Writes A. Cerisse Cohen, in "The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water/Paying closer attention to what was coming out of my faucet changed the way I see the world" (NYT).
I drink tap water, and I always have.
May 28, 2025
"Having spent two years in a mild hysteria over tap water, I no longer have my old, unthinking faith in it. Sometimes I miss that naïveté."
"But in its place, I have something better. The whole ordeal encouraged me to ask questions and engage others in dialogue instead of trafficking in superstition — to make up my own mind. Instead of simply relying on the warnings of others, I did my own research, learning that tap water is subject to more regulation than bottled water; the most recent survey of L.A. tap water showed it to be compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency’s measures.... Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too, because it means consuming the public resource that an ostensibly well-intentioned government system — and not a for-profit bottled-water company’s marketing firm — has worked hard to offer its citizens....."
Writes A. Cerisse Cohen, in "The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water/Paying closer attention to what was coming out of my faucet changed the way I see the world" (NYT).
Writes A. Cerisse Cohen, in "The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water/Paying closer attention to what was coming out of my faucet changed the way I see the world" (NYT).
Posts
107 comments:
I also have always drunk tap water.
I wonder whether the writer's foray into facts from her prior place of superstition will inspire her to travel into any other area. She might try Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. (Of course, she might not.)
If you're paying 4 bucks for a bottle of "Smart Water" ... it isn't working.
What do the people of Flint Michigan think of tap water?
I drink tap water, but I need to bubble it up to cover the taste. In Anchorage, the tap water was the most delicious I've ever had. It really depends on the minerals in your location.
This article appears to be about prestige, though. Even the sophisticate class should try tap water .
Michigan? Democratic mismanagement, Incompetence.
About 10 years ago, we got an advanced filtering system to make sure our daughter wasn't exposed to a lot of somebody else's hormones while she went thought puberty. We still use it because now tap water tastes weird.
the most recent survey of L.A. tap water showed it to be compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency’s measures
Who laughed when they read this?
Except for the fact that every time the lake gets churned up by three days of a fresh south wind, the tap water reeks of chlorine. But I suppose it's more important that I internalize absolute faith in government through daily ritual, which is, I think, the real point of the article.
Los Angeles lacks water or competence. Common link?
Water from the tap here in central Texas is potable, but tastes of the limestone in the aquifers or reservoirs from which it comes. Hard water, we call it, because it will put precipitates of calcium carbonate wherever it touches.
Give me water from the Rockies, like in Fort Collins, CO, which experiences granite and tastes delicious in comparison.
As to the elitism confounded by tap water in the post, today it is water from the tap, tomorrow, the entire progressive ideology going down the drain.
“In Caliunicornia, we drank re-constituted toilet water… and we LIKED it!”
Tap water filtered through fridge. For decades. Cannot stand wasteful plastic bottles.
The first time I visited my fiancé's family in Florida, I remember thinking that I detected a soupçon of alligator piss in the tap water. If you have no problem with tap water, you are just lucky. Many places it is fine and in some places it is excellent.
Bottled water is expensive and (to me) a little suspect. Quite a few years ago, we put in a reverse osmosis system. You can get them now for under $200, they go under the kitchen sink, and have a mineral cartridge to replace beneficial minerals. What a difference. Our tap water isn't bad, but the RO water is a full cut above, superb. We use it for the fridge's ice and water, too. Really enjoyable, and cheap. You can get a similar system from Culligan on rental for about $35 a month, so the self-installed system pays out quickly by comparison. The cartridge sets usually last about a year for us.
mikee, I love the taste of both limestone- and granitic-influenced tap.
My favorite water ever was the untreated well water at my grandparents' farm outside LaCrosse when I was little, with the (also untreated) water I collected a few feet from the beginning of the meltwater stream at the toe of a small glacier near Mt. Rainier a close second - but I do tend to stick to treated tap.
I do stick to bottled water (often in the form of beer) in countries where I don't know their water treatment laws and compliance history.
Cohen likes to moralize.
Only peasants drink tap water. I drink Gourmet water from tahiti. It costs 4 dollars a bottle but it makes me feel superior.
Used to be in Mild hysteria? I don't think she's changed much.
we have a filter on the kitchen tap. That's good enough.
