The Water Crisis Cities Don't See Coming (axios.com) 121
Aging water treatment systems, failing pipes and a slew of unregulated contaminants threaten to undermine water quality in U.S. cities of all sizes. Still, with only a handful of exceptions, "water systems aren't designed to focus on health, they're focused on cost-containment," says Seth Siegel, whose book "Troubled Water," released this month, examines the precarious state of water infrastructure in the U.S. From a report: Whatever goes down the sink, shower, washing machine and toilet is transferred to one of about 14,000 U.S. wastewater treatment plants. While those plants are good at neutralizing sewage microorganisms that can make people sick or pollute waterways, they can miss chemicals that are linked with our changing lifestyles. The biggest change since most treatment plants were designed? The explosion of pharmaceutical use by Americans, Siegel told me during an interview in Axios' office. About 60% of American adults take at least one prescription pill every day, per the National Center for Health Statistics. Residue from those pills travels to treatment plants and waterways. Water testing often doesn't accurately reflect the risks of tap water, and testing processes can be manipulated to show passing results.
The YouTube Channel Status Coup (Score:2)
And no, it is not the case that the cities don't see this coming. Everybody in civil engineering knows about it but we've slashed taxes to the bone so there's no money to pay for what is basically a new water system. Not until old people start dying from Legionnaire's and kids start getting brain damage from lead that is. Heck, Flint _still_ doesn't have clean water.
How are most city water systems funded? (Score:2)
Here in Minneapolis, our water system is self-funded by the fees the water department charges to water users. It's not funded by taxes, so it's not subject to the kind of damage done by declining tax revenue/tax cuts or diversionary spending.
And if I believe the propaganda the water department puts out, we have one of the best water systems in the country, with state of the art filtration technology.
They've also been involved in a multi-year project to re-line water mains. They did the ones on our street
I thought that was normal... (Score:2)
You pay for each gallon you use, and for each gallon of wastewater you return dirty.
To finance you part of the system you use, plus a small share of costs that can't be split down to only what you use.
How else would you do it?
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I can totally see many places either rolling it into the tax system or charging water fees that don't pay 100% of the water plant costs.
Tax-based water systems could exist where the usage fees can't cover the costs due to a variety of reasons (not enough subscribers due to individual wells or just low population) or some idea that water is a right and should be really cheap.
It could also be that some places have just incredibly poor metering and can't actually arrive at a unit cost that works or would be se
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So this "tax based water" theory of yours is really just pure speculation? Personally, I have never lived in any part of the US where I did not pay a monthly water bill. Have you?
In the interest of injecting some facts, I found this site: https://www.watereducation.org... [watereducation.org] which is interesting, as it shows there are far more costs to water delivery and treatment that I had though about, like the cost of taking apart old and failing dams, or retrofitting them with fish ladders. It looks like most water compan
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My water system is a pipe out of the lake. I've got a pretty nice particulate/activated charcoal system plus a UV anti bacterial sanitizer.
[Sigh]. When this news reaches the public utility infrastructure contractors, I'll have to go to a few more community meetings. And hear why we really need a pipeline built down our road from the end of the city system. For a property assessment of somewhere between $50 to $100K per residence. So we will have the privilege of paying $100 per month for water that they pu
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My parents got hit with a double whammy after buying a new house many years ago. The builder installed the septic system drainage field upside down, so over the course of about ten years, the pipes filled with dirt. The house is next to a wetland. My dad was ordered to pay $40,000 to replace the system and perform mitigation. As with many residential developments, the builder was a partnership that was dissolved soon after completion of the project, leaving no one to sue.
The very next year, the city install
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Here in Minneapolis, our water system is self-funded by the fees the water department charges to water users. It's not funded by taxes, so it's not subject to the kind of damage done by declining tax revenue/tax cuts or diversionary spending.
That also means they probably only have the revenue stream that they need for maintenance and incremental improvement, not for big capital expenditure on replacement of reservoirs or trunk pipelines between the reservoirs and treatment plants.
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Flint spent decades on failed social programs instead of plans to upgrade their infrastructure. Then they pissed off their biggest source of income: GM. GM left, taking many of their workers with them - along with their tax money.
You are correct that everyone knows this is coming, but no politician in power wants to spend the money on it. Because it won't be done during his term, so he can't take credit for it.
