Link to Google Map of Turbidity on the University of Cincinnati's website

Dozens of molecules with scary-sounding names, but nearly always in quantities so small that they’re deemed safe by the Environment Protection Agency.

For some molecules, the name may indeed be more scary than the molecule itself, and for some we don’t really know yet–there are no restricted levels on all possible contaminants. In any case, there is one relatively cheap way to improve your drinking water even further, by buying an NSF-approved home filter.

Tip-Top tap waters

I turns out you should worry more about the water from a hand-pump in the National Park campground than about the one flowing out of the tap in a big city. Smaller utilities and water from wells sometimes come closer to the allowed limit for some contaminants, because they may not afford to invest in expensive equipment.

Link to Google Map on the University of Cincinnati's website

Still, a study by the University of Cincinnati and Procter & Gamble researchers found all tested waters to be within federal health limits, and therefore safe to drink: “I believe the overall picture for US drinking water quality in the US is good,” says lead author Scott Dyer of Procter & Gamble. (Note: Procter & Gamble markets the “PUR” line of home water filters, one of the main brands on the market with “BRITA.”)

The authors of the study started looking at many utilities around Cincinnati, including some supplying water to only a hundred homes. They then enlarged the study, but to be make it relevant to more people, they focused on 77 urban areas in the US.

Find out if your city is one of these 77.

Note that the concentrations used are reported by the utilities themselves–as required by federal regulation–and date back to 2004-2006. The report took into account 392 water utilities that serve 62% of the population.

Costs and benefits

You wouldn’t fill your bathtub with spring water. Yet you flush drinking water down your toilets, use it for washing clothes, dishes and your skin. It would be even more irresponsible to ask for all that water to be absolutely pure. All drinking waters are exposed to contaminants, whether from pipes, bottles or contact with the environment. Purifying beyond a certain point is counterproductive: both useless and prohibitively expensive.

A more cheaper solution is to use a filter at home, and treat only that water which you are going to drink. A filter containing what is called “activated carbon” and “ion-exchange resins” is the easiest, most affordable solution to raise your drinking water quality above federal standards.

Link to the results for Boston on the University of Cincinnati's webpage

If you find out that your tap water (on the right is a diagram of the results for Boston) contains high levels of some unwanted contaminants, you may consider getting a filter that removes the incriminated contaminants. Just make sure it is NSF-certified and doesn’t rob your water of its healthy minerals (most filters won’t).

What’s good for you is not good for your dishwasher

You should drink water that is free from microbes and various organic molecules seeping from farms and factories. Yet you do want some of the minerals–not lead or arsenic, but at least calcium and magnesium.

When spring water contains lots of minerals it’s called mineral water. With minerals such as calcium and magnesium, water is beneficial to your heart. Even companies that bottle tap water after purifying it also often add some of these minerals back–check the labels to see how much. Don’t get too crazy about this, though: with a balanced diet, you should get a lot of these minerals from food rather than from water.

The simpler and cheaper way is to drink tap water: when tap water contains lots of calcium and magnesium, it is called hard. So if you live in an area with hard tap water, by all means, drink it! A proper filter shouldn’t remove these healthy minerals.

On the other hand, if the water in your area is hard, you may want to install a water softener on the pipes that feed your dishwasher and other appliances, because the calcium and magnesium in hard water clogs these.

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone”

“One cannot tell if water is safe just because it appears clear or tastes good,” says Rick Andrew from the National Science Foundation.

#1 Bubbles: Your water may appear cloudy, but colorless. Most likely, the pressure in the mains has increased so that minuscule bubbles form when the waters exits your tap and reaches normal pressure.

Bottom Line: Leave your glass aside for a minute or two and see if the bubbles coalesce and finally clear up. If that’s the case, you’re fine, but if the cloudiness remains and is accompanied with color, go to step #2.

#2 Soil: Heavy rains may have caused soil runoff, or maybe there’s repair work being done on the water mains: the little submarines floating in your glass are soil particles, and they may have brought microbes along for a ride.

Bottom Line: You may see soil particles, but you can’t see germs, so check item #7. You may also want to get a filter.