The Democratic LEFT are on a crusade to STOP DAM building, and DESTROY dams.
No DAMS = No water Storage.
No Water Storage = No municipal water.
Democrats are insane. They are obedient Communist dopes.
At no point does the author mention getting her tap water tested. She does mention drinking tap water as a kind of civic duty to get connected to plants and animals.
My house came with an inline filter that needs a cartridge change every couple of years. It is clogged with something, probably sediment, that I'd prefer not to consume. I doubt the filter is protecting my health.
Providing broad access to safe drinking water and ensuring other nations respect our borders are fundamental government responsibilities.
We've done one of them pretty well for years.
What is it that makes lefties think that non-profit is better than for profit? My own observations is that non-profits means the organization has an easier time of hiding the money leadership takes home from corruption.
I just got around to reading the blog post title more carefully. So, first the writer trusted tap water. Then she mildly hysterically didn't. Now she does again, but from an informed perspective. Anybody know what made her mildly hysterical about it?
I suppose I'm feeling sort of this way about teaching reading through phonics (et al.). I grew up on it and was like, "Of course this is how you teach reading." I never went through a "Phonics is both ineffective and harmful!" phase, but I did go through a period in which I thought it didn't really matter - the great majority of kids will learn to read no matter how you teach them. (That's true - but too high a percentage will never read well, evidently.) Now, thanks to the podcast Sold A Story and subsequent reading, I am a passionate advocate for teaching reading through phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary building, etc., and against the "whole language" approach to which my children were subjected during my "anything goes" stage.
So, physician, heal thyself, I guess.
Again - corrupt leftist Judges across the US - are abiding by their communist masters.
Proof: On April 3, federal Judge Christine Arguello, with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, issued a ruling that halted construction on the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project.
See here for the Obedient Communist(D) Judge's command.. and the story within
Soros and the Chinese Communists smile.
Hysteria is SOP at the NYT.
People who buy bottled water are saps. That's my opinion. Tap Water 4Ever! (Unless I'm in Asia).
Corruptocrats are trying (trying - lol) to pivot away from some of the insanity that is driving their low poll numbers.
Perhaps this is a glimmer of hope?
I live on the farm I grew up on. When I was a kid we kept a tin cup hanging on a hook by the hydrant that was over the well. We didn't worry about "germs." Bottled water to us was filling up a glass milk jug and putting it in the fridge for really, really hot days. Now days when our kids come over, they fill up on our tap water. They don't like their city water. Sister-in-law grew up on city water. Doesn't like the taste of our tap water. To each his/her own.
My own observations is that non-profits means the organization has an easier time of hiding the money leadership takes home from corruption.
Or at the very least, has only the good character of its leadership to depend on to determine whether its expenditures are appropriate and constructive. My husband just finished working for a pretty large (in money terms) foundation for some years; when he first got there, they had no, zero, short-term goals or milestones to enable them to gauge whether their grants were having even the slightest effect on the social ills they were trying to help solve. They had 10-year goals that they never measured anything against, because ten years is just such a long time, you know? and all sorts of external factors will have changed over that period, so who can say what improvements or failures are because of their grant money?
As their head of finance, he fought and fought for short-term metrics, and finally won. But now he's gone from there and I fully expect them to revert to type, because they have no motivation but their own personal determination to be effective. (And the ultra-rigid young woman who forced him out, who should be an external auditor and not any sort of head of organizational finance, has plenty of determination - but only to say "no, you can't do that" to everything the grants people want to try, and to judge every expenditure solely on the basis of what the audit committee will think of the ledger and not whether it worked.)
I'm a little bitter.
The only downside of my paradise.
RCOCEAN II said...
Used to be in Mild hysteria? I don't think she's changed much.
Mild isn't the right word. She is a nut.
People think the world is "clean" and the presence of bacteria is abnormal.
Then they they go eat wheat and destroy all of the protections your body has built in our gastrointestinal tracts over the last several million years.
People just don't think about how things actually work.
Peachy said...
Again - corrupt leftist Judges across the US - are abiding by their communist masters.
Proof: On April 3, federal Judge Christine Arguello, with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, issued a ruling that halted construction on the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project.