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Sorry, which community anywhere has "slashed taxes to the bone"? Anywhere I know of taxes are higher than ever and always going up faster than inflation.
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I do get test results of our suburbs water and all is well. I am not ignorant, but you seem to make assumptions without facts
INB4 "show us the birth certificate!" (Score:2)
"Err, I mean water analysis lab report." ... longer." ;)
"Long form, of course."
"No,
. . .
"It's fake!"
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It's called the "Water Quality Report" and is on the village website, they test for 65 contaminates. Looking good.
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I think you would do well to at least read the summary. Much of the question has to do with pharmaceuticals in the water (if the system is well maintained).
Also, Flint, Michigan, had their water system "revamped" by a Republican friend of the governor. Until then they did not a a problem with lead in the water, as their water source was alkaline. But the revamping included blending in river water which was acid, and caused the lining of the pipes to corrode...yielding lead in the water. This was not the
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The pipes were faulty. A proper water system that didn't have lead pipes wouldn't have developed such difficulty. Those pipes are old.
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I think you would do well to read the comment to which I was replying. That was talking about Flint and Bacterial infection.
There was blood level problems in Flint long before the recent "crisis" with it's 1.87 mpD, was 5 in the 1970s, and there also was a spike before the "crisis" from unknown cause. Maybe lead pipes are bad even without Republicans, eh?
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Lead pipe are bad even with alkaline water, agreed. But there are degrees and degrees. And at the time the system was built I suspect that lead pipes were standard. (Yes, it was old and needed to be replaced, and poor people couldn't afford to do that. But with alkaline water the problems were a lot less serious.)
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That is bullshit about Flint, as anyone that can read even something as simple as Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] knows.
The Flint water system source was changed to the Flint River from the Detroit water system in 2014, at the direction of Emergency Manager and former Flint acting mayor Michael Brown - a Democrat. He made this decision as part of a cost cutting measure after the Democrat city council had taken the city to bankruptcy.
In 2015, the city council refused to switch back to the Lake Huron water system, because rates w
A lack of proper water treatment (Score:2)
I don't see the problem here (Score:5, Funny)
By drinking this water, you're basically getting access to a whole cornucopia of expensive meds for free. Without any effort on your part, you're able to treat or ward off scores of maladies all at the same time. This is a win/win for everybody!
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By drinking this water, you're basically getting access to a whole cornucopia of expensive meds for free.
If only homeopathy worked.
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So it is possible it actually does something, unlike homeopathy. Maybe it will turn all the frogs gay?
That's Communism! (Score:2)
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That it's already happening is implied by the summary. The problem is getting the correct dose to each person.
The answer is clear (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The answer is clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses have shown to suck at offering infrastructure based services.
What are often the top hated companies.
Cable TV/Internet
Power Companies
Telephone Companies
All these companies we hate because they have to maintain a large infrastructure, they are trying to maximize profits, they do this by pushing infrastructure fixes as long as they can, so you will get a few years of good service then an outage that lasts a few days. Because the infrastructure rotted away.
Government is actually much better at infrastructure especially if there is general support for taxes to go towards it. As that few day outage will effect their election results, vs a companies which would be a fraction percent drop in revenue.
That said, not all things are better run via the government. There are products and services that improve due to competition and self interest to sell a product better then someone else, and the fact that the company needs to earn every cent, means less waste in providing that product or service.
That actually is not true (Score:2)
Businesses have shown to suck at offering infrastructure based services.
Cellular companies, though sometimes incompetent, also generally work pretty well.
That's because there is competition.
A few decades ago, I was able to get fiber to my house from a small company called Wide Open West, instead of Comcast... vastly faster than cable modems at the time. They were an awesome service provider. Until they got subsumed by another company and there was no longer competition, so I was stuck with Comcast.
It's n
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I agree that competition would make it better, but competition in infrastructure is more likely government created than not; monopol
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Cell companies success is due to a smaller infrastructure footprint. A tower every 10+miles. Which is the normal distance between town centers. One down tower is easy to find and fix. While Cable, Water, Roads. will need hundreds or thousands of miles of infrastructure for every 10 miles radius to cover all the customers. Also many cell companies will rent towers from other companies anyways, so they are not building a tower every 10 miles. but perhaps every 50 miles, and rent from their competitors in a
Not all infrastructure businesses suck (Score:2)
Businesses have shown to suck at offering infrastructure based services.
