppress the report. “And so the chemists handed their reports to us,” Bill Wegner, watershed analyst for the environmental advocacy group Riverkeeper, tells me. Eventually, Wegner says, the biofilms will need remediation: “They’ll slough off, or they’ll choke the system.” Fortunately, the city is nearing the final stages of building a third water tunnel, an enormous (more than sixty miles long) and expensive (between $5.5 billion and $6 billion) undertaking that began with a dynamite blast in 1970. The opening of the third tunnel in 2012 will allow the inspection and repair of the other tunnels for the first time since they opened, one in 1917 and the other in 1935.
When I come home from long weekends away, I notice a thin brownish fog at the bottom of my Brita UltraMax, which holds a gallon of water and sits atop my fridge. I’d inherited the tank years ago and used it not out of fear (my attitude, until recently