Interesting reading about this situation, especially since the project is 60% complete. I wonder if people will correlate this situation to what other judges are doing to block executive orders.
Nah.
…they mention tap being subject to more regulation to suggest that means its better and safer. A bunch of people got seriously ill when the Boston suburb coliformed everybody. They hate free markets but Poland Spring and west coast Crystal Geyser are safe and some the best tasting waters anywhere. Boston water was crap until the state built the cistern and the ozone treatment facility. Now it’s pretty good. NYC water is delicious. I hate chlorine treatment. The remnants make water taste like crap. We had ours tested and it is above average in three hundred metrics but its a little soft…and is chlorine treated so it tastes like crap…
Gavin Newsum and his communist masters of idiocy - removed a bunch of Dams in CA. Who needs water storage for the people? - when you can save a small fish and Gavin's son can go fishing again!
Bottled water: One of the greatest sucker scams of all time. Right up there on the gullibility scale with those knob and dial-rife "electric" healing devices. Except bottled water - now de rigueur - was the much more successful con.
Remember "water bars" in the '90s? With "tastings" even!
Clean tap water depends on where you live. Some communities do a better job of cleaning and sterilizing it. Some have a newer, more dependable infrastructure, others are like Flint, MI and chock full of lead. Some areas might have a fresher source of water- say the mountains of North Carolina vs the East River in New York.
In my area, the water is OK, but it's hard- full of minerals that will literally break down the appliances before their time. So yeah- we use a whole house reverse osmosis filtering system + a water softener to use our tap water.
But then, we did the same thing when we lived Atlanta. So maybe we're just being careful.
I'm not completely confident of our government and their oversight on much.
BG - Democratic authoritarians / one party rule of CO = our state is a hot mess.
Local Democratic media at NBC(D), ABC(D), CBS(D) all blame Trump. Right on Q.
The democrat's one party rule destruction of our state has been churning out the destruction for years now.
"Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too ...".
Jesus! What a moronic basis for a decision. In the first place, the City of Los Angeles really doesn't know whether you drink their tap water, even if they cared, which they don't. Except, all things being equal, they'd rather you didn't since they don't have unlimited quantities of it. If you drive your little car to the supermarket, and bring home a $30 case of little plastic bottles of water, that will be a little bit more water for them to fail to deliver to the hydrants, next time they clear some ground to sell to billionaires.
This idiot is allowed to vote!
Where is the water sampled, to meet the regulations?
It goes through a lot of piping before it gets to an individuals tap/faucet.
My little town's water system supplies about 250 households.
I understand that the treatment system gets a look-over once each business day or when it alarms, but otherwise is automated. I look over the annual-water-quality reports thoroughly, but much can happen between measurements. I'm pretty confident that the aquifer is secure, so contamination would be a result of when there are the inevitable breaks and repairs on the water mains some of which have been in service for well over a century.
According to the EPA-require annual drinking water quality reports, the water is high in sodium -- not above EPA limits, but above what's suggested for people on restricted sodium diets. So I've no moral qualms with using bottled water and/or further processing the tap-water that comes into the house for our use in cooking, drinking, and coffee/tea making.
an ostensibly well-intentioned government system claimed that the brown stinky cryptosporidium infested water in Milwaukee was perfectly safe, twice. Since they hired one of the regional garbage hauling company to run the water works, I haven't heard about it. I assume that is because the private company is not immune from lawsuits.
Also, what about the chemicals and compounds they don't test for? A common practice, when disposing of old medicines, is down the toilet. If it is city waste, where does that go? I'm not up on water/waste treatment facilities.
As such, I drink bottled water, in general. The fact that the bottled water is less regulated - by government - implies that the regulations and government are 'good'/'not bad'.
One of Lewis Black's better rants.
The municipal water in Boulder is not great. Smells of bleach.
Don't car. I can filter it - if need be. and do so!
Leftist Chi Com judges take for granted the faucet turning on, providing them with their shower. No amount of water will clean their corrupt Soviet souls.
“ What do the people of Flint Michigan think of tap water?”