#3 Iron: Iron oxide can seep into some wells and color the water a rusty brown-orange and give it a metallic taste. To avoid this nuisance, federal standards recommend an upper limit on the iron content of water.

Bottom Line: Utilities have no obligation to follow the federal standards for taste, only those for health. There is no clear associated risk with iron–which is why water in some rural areas can taste funny–but if iron is leaching from a mine, there may be other metals around (see #8).

#4 Algae: Algae present in lakes and stream can give an unpleasant flavor to drinking water, if your water comes from reservoirs as opposed to wells.

Bottom Line: The presence of algae mostly causes an unpleasant odor, but it can also be accompanied by bacteria (see #7).

Not just a matter of taste

#5 Chlorine: Chlorine is added to disinfect tap water: water leaving the treatment plant without chlorine wouldn’t be so safe during its trip through the water mains. But chlorine brings an unpleasant taste and can produce unwanted byproducts that affect the nervous system, irritate the eyes or nose and increase the chances of cancer and anemia.

Bottom Line: You can use a home filter to remove chlorine and its byproducts right before you drink–just don’t leave the water standing for days, and pay attention to seasonal variations in waterborne germs (see #7).

#6 Copper: Corrosion attacks pipes, and copper may slowly dissolve into the water. This gives a metallic taste and even a blue-green color to your water. It can also upset your digestion, or even damage your liver and kidneys in the longer term.

Bottom Line: More recent pipes made out of PVC avoid the problem with copper, older ones containing lead may be worse (see #8).

Tasteless

#7 Microbes: Germs in human or animal excrement can trigger gastro-intestinal illnesses. Spikes in bacteria concentration may also stem from the seasonal blooming of algae on which some bacteria feed in lakes and streams. In areas that rely on surface water as opposed to groundwater, these bacteria can end up in tap water.

Bottom Line: In general, utilities will solve the safety issue, but make the flavor one worse–by adding chlorine to get rid of germs (see #5).

#8 Lead: If the pipes in your area are old and contain lead, this metal can find its way into your water–even if it was removed properly at the plant. Lead can delay a child’s development and affect an adult’s kidneys and blood pressure. Even though old water systems are more likely to have lead pipes, the tests reported by utilities may not reflect that since they’re often performed upstream at the plant.

Bottom Line: Pipe quality varies, and it is impossible to test the water in every single house. This may be a good reason to install a filter, unless you can convince someone to replace the pipes in your area (see #6).

Link to Google Map for Nitrate on the University of Cincinnati's website

#9 Residue from fertilizer and septic tanks: These produce nitrites and nitrates which can affect infants, leading to shortness of breath and blue-baby syndrome and possibly death. On the map drawn by the University of Cincinnati – Procter & Gamble team, these concentrations are clearly high in a teardrop-shaped region from Nebraska to Ohio, says team researcher Scott Dyer from Procter & Gamble, who explains this by fertilizers seeping into the cornbelt’s water table.

Bottom Line: As for many other contaminants, you can use a filter to remove most of it.

Everything you ever wanted to know about tap water

There are many other compounds to pay attention to. For instance, perchlorate, which is used in explosive and rocket fuel to provide extra oxygen, has been found in some tap waters. The Environmental Working Group’s Nneka Leiba is hoping that the EPA will enforce an upper limit on perchlorate concentrations in drinking water. She mentions 141 unregulated compounds found in tap water for which she would like to see standards enacted–yet for most of these, it is unclear what effect they have on our health, if any.

The Environmental Working Group’s report is a few years older than that of the University of Cincinnati, but it lists many more communities, and separates them according to 39,751 utilities, so you can find yours instead of reading about a city average. It also lists a broader range of compounds, including unregulated ones.

If you still cannot locate your utility, try via the EPA’s website.

