Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [80]
Making matters worse, the warmer the weather, the more water we all use. Richard Lamming of the British Soft Drinks Association quantified the uptick: “For every degree the temperature rises above fourteen C [57.2 Fahrenheit], sales of water increase by 5.2 percent. This means that at twenty-eight C [82.4 Fahrenheit] sales of water double.”
Our government might be able to do something about the weather; it certainly has the power to protect watersheds and help cities and towns maintain infrastructure. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. The Bush administration has scaled back enforcement of the Clean Water Act, which keeps waterways fishable and swimmable. It has failed to adequately fund basic maintenance projects, such as repairing or upgrading hundred-year-old water mains. The EPA, on Bush’s watch, declined to set and enforce limits for dozens of industrial contaminants. In 1995, Congress let the Superfund tax lapse, leaving the EPA struggling to address cleanup needs today. In 2006, Bush rolled back the Toxics Release Inventory: now industries report less frequently on the contaminants they release to the environment. Without substantial change, the forecast for tap water looks bad. And the forecast for bottled water, as pristine sources grow scarce and private companies gain control of those that remain, looks good.
Renting a house in rural Dutchess County, New York, I glimpse the future when our taps, one night, yield nothing. We’d come home late and headed upstairs to brush our teeth, but the pump, apparently, wasn’t working. One five-hour plumber visit later, and we learn it’s not the electrical system, it’s the well: gone dry. Suddenly, all my water research is eerily relevant. The plumber returns and together we try, unsuccessfully, to drop a line 460 feet into the well to see if we can hit water. “Don’t you have a transducer?” I ask, thinking of Rich Fortin’s magic bob.
Next comes a pump test—performed by a guy with a hose, a scrap of paper, and a pencil stub—which reveals a recharge rate of just 7.8 gallons an hour. (A half-inch garden hose, under normal water pressure, can go through more than five hundred gallons an hour.) Where did all the water go? Hard to say. We repair a leaky toilet, then we learn a springwater company is operating a few miles away. Of course I wonder if it’s affecting our water supply, but there’s no way to know: the county has done limited groundwater mapping, every well on our road is a different depth, some wells have already been moved or drilled deeper. It looks as if our landlord will have to do this too. I buy two gallons of locally sourced springwater, suffer some minor tummy trouble, and take sponge baths using water collected by the basement dehumidifier. It’s fun for a while—a little like camping. But the novelty doesn’t last. In another week the rental is over, and the problem becomes someone else’s.
In another few weeks, my water issue is quality, not quantity. We visit friends in rural Long Island. No one in the house, a summer rental, drinks from the tap: some don’t like the taste of the well water, some are scared of contamination from the gasoline additive MTBE, a persistent problem in Long Island aquifers, and from surrounding grape and sod farms, which use a lot of fertilizer and herbicides. Corporate Accountability International claims that misleading marketing of bottled water as the only place to get a safe drink has undermined the public’s confidence in tap. In this instance, however, knowledge of our environment has worked this trick all on its own: in the pantry are a 2.5-gallon jug of Deer Park, a 2.5-gallon jug of Poland Spring, a liter of Perrier, and a couple of bottles