They’re thinking they should get out of Flint, Michigan
I cannot stand tap water. Can't stand the chlorine tase. So grateful to live on a well now. Our water is great after going through the softener and arsenic filter. It has a great mineralized yet clean flavor with just a hint of PFAS. That's the downside of living in range of an airport.
Instead of simply relying on the warnings of others, I did my own research
Is that phrase no longer subject to derision in her circles?
What happens to otherwise secure aquifers is when old household or agricultural wells become disused, but they are not capped. I am sure farmers cap them due to regulations, but regular people buy old farms too. Stuff like this allows contaminants to reach aquifers.
Well, now we know how they mix their Kool-Aid over at the NYT.
Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too, because it means consuming the public resource that an ostensibly well-intentioned government system — and not a for-profit bottled-water company’s marketing firm — has worked hard to offer its citizens...
20-odd years ago, I was road tripping through southern Illinois. When I stopped for gas, one of the car occupants purchased a bottle of water inside, with some sort of Alpine mountain name on it.
Curious, I looked at the label. It said: Water source - City of Chicago Department of Water.
Arizona water sucks. Up until a couple of years ago I never drank water straight, and now only do so for quick hydration (i.e., after sweating my 'nads off in the afternoon). We have a reverse osmosis but I use the fridge's filter for drinking and the espresso machine and tea -- the RO system strips everything out and I end up with incredibly weak tea for whatever reason. the Spousal Unit drinks electrolyted water for whatever reason (sensitive guts, I think). I don't even remember the last time I drank water out of a bottle.
I think this mania for constantly drinking water is all a result of that "8 glasses of water a day" myth.
Hollywood, FL water is fine. I drink it and almost nothing else, and fill up old water bottles to keep in the fridge for cold water.
Well, she's run through all of her emotions, from ignorant and oblivious, to hysterical and paranoid, to proudly, stupidly, trusting. If there are any nuggets to see, it's that she's grateful for clean water, as all of us really ought to be - it's the cornerstone of civilization, really. But her 'journey', good gracious. She really wrung herself dry.
Tap water in Washington DC has had problems with lead. That's why I drink Coors at work.
The fact that these people are always at least mildly (usually 'wildly') hysterical about something does not inspire trust in their judgement.
I prefer my water to be filtered through the digestive systems of large broad snouted reptiles.
I drink well water. Lots of iron.
Anyone who is talking about how good tap water is has never lived in Arizona. I grew up on tap water there and never really thought about it. Then we moved to Colorado and I realized that not all water is created equal. The water where we live now is also excellent. But when we return to AZ to visit, we never drink straight tap anymore.
Aggie said...
If there are any nuggets to see, it's that she's grateful for clean water, as all of us really ought to be - it's the cornerstone of civilization, really.
True dat. The Romans understood this, as did a few other scattered civilizations. It's really the basis of true public health.
I remember marveling at the taste of NYC tap water (after 3 years of Texas limestone-affected water). On the other hand, City of Boulder water started to taste too chlorinated (especially in summer) so I installed a filter. Even the coffee tasted better after I did that.
When I lived on the side of Cobb mountain in Northern California the tiny home we lived in was on a water bottling plant. So we received fresh spring water through the tap. Next we move to Cartago California and the house we lived in had a well that tapped into the same aquifer at Crystal geyser eventually tapped.
One of the main problems with tap water is chlorine. April the filter will remove 90% of the free chlorine. How do I know you ask? Well when I was a volunteer water system operator for my community and Felton California I would test the tap water before and after Brita filtration.
the worst tap water ever though was in Goleta California.
Leland said...
“What is it that makes lefties think that non-profit is better than for profit?”
Multiple reasons:
1) “For profit” means they are in it just for the money.
2) They see people who do things because they are passionate about it and don’t do it for the money, and assume that’s how non-profits work.
3) They don’t see “profit” as profit, but rather like an additional cost added to the system.
4) Hence, non-profit will be cheaper for the end users.
I am sure there’s more.
Penn & Teller's "Bullshit", Season 1, Episode 7
It was in 2003 that the Deceptive Duo proved to my satisfaction that bottled water has only one advantage: It might be cold when you buy it. A small, I dare say misicule, advantage easily crushed by a small application of native intelligence and a small effort of preparation.