Mud Flow

WATER- Here’s Mud in Your Eye: Mud volcanoes may sound absurd, but these underground pools of pressurized mud can be just as dangerous as their fiery cousins. In May 2006, drilling company PT Lapindo Brantas chose to drill for natural gas in East Java, Indonesia despite warnings from geologists that their find was on a fault line. The company drilled down to nearly 9,300 feet, cracking through the limestone above an undetected highly pressurized mud reservoir. Even then, disaster might have been averted had the company not illegally decided to forgo the standard a protective steel cage to stabilize the area. The mud quickly fractured its casing and a fountain of hot mud swept down to the nearby villages, forcing over one and a half million people to flee their homes. The mud volcano continues to pump out around 100,000 feet of mud every day and will continue to do so for another 30 years. Despite attempts by the company to blame an earthquake from two days before and 200 miles away from the volcano, they were eventually fined $278 million for their shortsighted arrogance. Currently, the company is trying to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying.

Road to Centralia

FIRE- Feel the Burn: Pennsylvania was long a hub of coal mining, but after the mines were exhausted, the local towns were left with deep caverns under the Earth.  Many towns, including Centralia, used nearby abandoned mines as landfills. Every year, the town firemen would set the landfill on fire as a cleaning measure.  To contain the fire, layers of trash were sperated by layers of clay. Unfortunately, the town forgot te clay one year and in May 1962, a deliberate fire set in an abandoned strip mine used as a landfill spread underground. Soon, the fire spread to the remaining coal seams under the town, making every attempt to put it out futile. The fire released carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases into the town as well as creating dangerous sinkholes. The town was officially evacuated in 1981 although there are still a few diehards living in the fiery ghost-town. Scientists estimate the fire will continue to burn for another 250 years.

Life in the Dust Bowl

EARTH- Dust Follows the Plow: In the late 19th century, many farmers believed that agricultural activity on semi-arid plains leads to increased rainfall and more fertile soil. The “rain follows the plow” theory (based on limited, circumstantial evidence) was used as justification by the United States government when it gave away thousands of grassy, unproductive prairie to farmers in the beginning of the twentieth century. Thousands of families took the government up on the offer, and plowed over the grass that protected the soil from drying out. Without the grass to hold the soil and keep it moist, the soil rapidly became dust. The notorious Midwestern winds then whipped up the dust into enormous storms so that during the 1930’s; the drought plaguing the area only grew worse. If that wasn’t enough, whatever crops were left got eaten up in a jackrabbit and grasshopper population boom. At the same time, tarantulas, black widow spiders, and centipede numbers also grew enormously. Unsurprisingly, over half a million Americans fled the situation to seek jobs in the West. The lessons of the Dust Bowl are still being taught. Today there are several candidates for new dust bowls around the world, especially in China and Africa, and no guarantee it won’t happen again.

Great Sparrow Campaign

AIR- Sparrow Sorrow: When Mao Zedong and the Communist Party took over China, they announced a series of social and economic plans jointly called the Great Leap Forward. One of the first to be implemented in 1958 was the Four Pests campaign, a concentrated attack on the most problematic pest animals: mosquitoes, flies, rats… and sparrows. Prompted by the sparrows’ grain seed eating habits, the Chinese government encouraged people to drive sparrows off with pots and pans, destroy nests, kill nestlings, and otherwise get rid of the perceived menace. But in their zeal to destroy the sparrows, the fact that sparrows mainly eat insects, not grain was forgotten. The result: a veritable plague of locusts devouring crops. This disaster, compounded by other Great Leap Forward projects (encouraging farmers to start their own personal steel furnaces, implementing new farming techniques based on very flawed Soviet science) led to the Great Chinese Famine, also known as the time when 30 million peasants starved to death.

photo by Ian Boyd

In the spring of 2007, Jennifer Campbell and her husband received a shockingly high $375 water bill. Their house, which was a mere 800 square feet in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee had somehow generated a bill that was twenty times higher than their neighbors were paying. Either the whole block was poaching their water, or they were footing the bill for a serious leak somewhere in the system. “It took the utility company three trips to our house to convince them we weren’t operating a water park in our backyard,” Campbell said. “There was just one hell of a leak right outside our house that they conveniently overlooked.” The 100 year-old pipes that connected their house to the municipal water supply were worn out and leaking, but the city had no system in place to either prevent or detect leakages. The city’s wasteful and irresponsible inaction is not unique to Nashville. In fact, cities across the country with similar attitudes are costing Americans billions of gallons of water every single day.

