Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [88]
So what do you drink?
“You’ve got to go with what you’ve got.” Tap, in other words.
Do you filter?
“I do the right thing,” she says, which I take to mean yes.
By this point I’ve spoken to enough scientists and environmental experts to believe my countertop Brita is giving me more psychological than physical benefit, and that anyone with good reason to be suspicious of her tap water should invest in a point-of-use filter—the kind of gizmo you install on your faucet or under your sink. (Of pour-through filters, Levin says, “If there’s nothing to filter out of your water, they are fine.”) But not everyone is at high risk of illness, not everyone can afford a point-of-use filter and its maintenance (if they’re not changed regularly, filters can put contaminants into water), and the money might better be spent on other preventive health measures.
To smooth out equity issues (under-the-sink filters can cost a couple hundred dollars to buy and plumb), Robert D. Morris, the epidemiologist, suggests that utilities help pay for, install, and maintain point-of-use devices. In that way, water utilities could have confidence, he writes in The Blue Death, “that occasional occurrences of accidental, incidental, or intentional contamination would have little if any consequence.” What would that cost? I ask him. “About a third of the utility’s annual cost,” he says, “but it’s onetime only. You’d amortize that cost, and you’d recycle the filters. There are economies of scale in buying a lot of them. But, yes, the consumer will ultimately pay for it.”
All these caveats beg the question: how do I know if I should be suspicious of my water? The EPA says, “Read your annual water report.” But these documents—written by the utility—can be flawed, and some are essentially propaganda. (And again, they say nothing about the condition of your pipes.) They report yearly averages over time and, with some contaminants, over multiple locations within a system, which can obscure spikes. They don’t necessarily list contaminants that aren’t regulated (such as perchlorate, radon, and MTBE), and their reporting periods close long before data reach customers. Reports may state that finished water has no cryptosporidium, but the protozoan parasite is notoriously difficult to detect.
When the NRDC studied the water-quality reports of nineteen cities in 2001, it gave five of them a poor or failing grade for burying, obscuring, and omitting findings about health effects of contaminants in city water supplies, printing misleading statements, and violating a number of right-to-know requirements, such as the rule that says reports must identify known sources of pollutants in city water. What’s a devotee of the tap to do? Read your report carefully, learn about the health effects of contaminants, call your utility with questions, then test your water yourself (see the appendix for sources to help you with all of this).
Drinking the waters of the Ashokan and other upstate reservoirs, here in New York City, my husband and I fall into no obvious risk category, but could eight-year-old Lucy fight off cryptosporidiosis? (Treatment with ultraviolet light hasn’t yet started.) And while disinfection by-products worry me a little (I live far from where the chlorine goes in, which gives trihalomethanes a longer time to build up), do they worry me enough to spend another hundred bucks a year on filters?
To settle the question, I order my own tests. I fill four different containers with unfiltered tap water and mail them on ice to a certified lab in Ypsilanti, Michigan. When I rip open the envelope in two weeks, I’m relieved: I’ve got no lead, no coliform, no nitrates, and my total trihalomethanes are well within federal limits (at least on this November day: they may be higher in the heat of summer). But my manganese—of all things—is 40 percent higher than the federal standard (though still 5.7