Two years in "mild hysteria"? Bullshit. Ms. Cohen may be a hysteric, but her problem is a fundamental shortfall of smarts coupled to an ovine submissiveness to advertising.
I drink tap water all the time and haven't purchased a bottle of water knowingly in my lifetime. However, I filter it most of the time with a Brita filter- the taste is just better.
I read the annual report sent out to all household by the water authroities based in western Mass. who supply us folks in the East. The specs are remarkable, and I have to say, our water quality is excellent.
But I wonder about the hysteria we're treated to regarding micro-plastics and estrogens in the water supply. The water authorities here say our H2O is well within EPA allowable minimums regarding such contaminents, so...........where is the evidence that those specs are inadequate?
Are we dealing with homeopathic-level hysteria here?
We live in Brunswick County, NC, famous for its high level of PFAS in the water. The county has taken steps to improve it, including a major RO water treatment facility coming online at years end or so. We fortunately moved into a house with a whole house filter, had the water tested, and no discernible level of PFAS was found. Water tastes fine, generally, but I do think I can taste when the filter needs a change…
"Are we dealing with homeopathic-level hysteria here?"
I don't know, but those on the left seem to need at least a minimum daily allowance of hysteria in order to make it through the day.
I drink tap water. And not always from a glass.
One more reason it might be sketch in our house.
Jamie, thanks for your response. Your husband's experience is similar to one my mother had when she volunteered to help a non-profit day care center to manage their books. The day care actually supported the local FAA ATC and was fine as a care center and educational facility, but as a business, they were a train wreck. They had problems managing their money and keeping the facility maintained, because that requires money and planning.
Rocco made this statement (not suggesting he believes it, as I suspect he is just repeating what he's heard):
1) “For profit” means they are in it just for the money.
One of my first professional experiences with a non-profit was with VISA. Prior to 2001, one of the largest credit card companies on the planet was non-profit. They existed to handle money, collect it and redistribute it. The only reason they were made non-profit was because the banks that created VISA wanted the profit. It just became a bigger entity than the banks (amazing how a non-profit can become bigger, eh?) that it was better to become a public for-profit entity and be managed external from the banks.
What was funny was how VISA worked from an employee perspective when it was non-profit vs profit. For example, the cafeteria was free to all employees. They also catered meetings, all meetings, throughout the building, because they had all this money and it needed to be spent. Everything was quite extravagant, and you could work all the hours you wanted, because they had the money to pay your overtime.
And then they became for-profit and poof, all those things changed. Now the employees had to buy their own lunch and cater their own meetings. They still had money to pay overtime, but can you explain why things can't get done during normal hours? And it wasn't just the regular employees. Now the Executives had to justify to compensation packages, which were pretty extravagant as a non-profit.
Just to have fun with this, I decided to look up Lakewood Church, a non-profit run by Joel Osteen. I'd say he is passionate about the work he does. His father started the business and now he runs it. He certainly has some additional costs for running the church, somewhere in the tens of millions of additional costs, which to be fair is paltry compared to the Catholic Church. I also agree that an end-user level, participation is rather cheap for both Lakewood and the Catholic Church.
Did she change her mind about tap water because the issue is now associated with Trump? I didn’t read the article. Paywall.
n.n said...
Michigan? Democratic mismanagement, Incompetence.
5/28/25, 8:09 AM
...
IIRC ... and I might not, but I'm from MI and I remember following the story when it came out ... the pipes in Flint were filled with lead. However the water treatment they used did nothing to affect it and the lead did not leak into the drinking water. Like many older houses it was there and it did nothing as long as it was not disturbed. IIRC lead paint does not cause any issues. It is when construction is done the lead in the dust is inhaled and that is of course problematic. But having lead in the paint itself is not harmful. My understanding is that's the same as the lead pipes in Flint. The problem was that the local government decided to change how the water was processed and THAT process resulted in lead being released into the drinking water which then resulted in the need for every pipe in Flint needing to be replaced which was a catastrophe.
effinayright said...
I read the annual report sent out to all household by the water authroities based in western Mass. who supply us folks in the East. The specs are remarkable, and I have to say, our water quality is excellent.
But I wonder about the hysteria we're treated to regarding micro-plastics and estrogens in the water supply. The water authorities here say our H2O is well within EPA allowable minimums regarding such contaminents, so...........where is the evidence that those specs are inadequate?