The U.S. population is outgrowing its water supply. Water shortages are rampant across the country, and more and more states are looking for new sources to exploit. Georgia has tried accessing four different rivers to feed a thirsty Atlanta. Las Vegas is in a constant crisis and is trying to access more of the Colorado River, and several small townships in Massachusetts north of Boston have all but drained the Ipswich River and are desperately looking for better options. What they have all failed to recognize is that the solution might be flowing under their backyards.

Rather than updating the infrastructure that’s already in place, states are looking into exploiting more resources. Despite their desperation, they have failed to recognize that conservation is the best and most responsible way to cope with the problem at hand. There are a number of effective methods out there for conserving water — storing storm water, planting native plants and using drip irrigation systems –, but perhaps the most important thing urban areas can do is look inside the system they’ve already built. If cities concentrated more on efforts to update the plumbing infrastructure and promoted water conservation, perhaps they could avoid having to find other water sources altogether.

Many states haven’t bothered to estimate how much water they waste because of leaky pipes; but for the cities that have, the numbers are staggering. Every day, Atlanta loses 14% of the water it pumps. That’s roughly 17 million gallons, enough water for 170,000 people, according to the City of Atlanta Bureau of Water’s website. According to the USGS, this percentage is average compared to other major cities across the country. Yet for most cities, fixing leaky pipes never has been a top priority.

The current philosophy is that as long as pressure in the pipes is high enough to prevent bacteria from growing inside of them, the pipes are perfectly functional, said Randy Gentry, a hydrologist from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. As far as the water utility companies are concerned, healthy, high-pressure pipes are happy pipes, regardless of how much they leak from the system. The philosophy with the plumbing infrastructure has always been to “throw the pipes in the ground, cover them up, and forget about them,” said Gentry, but in a time of increasing water shortages nation-wide, that philosophy is no longer practical. In most parts of the country, Gentry said, the existing plumbing was designed for much smaller populations, and isn’t appropriate for supporting populations of this size. Inadequately sized pipes are being pushed to their limit, which is decreasing their life spans. But rather than installing more adequately sized pipes, cities are allowing the old pipes to accrue damage and develop significant leaks. In order to adequately and efficiently provide for a population, plumbing systems must evolve with the populations they support.

Fixing pipes is expensive and inconvenient. For a city the size of Atlanta, a large-scale repair on the system would cost billions of dollars – not far from the cost of building a pipeline to Tennessee, said Eric Evenson, Coordinator of the Water Availability Initiative at the U.S. Geological Survey. Additionally, no one wants to deal with the inconvenience of large-scale, citywide construction. Fixing all of the plumbing that needs to be fixed in the city could mean ripping up all of its roads, which might take years. Fixing municipal plumbing could very well be a project that could outlast a politician’s entire term in office. It would increase citywide traffic and be a daily reminder to all citizens that their tax dollars are going towards something that seems like a long-term inconvenience. Approving such a project would hurt any politician – it’s a more tactful political decision to build a 100-mile pipeline that avoids Atlanta, which is home to over half of Georgia’s population. But diverting money into projects that access other water sources is what Gentry calls, “a band aid, not a solution.” It completely lacks foresight.

Fixing the plumbing infrastructure has proven to be an effective remedy in the past. During the 1960’s, a massive drought in the mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey and Maryland caused the states to focus a lot of energy toward drought-proofing the area. States created new reservoirs for water storage, began accessing and storing alternative water resources such as storm water, and interconnected public water systems so adequate supplies could be moved to inadequate ones. Since then, these states have been able to cope with large droughts. Responsible systems like these reservoirs need to be employed in more areas of the country.

But responsible plumbing practices aren’t necessarily what dictate how most voters cast their ballots. A $20 monthly water bill is, for the average American, not large enough to complain about. As long as bills are low, a quickly dwindling resource will continue to be treated like a limitless commodity. As long as voters are happy, there is little motivation for the government to think more about the big picture and correct this problem that is quickly growing into a disaster. Jennifer, her husband and the average American cannot fix this problem – only the government can.

