Reed, 63, grew up drinking the crystalline water from wells and local springs dotted throughout the Appalachian mountains in Martin county, but switched to bottled while raising her own family amid safety fears linked to coal mining and mismanagement at the utility.
‘We’ve always known ours was contaminated’: the trouble with America’s water She’s not alone: 96% of residents rely primarily on bottled water for drinking, and only 56% use tap water for cooking, according to a recent study by the University of Kentucky.
The tap water smells strongly of chlorine, like a swimming pool, and residents frequently report problems with bad taste, discolouration, sediment and irritated or burning skin after bathing.
A new study in the journal Science suggests that the Earth likely got a lot of its precious water from the original materials that built the planet, instead of having water arrive later from afar.
The researchers who did this study went looking for signs of water in a rare kind of meteorite. Only about 2% of the meteorites found on Earth are so-called enstatite chondrite meteorites. Their chemical makeup suggests they're close to the kind of primordial stuff that glommed together and produced our planet 4.5 billion years ago.
The other day I paddled the Montour Falls Canal, hoping to see some of Bad Indian Swamp but mostly taking in the bad odors of sewage and gasoline motors as I paddled through the pea green water in the trench dredged more for navigation of power boats than natural beauty.
I am sure a lot of the problem is the nature of the canal – water flows slowly through the marsh into Seneca Lake. It collects waste water from treatment plants Montour Falls and Watkins Glen, along with urban runoff from streets and lawns. It’s downgradient from farms, which run off its share of manure, synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. While no source of pollution is that significant – farmers follow their nutrient management plans, villages treat their waste water to a great extent, it just kind of adds up and collects.
More though needs to be done. The overwhelming smell of sewage suggests that either treatment plants are overflowing, they’re dumping too much treated waste or there are homes, businesses or marinas dumping directly into the lake. While probably a lot of the pollution is dilluted and biodegrades quickly when reaching the lake within hours it’s still pretty gross to say the least and not good for human health or the viability of the canal and the lake as a whole. An occasional emission may not make much of a difference but it adds up.
That the Chicago River is reborn, that its tree-shaded promenades are thronged with strolling families, that new buildings turn toward the water and old buildings have opened new windows to face it, that people kayak in what was once an open cesspool in the middle of downtown—all of this is a point of pride here. People laughed when then-Mayor Richard J. Daley said in the ’70s that he’d one day like to see people grilling freshly caught fish on the river’s banks. Though it would have seemed insane in 1980 (or 1880), people do fish in the Chicago River today, and the number of species to be found here has multiplied tenfold in the past four decades.
That’s because Chicago built a second river, an infernal reflection of the first, tracing its course hundreds of feet below ground. On rainy days, this subterranean passage, a conduit that can hold more than 1 billion gallons of wastewater, welcomes a roaring torrent of shit, piss, and oily runoff from the downtown streets. This megasewer, a filthy hidden portrait to the Chicago River’s Dorian Gray, is dynamic enough to create its own wave action if not properly supervised. That’s what happened on Oct. 3, 1986, when a geyser blasted through a downtown street, lifting a 61-year-old woman’s Pontiac Bonneville into the air like a toy, nearly drowning the driver in dirty water.
Altogether, 109 miles of subway-size tunnel lie beneath Chicago and its suburbs, covering more miles than the L, culminating in three suburban reservoirs (not the kind you drink from). This is the Deep Tunnel, formally the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, and it may be the world’s most ambitious and expensive effort to manage urban flooding and water pollution. It is a project, in the visionary tradition of Chicago engineering, to bottle rainstorms.
An interesting story about a megaproject to protect water quality in Chicago.
