Water, water everywhere!
Thursday, 3 April 2008 by Elizabeth
But not a drop to drink! Where is that quote from anyway?
Back to the blog. Lots of rain today. Lots and lots of water everywhere. Which reminded me that my little ole bloggy notebook where I write quick notes to myself about possible future blog posts had an entry about water. Tap water, to be specific.
I read about Take Back the Tap! in my Sojourners magazine. The idea was intriguing to me, so I jotted the website down in my little notebook so I could check it out later. Their treatise is that tap water is safer than bottled water, in addition to the whole plastic bottle trash problem.
Before I could find the time to pull my thoughts together, I heard about a little town in Colorado on NPR. More than 3oo residents of Alamosa have been infected with salmonella bacteria from their water supply and about half the victims were under the age of 11. Somehow, I’d bet that a few of these folks won’t be joining the Take Back the Tap! campaign.
What is a person to do? How about try out one of these water filtration systems from The Urban Homemaker!
Of course, given the profuse amounts of precipitation that has been pounding us recently, I could just order one of these babies from REI and purify the precipitation pooling on my property.
I’m going to step in and recommend the classic Katadyn filters. Ceramic filter lasts forever - you just scrub it clean with a brush every month or so. Lasts for years. About half the price, too! They have gravity feed ones, but we always had one that was plumbed into the sink.
The filtration is good enough for deepest, darkest Africa - ie schistosomiasis, cholera, Hepatitis C, giardia… and the water tastes really, really good coming out.
Bottled water scares me. At least the water coming out of my tap here comes from an aquifer 200 hundred feet underground. That’s 200 feet of clay, rock, and sand filtering my water. Who knows where that bottled water is really from? And what about storing and shipping it in plastic? Yuck!
If we didn’t have a well I might be one of those ones who buys water from the store. We’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles over the past month and the water there smells horrible. Not only does it smell bad but it tastes flat as well.
Sorry Elephant’s child. NO Katadyn. Our co workers have one. We do not like the taste as much as we enjoy our Birkey water. Their web site: http://www.berkeywater.com/start.main.html I am NOT in the deepest, darkest Africa, but close. LOL!
What are we to do when we go out to eat from time to time. For safe water we have to buy bottled water. Or we get pop (soda) in a glass bottle. Actually pop is cheaper too. OK so it is full of sugar. Everything has it problems. We drink form our Birkey at home.
“Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink” comes from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Colridge.