Boston's Long Wharf, from the Harbor. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Today, the Atlantic Ocean laps eight feet below the stone wall of Boston’s Long Wharf. The wharf is one of many that jut into the gray waters of Boston Harbor, reaching like outstretched fingers. When it was built 300 years ago, this popular tourist spot was an active commercial dock, stretching 1.3 miles from Quincy Market, the longest wharf in Boston. Over time, landfill was added around the wharf to extend Boston seaward, creating a city built on low, flat land that sits precariously close to the ocean.

As that ocean rises over the next century, Long Wharf and the city beyond it could be periodically swallowed back up by the sea. Climate scientists with the Union of Concerned Scientists warn that rising sea levels from global warming will create more severe and frequent floods along the Northeast Coast. They predict that by 2050, sea levels around Boston could rise as much as two feet. If these predictions hold, 10-foot floods—which used to be a once-in-a-century event—could engulf New England’s shores every two to four years. That’s enough water to swamp every wharf in Boston and fill the streets of downtown.

The Peter Stuyvesant, once part of Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, sank in the icy waters of Boston Harbor during the Blizzard of '78. Credit: Boston Globe

A series of floods this severe would cost Boston billions in repairs to flooded buildings and submerged streets. Such a flood happened only once last century, during the Blizzard of 1978, when four days of snow created a 16-foot tall swell that shattered homes along the coast and swamped Boston Harbor.   The blizzard alone cost the state $500 million in damages. Three or four major floods every decade could cost Boston alone anywhere from $20 billion to $94 billion over the next century according to Paul Kirshen, a professor of civil engineering at Tufts University. These figures represent only property damages—they don’t include the other financial and psychological costs associated with living in a city that returns to the sea every decade.

A storm rolls into Boston Harbor. Credit: Rachel Blumenthal, rachelblumenthal.net

Imagine what such a flood would look like, standing at the edge of Long Wharf in the year 2050. At high tide, the ocean would ebb just five feet below the wharf wall. A storm blowing into the Harbor from the northwest would push massive waves towards shore, creating a storm surge five feet high. The rows of white boats lining the wharf would knock together in the wind, and then start to list as the water rises above their moorings. Before a drop of rain had even fallen, the ocean would flow over the lip of Long Wharf, swamping the white mast that stands at its edge.

When the storm hits, rain will pour into the sea, raising the ocean another 15 feet and sending it crashing through the city. The first building to be inundated would be the trendy apartments whose sea-facing balconies have long been the envy of Harbor-going tourists. Then seawater will flow over the Harbor and across State Street, where it will hit the entrance to the Aquarium T stop and cascade down the escalator into the underground. At its worst, the surge could push all the way to the concrete and glass gate of Quincy Market. For as long as the storm lasts, the market would sit at the water’s edge, just as it did when it was first constructed in 1826, before the city was built out into the ocean.

This is the sort of flood that could hit Boston not once a century, but once every five years or more as sea levels rise. The new flood of the century would likely be worse than anything ever experienced in Boston’s history. You can see the extent of the new 100-year flood in this picture.

The light blue shows the extent of Boston's new flood of the century, a flood so severe it used to occur only every 500 years. Credit: Union of Concerned Scientists

While increased flooding from global warming may be unavoidable, there are steps Boston can take to reduce the predicted $20 billion of flood damage over the next century. The simplest method is building seawalls along the coast that will block surges heading landward. Seawalls have the benefit of allowing construction to continue uninhibited along the coasts, but they are expensive and cause coastal erosion. A cheaper and more effective solution, according to Kirshen, would be to limit development and flood-proof existing buildings in the new floodplains.

Neither solution is cheap or completely effective at preventing flood damage, but they are far better than the alternative. If nothing is done, for a few days every decade, the land the city has wrested from the Harbor may be reclaimed by the sea. Payment, perhaps, for reaching our fingers too far into the ocean.