Are we dealing with homeopathic-level hysteria here?
5/28/25, 10:55 AM
A while back there was hysteria about sodium ... something or other and we were not supposed to be exposed to it. Except it was in every shampoo. Every shampoo. It was unavoidable. Then at some point it became clear to me that it was nonsense. Then you could not use this type of plastic you had to use that type of plastic. Then micro plastics became a thing. Then most recently there was something about black plastic cooking utensils? To say nothing of eggs are good for you. No they're bad. Now they're good. As someone trained in science we really do have a reproducibility crisis, most of what comes out in science will be found to be untrue at some point in the future, nutrition science is religion not science in that it is not vigorous at all and - like SARS 20 Y ago, followed by swine flu, avian flu, Zika, etc. - at some point when "they" tell you this is extremely dangerous and going to cause millions to die and EVERY time the prediction fails to come true ... well at some point a scientific mind would say "if every time you make a prediction it reliably does not come to pass... well I think from a scientific perspective it is most likely your next prediction will not come to pass."
Just like Covid.
The thing about tap water is that it's highly regulated and the city sends me a report every year about what's in it. Bottled water isn't regulated that well. You never really know what's in that bottled water.
Fish fuck in it.
Water is a solvent. If it's "pure", it won't stay that way for long. It mixes and combines with a multitude of things that vary from region to region, public water system to public water system, and for people drinking "natural" water, from source to source. There is little anecdotal evidence that people in the US get sick or are otherwise harmed by tap water, apart from rare instances of benzene poisoning, or alleged instances of excessive fluoridation, sodium, or chloride. If the water out of the tap smells bad, or has a bad taste, fix the problem with filtration or some third party provider.
We have a refrigerator that filters water. I used to buy water and sometime along the way I realized I didn’t have to, as long as I changed the refrigerator filter. The fridge tells us when it needs a new one. Which I just so happened to change this morning after delivering Amazon-flex. What a coincidence that it came up here as a topic.
One of the lines in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is “don’t panic”. But if you don’t panic, at least once in a while, wouldn’t you lose something that you might need when the time to panic comes? That’s one of the reasons I like this blog, I can practice panicking within the confines of a post. This is a panic safe zone. Now days I wouldn’t trust what my own research could come up with on practically any subject. The internet is not reliable. I still don’t know for certain whether the mRNA technology is safe and effective. But that’s a whole different question than the one posed here. Thanks for letting me share.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Culinary Water Change (CACWC)
I drink tap water at home (Milwaukee) but certainly have and will continue to drink bottled water for convenience...out on my boat fishing, watching my son at the race tracking. It's just easier throwing a bunch of bottled water in a cooler.
When I had my lake home up nort' our original well went dry. It had good water but the new one had a lot of iron so we would bring water for cooking, drinking, making coffee etc. I'd usually grab a few gallons of mineral water from the grocery store. Nor sure if you consider private well w ater "tap water."
After 40 years in CT my wife and I moved to the MD Eastern Shore. Well water. We are learning a lot about water in general and about all the potential bad stuff. Our well water has arsenic, for example, as well as all sorts of harmful bacteria. We have a UV sanitizer as well as reverse osmosis filters.
Both the well water and the municipal water "in town" are pretty nasty compared to the tap water in CT--which is the best I have tasted anywhere.
I'm on my local water board. Water comes from a well less than a half mile away from the City of Houston primary source of water from a surface level lake. I'm constantly having to explain to our residence how problems with City of Houston water doesn't have anything to do with our water, because they are from different sources and processed via completely different systems.
Judging by the NYT articles the professor curates for our perusal New Yorkers are fearful, crazy, and neurotic to an extent that they're barely functional. Their political beliefs and voting patterns have made their blue states and most urban area cesspools of crime, corruption, fear, disease, and misery and I gather from their submitted comments that they prefer to keep it that way too. FTP.