US passenger rail might suck, but US freight rail (which is privately-owned) operates very well.
Basically the entire Internet network is run by business. The backbone has been very reliable, and the worst thing I could point to is government involvement (NSA surveillance).
Anecdotally, I've been quite happy with the service provided by my water, electric, and gas transportation providers, all of whom have 99.9%+ uptime (note: I'm not with PG&E).
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Businesses have shown to suck at offering infrastructure based services.
But they make a load of cash providing the infrastructure. And leaving the operations to the local utility (public or private).
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to sell a product better then someone else
It's illegal to sell people :-)
*ba-dum TISS* ... (At leeching wealth, ... sure.) (Score:2)
You get the same ineffective monopolism ... PLUS profit (aka the part that you get nothing in return for, like with robbery).
Yeah. Sounds great.
Besides: The "government" IS already a corporate council at this point. So if you're saying they are doing shit ... ... ;)
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I know you were trying to be snarky, but actually economics seems to be proving you right.
For some reason despite people being forced by government to pay for city water, they nevertheless pay private firms VAST sums to drink their water instead.
https://recipes.howstuffworks.... [howstuffworks.com]
Water Is Free. Why Do Americans Spend Billions on the Bottled Stuff?
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Dont forget job creator. Yes, that's important. Give all the taxes to and target tax cuts to the corporations. Because they are the job creators.
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Re: The answer is clear (Score:2)
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Highly reactive? You never studied organic chemistry did you?
Well, I did, but I was bad at it... And to my defence that was a long time ago.
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Re: The answer is clear (Score:2)
Right. Because we all know that since corporations are people they're held to the same standard as individuals when they do harm. I wonder what would happen to me if I poisoned an entire city's drinking water with lead?
https://theintercept.com/2018/... [theintercept.com]
s//don't see/don't care (Score:3, Insightful)
More important - you can replace "water" with "bridges," "electric grid" , "school buildings," "fire trucks," .... anything that a town or state gov't has to pay for is either ignored or gets shouted down by the "no more taxes" crowd.
Re:s//don't see/don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is that they want to raise taxes and put it into a 'general fund' that they assure you will go towards roads, bridges, water plants, etc., but just ends up going into some politicians slush fund or pet project for their city. There are ways around this, but they won't do it.
That depends very much on the state. In this state, the half cent transportation sales tax is earmarked in the law and is only spent on roads and bridges. Maybe you need a better state legislature.
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In this state, the half cent transportation sales tax is earmarked in the law and is only spent on roads and bridges. Maybe you need a better state legislature.
I don't think you understand how it works. When the earmarked transportation sales tax comes into effect, they reduce the general funds that were previously going into roads and bridges. They simply freed up general funds for their pet projects.
Re:s//don't see/don't care (Score:4, Interesting)
In Cali we raise gas taxes and then dump the revenue into light rail that the vast majority of will never use because it just is not practical.
The closest trolling stop to me is 5 miles away from home. The trolling ride to the station closest my work is about two hours. Then another 3 miles from station to work. If I take my bike with me, I could probably do the biking portion is 30 minutes each way.
So we are looking at nearly 5 hours every work day.
Or I could just enjoy my car and cut that down to about an hour and 15 minutes of commute time.
Unless you double the amount of traffic, triple the price of gas and double the price of cars, this isn't changing.
Re:s//don't see/don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry it doesn't work out for you, but when the BART tube was closed for repairs the traffic to SF came to a standstill, because the streets were too congested for anything to move. Everyone in the area was quite relieved when it was running again.
I will admit that there are LOTS of edge cases, and I don't know how to solve the problem. But in lots and lots of places the answer is not more streets and roads.
FWIW, commuter rail used to be a lot more widespread, but the railroads didn't like having to deal with passengers, and lobbied congress to let them sell off the business (which they had only originally agreed to take on in order to get the free land to build the railroads on).
Rail lines don't make a lot of sense where the population is widely dispersed, but where it's concentrated they are essential, and will be until someone comes up with something else that will carry as many people in as small a footprint. Monorails have trouble switching and aren't any cheaper anyway.
