Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [52]
“I’ve never seen that,” Sylvie Chavanne, research-and-development group manager for Brita, tells me when I phone. “But we don’t claim to remove iron.”
And then there is the spigot of the tank. Once or twice I’ve noticed a tiny vegetal blob just poking from its snout. Is it an oscillating slime fiber? Do I need to buy my own pig? Is my filter’s Schmutzdecke too schmutzy? When I remember, I clean the plastic spigot with a tiny brush, but the stainless steel pipes of Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring are starting to look better and better. Maybe taking personal responsibility for my water system isn’t such a great idea after all.
A lot can go wrong with your home’s plumbing, but even more goes wrong in the streets. Every year, according to the American Water Works Association, between 250,000 and 300,000 water mains break. Sometimes freezing and cracking damages pipes, sometimes construction workers are to blame. Ruptured pipes send geysers of filth into the sky, white water runs down the streets, and taps go dry. Any time a pipe breaks, pressure drops, and water managers contemplate the possibility of contaminants leaking into the system. Flooding, too, can swamp and contaminate water systems. Toward the end of 2006, severe storms stirred up so much sediment in Vancouver reservoirs that the city went on boil-water alert for more than a week. Fights broke out in stores over bottled water, Starbucks stopped serving drinks made with water, and hotels added more chlorine to their laundry to counteract the effects of silt as staff made the rounds of unoccupied rooms, flushing toilets to keep out brown water. Reaction to the inconvenience filled column after column in local newspapers. (Meanwhile, it’s big news in the developing world if you can open your tap and drink from it.)
Even more dramatic are giant sinkholes, which open to swallow repair trucks, innocent civilians, and homes. The problems are especially severe in the Northeast and in older industrial cities, which rely on cast-iron mains installed in the early 1900s. Global warming is expected to bring more of these record-busting, pipe-bursting storms to wet regions of the world. (And perversely withhold rainfall in drier regions.)
Unless cities invest more to repair and replace their water and sewer systems, the EPA warns, nearly half of them will, by 2020, be in poor, very poor, or “life elapsed” status. The bill to take care of the drinking-water part, to hell with the sewers, will run $390 billion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Where will this money come from? Federal funds for drinking water and wastewater treatment are at their lowest level in a decade. Between 2001 and 2006, allocations declined from $1.3 billion to less than $900 million. “The Bush administration wants to phase out the state revolving fund for water,” Nancy Stoner, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Clean Water Project, says. “They think it’s a state and local issue.” In 2003, the EPA estimated it would take nearly $277 billion to keep the nation’s water-distribution systems up to par over the following twenty years.
In the feds’ view, local utilities aren’t charging enough for water. The government has a point: of all the developed nations, the United States pays the lowest tap-water rates, an average of $2.50 per thousand gallons. Sure, the rain and snow fall for free, but storing, treating, and distributing it aren’t cheap, as just demonstrated.