My parents' home in Vermont has its own spring, and that water was always pure and cold, but a little hard so it took a toll on your hair. As others here have noted, Boston had/has great tasting water. The MWRA did a good job in shoring up the quality. San Francisco is blessed to have fabulous Hetch Hetchy water straight from Yosemite coming out of the tap. I have a SodaStream and for the cost of the Co2 refills, I get excellent fizzy water. But, knowing how strongly people can be swayed by questionable marketing/advertising, it wouldn't surprise me to know that there are folks in SF who filter the tap water.
Memphis boasts of the purity of our city water supply, straight from a deep aquifer, but I stopped drinking tap water when we bought a fridge with a filter. It's now an antique, and the exact filters are no longer available, so that function joins the ice-maker, which hasn't worked in five years or more.
We buy water in jugs "from a municipal source" which tastes better to me than tap water, and much better than what comes from the clogged filter.
The old fridge still cools and freezes, but we probably should get serious about replacing it.
I should’ve said mild panic instead of just panic 👆🏽
"Non-profit" is a tax status, not an operating strategy, but some people never learn.
I was involved for decades in a non-profit historical society, but the state audited our activities and expenditures in great detail; I rarely claimed expenses like lunches on the road, or mileage, just to avoid the paperwork.
@Narr "..The old fridge still cools and freezes, but we probably should get serious about replacing it. ..."
We replaced ours last year (after 16 years) and got a Samsung which so far is doing well - what I really like, is that it has an outer door that opens to reveal a self-filling pitcher of ice water from our RO, about a liter. Very handy !
Unfiltered LA water killed Marty Funkhouser!
Haven't swallowed tap water in at least 10 years. We have an artesian well downtown. Not only is it better water, it allows us to have at least a month's supply at all times should bad things happen.
"San Francisco is blessed to have fabulous Hetch Hetchy water straight from Yosemite coming out of the tap."
The lefties have somehow managed to keep O'Shaughnessy Dam off the list of the ones they want to tear down.
Tap water is not a miracle. It is the result of careful long range planning by (for the most part) nineteenth century white males that a lot of people today would look down upon.
I had an uncle that always boasted about his New Hampshire well water and he wouldn’t touch the water in my Back Bay condo because he fished where it came from. I spent the money to have his well water tested and it had products of anti-freeze, plastics and motor oil, perhaps from the pump to get it to the tap…
As I've probably mentioned before, I am on the BOD of a small rural water co-op here in Southern Maryland. Our water tastes quite good, although some object to the chlorine which we must add by law (and that is the only treatment we are allowed). Our water comes from 8 300-400 ft deep wells, and could be regarded as "fossil water"; it takes about 40,000 years for water to travel from the recharge zone up near Annapolis to our wells. We do have a slight arsenic issue from a particular sediment layer. A couple of our 8 wells flirt with the MCL of 10 ppb. We make sure those wells are used as little as possible. Baltimore and Washington DC, our neighbors to the north, rely on lake and river water, which must be treated much more heavily, and chlorine by-products are an issue.
I grew up in SoCal. The local water in Culver City was awful, I believe it was local well water. LA city water, was, of course, mostly from Owens Valley, tasted quite good. That was back in the day that the LA water had ca 50 ppb arsenic, from a hot mineral spring in Owens Valley. They treat it now.
I miss that naïveté
Wait, now the New York Times is aping the New Yorker’s ersatz-umlaut solecisms?
stlcdr said...
Where is the water sampled, to meet the regulations?
It goes through a lot of piping before it gets to an individuals tap/faucet.
Community water systems are required to sample in many locations, from the well to the customers’ taps.
As long as the government in charge doesn't decide to do a Flint MI.
I'll keep the Samsung brand in mind, Aggie. After that, replacing the washer and dryer, also antiques . . . The washer is quirky and noisy, and the dryer tumbles but doesn't heat.
They function about as well as my wife and I do, I guess.
Kelly said: “San Francisco is blessed to have fabulous Hetch Hetchy water straight from Yosemite coming out of the tap.”
But the do-good enviros want to take down the dam. Not just complicating CA’s water shortage issue but, as per Kelly, the drinking water.
"the worst tap water ever though was in Goleta California."
Hold my beer.
Lead
Iron
calcium
sulfer
radon
molybdenum(I shit you not)
The wells that serve the town are a combination of shallow and deep wells into the Michigan Limestone Shield. God only what precambrian detritus was left behind.