Additionally, for the BARTD counties of California, the funding is via sales tax. Part of that sales tax is on gasoline, admittedly, and the justification is that it gets lots of cars off the road. (This was experimentally proven true during the BART repairs.) But the real reason was political, and I am neither capable nor willing to defend that process.
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Nice try but in California, gas taxes and other road user fees only cover 61.8% [taxfoundation.org] of the cost of the roads. The rest comes out of other taxes such as Prop K, Measure M, and TransNet sales taxes.
In Texas they once did the math and found that in order to make the roads pay for themselves, they would have to increase the gas tax to $2.22 per gallon [archive.org]!
You benefit even if you don't use it (Score:2)
And if the Trolly isn't useful to you that sounds like a problem that can be solved with more stops/trollies.
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Sometimes they do, but there are secondary changes that nullify the intent. When we voted a special tax to fund the libraries, that money did, indeed, go to the libraries, but they immediately cut the amount from the general fund that had been going to the libraries to compensate.
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My main problem with raising taxes is that they NEVER go to what they say it's going to go to.
No, your problem with rising taxes is that you think the pittance of a rounding error actually makes a difference in a complex and large budget. Taxes in the USA are a complete joke, good for making a quick buck and not handing over anything to the evil government while your infrastructure falls apart around you. If you actually raised taxes in any way that mattered you may actually see a difference.
Quite often though raising taxes doesn't actually raise the net income for the government, who simply lowered
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Taxes aren't the joke, the budget allocations are.
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Wow, thanks for clearing that up. I didn't know that's what I was really thinking. I'm glad we have people like you to tell people like me what they're REALLY thinking.
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My main problem with raising taxes is that they NEVER go to what they say it's going to go to. You want to raise taxes for to fix the roads, fix the infrastructure, revamp schools, etc. that's ok, things wear out and need to be replaced I understand that. The problem is that they want to raise taxes and put it into a 'general fund' that they assure you will go towards roads, bridges, water plants, etc., but just ends up going into some politicians slush fund or pet project for their city. There are ways around this, but they won't do it.
Yep. As long as there is a single "diversity officer" or what have you on staff, I don't want to hear about any government or school supposedly being starved of cash. They clearly have more than enough of my and my neighbors' money.
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... and the taxes never sunset and return to their previous rates.
I agree with the poster above, that it's fine to raise taxes - replace your bridge, fix your road. When the project is done and/or enough taxes have been collected for that project, turn the tax off/revert to previous rates. But no! That never happens.
Not new info (Score:3, Insightful)
Public water has been a worry in a lot of places for a long time. The biggest sign that we're fucked is that people will spend $1000+ a year on bottled water without batting an eye, but flip out if asked to pay taxes to update water systems.
And that's exactly how beverage corporations want it.
Re:Not new info (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Not new info (Score:4, Insightful)
How much do you pay for a gallon of water from your local utility company? How much does a gallon of Aquafina water cost?
How much profit does your local utility company make, even if you include taxes? How much profit does PepsiCo make on the same amount of Aquafina?
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I can't honestly believe that you think your interest would be better served if PepsiCo or Nestle were the primary suppliers of water.
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That's a good thing for consumers and those companies. Keep supporting them.
There is still the matter of Nestle and the like who sell essentially filtered tap water. I should have specified the water part, but this being a story about water... Bottled water has exploded in the market, and demand is driven largely by sub standard local water, or news of sub standard water somewhere else.
Regardless how you feel about those corporations, or their markup on bottled tap water, it's hard to argue that consumer
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So, say everyone gets a water filtration system and the government steps back from dealing with water. How do you get water TO your filtration system?
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that's what this $100 bucket is for!
Next (Score:2)
I have just one quetion: How can lawyers form a class action lawsuit over it so they can suck hundreds of millions of dollars out of local communities?
Follow the money.
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"About 60% of all American adults.." (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think someone misread someone else's study. I can find a Mayo clinic report that upwards of 60% of Americans took a prescription pill within the last month. But not 60% every day year round.
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I am. What are they taking though? (Score:2)
I know that about half of US students take hard drugs that have been prescribed to them or aquired otherwise, "to enhance learning".
The vast majority of 35-40+ people probably have cardiovascular problems due to bad nutrition and probably take blood pressure medication. If they each take two pills, e.g. to balance side-effects or badly counted, because you have to take two a day, you probably already have that number.