I can't stand bottle water bottled in recycled plastic. They cannot stand up on their own, fall over and spill that expensive fluid all over the place. I do buy bottled water going into hurricane season. Not for drinking per se, but to freeze. It is less wasteful than ice and has a purpose (drinkable) after it thaws.
When I lived on the side of Cobb mountain in Northern California the tiny home we lived in was on a water bottling plant.
I went to a summer camp near Cobb Mountain, but it was down in the valley where there was a pretty active geothermal field. It had the foulest rotten-egg tap water I've ever tasted.
In Las Vegas, our water is very hard (> 300 ppm in magnesium and calcium), and according to Grok it provides substantial benefits to bone and cardiovascular health. Anybody want to buy some Rocky Mountain Snow-born Health elixir? $20 for a 1oz. bottle. Guaranteed results!
“Bottled water is expensive and (to me) a little suspect.”
We buy it in flats of almost 50 at a time from Costco in PHX, Sam’s Club in Las Vegas. Maybe the cheapest thing that we buy at those stores. Purified, not spring or fu-fu water. Wife doesn’t drink tap water, even in MT, where we know the providence of the water. But what’s absurd to me is that she won’t let our cat or dog drink tap water either.
She learned from her best friend, worth more than most of us here, combined, how to fill those Fiji bottles with tap water in hotels. Nice think about living in Trump International is that they provide guests with unlimited numbers of small waters. Just ask them for it. Or grab them off the maids’ carts. Housekeeping is an issue for owners there, so we supplement with flats of purified water (from Sam’s Club).
Most of the water in Denver and its suburbs comes from the Denver Water Board. Denver grabbed most of the water rights to the front range around the turn of the century (1900, not 2000). And even over the Continental Divide, including the Blue River valley (above Breckenridge most of the way to Kremlin, where it runs into the CO). Above Silverthorne (and I-70) it is collected in Dillon Reservoir, then shipped in a tunnel under the Continental Divide and dumped in the S Platte, where it flows to Denver. Ft Collins and CO Spgs are far enough away that they have their own water rights.
The suburbs mostly buy their water from Denver. So, Denver controls water policy for over half the population in the state.
So, what is funny is that my Son-in-law works for the Denver water board. Initially, with BS and MS in Biology, he did testing. They do a phenomenal amount of testing. But more recently, he has moved into Team Building (he played O Line in College, where it is more critical that with the glamor positions). In any case, the punch line to that is that they do exactly what we do - they buy their water from Costco in $4 flats. He may explain in great detail why DWB water is crystal clean, but wouldn’t think of giving it to their daughter.
Something else to keep in mind though is that most of the municipal water in this country is recycled. It has to be - they don’t have Denver’s (Ft Collin’s, etc) advantage of being geographically close to the source, and above most other water users. Their cleaned water runs down to the NE border in the S Platte, where it joins the N Platte, that ultimately joins the Mississippi, which ultimately flows into the Gulf of America in LA. Yes, some municipal water comes from wells, and aquifers, and flowing through that much rock does a good job of cleaning it. Which I expect is better at cleaning it up than municipal water departments often do on their own.
“And even over the Continental Divide, including the Blue River valley (above Breckenridge most of the way to Kremlin, where it runs into the CO). Above Silverthorne (and I-70) it is collected in Dillon Reservoir, then shipped in a tunnel under the Continental Divide…”
If you know the geography of CO, you might be thinking about the water that runs into the Blue River below Dillon Dam, and above where it runs into the CO River. It would have to flow uphill to get to Dillon Reservoir. Well, the Denver Water Board had a plan. They just waited too long. They planned a ditch running south to Dillon, collecting the water coming off the mountains to the west. But then, that was made a part of a Wilderness Area. Whoops. It was actually quite humorous, hard left Rep Patsy Schroeder (D-Den) (then Dianne De Gette) desperately trying to get a waiver, to allow construction of that ditch through the edge of the wilderness area, and getting no support from her Dem party coreligionists because of the environmental lobby, and almost none from the Republicans, because these two Denver Representatives were such loathsome leftists.
"Having spent two years in a mild hysteria over tap water ..."
In my day, hydrophobia could get you shot ...
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