Then there are all the pain killers, and all that psychoactive shit like Xanax, that "are
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Well, I didn't when I was in that age group, but currently I take 11 pills a day. Some of them are non-prescription, but were recommended by a doctor anyway. Two I decided to take on my own after reading various studies. OTOH, I'm over 60. But if you average me into the population (or average me over my lifetime) 2 pills a day is probably conservative...though not by much. In my 40's or 50's there was a while when I took a combination of vitamin pills rather than a multivitamin.
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Not to mention about half of them are probably also taking another kind of prescription, every day. (well, 3 weeks out of the month.)
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meep, he was referring to "students"
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As a side-bar to this discussion: am I the only one who is disturbed by the apparent fact that "About 60%" of American adults are on at least one prescription medication every day?
No, not really.
There was (thankfully it seems to be dying down a little) a whole industry devoted to hyperventilating about "too many" people taking antidepressants, for example, yet depression is a real medical syndrome and it needs to be treated.
You don't hear people getting all upset about "too many" people taking beta blockers (or whatever), even if their tough grandpappies didn't take any.
How (Score:2)
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I guess distillation would do it. But distilating water is very expensive. That's why we don' use distilation to desalinate ocean water.
Re:How (Score:4, Informative)
How would you go about removing pharmaceuticals from the water at that scale? I assume distillation would remove or break down a great deal of pharmaceuticals, but probably not all, and is totally impractical at scale.
Conventional sewage treatment breaks down 90% of things like ibuprofen and naproxen [harvard.edu]. Drinking water treatment breaks down acetaminophen and carbamazepine by 75%. Current treatment regimes knock antidepressants, antipsychotics, antibiotics, beta blockers, and tranquilizers down to trace amounts. Detectable, but just barely, and not enough to affect people. The same kinds of treatments that are intended to kill nasty bacteria are also quite effective at breaking down anything that isn't water.
For a lot of what's in the water, a longer treatment cycle is all that's required. Both ends of water treatment are designed and intended to break down complex organic molecules, and do quite a good job of it, and that's what drugs are, whether over the counter or prescription.
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How would you go about removing pharmaceuticals from the water at that scale?
For a start, how about requiring every pharmacy must contain a disposal container(s). Just like those you have at Best Buy, Office Max, and Office Depot for recycling used electronics. Some medications might be to dangerous to allow the consumer to toss it in with the others, so you might need to have the pharmacy directly take expired medications. However, if when you pick up new medications you could get rid of your old stuff I think more people would use this method instead of throwing it out or flus
medications that are flushed down the drain (Score:2)
Most area's that I have lived, they are always in a cycle of replacing gas/water/s
That is seriously fucked-up: (Score:3)
"About 60% of American adults take at least one prescription pill every day,"
Holy hell!
So more people are badly ill in the US than are healthy?
Ore more take pills they would not or do not need?
I'd call that a national state of emergeny! And nobody blinks an eye??
Re: That is seriously fucked-up: (Score:2)
Re: That is seriously fucked-up: (Score:2)
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remove birth control from that number and I'm sure it's much more reasonable (albeit still really high.)
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About the only prescription I take is when I get sick and need to take a Z-PAK for an infection. That happens about once a year, and I only need to take it for 5 days.
Drugs effective at nano concentrations (Score:2)
Good thing the fish dont believe in homeopathy, else they will be zoning out on prozac.
An impossible problem (Score:3)
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The water is indeed still potable.
As it happens your city government is even doing things about the odor and taste.
Some people can taste that zebra mussel, some can't. We get that taste in our city water in hot summers. Not nice
Thinking you have a "mad max" level of problem is just bein a snowflake. You'll live.
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Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
This Message Sponsored by Aquafina (Score:2)
Life imitating art... (Score:2)
Now EVERYONE takes the major prescriptions (Score:2)
Give it a few years, and levels of the more popular prescriptions in our water supply will eliminate the need for anyone drinking city water to actually take compounds like atorvastatin, lisinopril and sildenafil. This will introduce a new problem: if people stop taking these meds, the city will now have to start adding them to the water so everyone doesn't come down with heart attacks, strokes and impotence.
Reverse osmosis (Score:2)