Drinking Water

Millrace, Mt. Vernon Distillery and Grist Mill Park, Fairfax, VA

©eop

For residents of the Washington, DC area, there have been a number of drinking water issues in this current, exceptionally cold, early (meteorological) winter. Water main breaks have been all too common, especially in the District of Columbia and in portions of Maryland served by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. A combination of long periods of freezing weather and old pipes makes long established urban areas vulnerable to breaks. While the District of Columbia claims to be replacing old pipe at an accelerated rate, there are still many kilometers of old cast-iron pipe, so weather induced breaks are to be expected until warmer weather returns.

A second issue raised in Sunday's right-wing Washington Post is the presence of hexavalent chromium in the water supplies of a number of urban areas including Washington. While I have not seen the movie (I do not care for Julia Roberts in any role), apparently that chemical was the cause of the supposedly courageous activities of Erin Brokovich. Hexavalent chromium is a known carcinogen, but at the moment its presence in drinking water is noted but not regulated. Current evidence indicates the chemical is in the water supplies of many urban area in the United States.

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Lead in Washington, DC's Drinking Water

Capitol from Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Court, Washington, DC

©eop

In common with the situation in most other major cities in the eastern United States, lead in the local water supply has been a concern in Washington, DC for the past half century. Lead pipes and lead welds on water supply pipes made of other materials created a potential hazard for those consuming the water, especially for growing children. Over the past two decades there was a massive effort to reduce lead in the water supply. Now it is reported that effort was inadequate to reduce lead levels in about 15,000 residences. The deleterious effects of lead on the bodies and brains of those who are exposed to it in drinking water are numerous and profound, and there is a great concern about what this discovery may mean for those children living in the residences where lead levels remain high. An article in press expresses both the problems and the levels of hazard in Washington, DC (Brown, M.J., et al., Association between children’s blood lead levels, lead service lines, and water disinfection, Washington, DC, 1998–2006. Environ. Res. (2010), doi:10.1016/j.envres.2010.10.003).

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• New concerns about lead in D.C. water (washingtonpost.com)
• CDC: Partial pipe replacement didn't cut lead risk (sfgate.com)

Return to Drought

Wildfires following winter drought in Bolivia, September 2010

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

After three weeks in London where drought is not a problem at the end of the wet summer of 2010, late last week we returned to sere lawns and shriveled bushes and plants in Fairfax. 2010 was a wetter than normal year in northwestern and north-central Europe with above average rainfall in many places and flooding in several places in  Poland and nearby countries even as it produced a severe drought in European Russia. The Russian drought has already been discussed here, and grain prices in world markets have escalated as a consequence. The mid-Atlantic Region, though at a much less severe level than European Russia, is in the midst of a drought.

Last Friday I got a weather advisory warning of the possibility of wildfires in the vicinity of Washington, DC. Over the past week a large wildfire has burned near Boulder, CO, destroying some houses and threatening to destroy others. One expects such fires in arid zones and especially in semi-arid zones like the eastern flank of the Front Range in Colorado where rainfall is adequate for the growth of forest but drought is common. Wildfires and drought are much rarer on the East Coast of the US. Subsequent rains and the cooler days of autumn have reduced the fire danger, but it is sobering to realize that drought-induced wildfires are possible anywhere, even in normally humid places.

Because much of its water supply is "run of river" rather than centered on storage reservoirs, the Washington, DC area is particularly susceptible to water shortages when rainfall is below average and the flow of the Potomac is low. A drought watch has been declared for the region following an abnormally hot and dry summer. Rainfall in July seemed to break the drought of early summer, but August was far below long-term average rainfall, and the year to date is well below the expected rainfall. High temperatures made the situation worse, for evaporation and transpiration rates rise with temperature. A drought watch is now in effect in the Washington area, and it could remain in place for the remainder of the summer and through the autumn, especially as October is normally a drier month than August or September.

Wildfires in south central South America, late August 2010

Source: NASA 

A more interesting drought is the ongoing one in the Amazon basin, especially the southwestern edge of that Basin in Brasil and Bolivia. With normal rainfall of 100-400 cm or more per year, the area is too damp for large wildfires much of the time. There is a distinct dry season in the southern hemisphere winter, and some agricultural burning is normal toward the end of that season. In the abnormally dry winter of 2010 many of those agricultural fires grew to substantial size, and much of the south central portion of the Amazon basin has been plagued with a  smoke pall since August. The dry weather has also resulted in reduced river flows in both the Amazonian and Paraná basins.

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Bottled Water II: The Baltimore-Washington Area

Infrared photographs of zone between Baltimore and Washington, DC 1973 and 2002 showing increase in urban development. Source: NASA Earth Observatory

Awhile ago I posted some comments on bottled water. When thinking about bottled water, we mostly think of the small bottles people who jog, bicycle, or want to appear addicted to exercise carry with them along with the multi-liter bottles on the refrigerator shelf. According to a television advertisement for Britta philtres, people in the United States annually empty enough of those bottles to encircle the earth 100 times. The costs in monetary terms and in environmental damage from consumption of that kind of bottled water are substantial, a topic we may examine in a little more detail at some later date.

Another kind of bottled water is known to people in urban areas where large (and mostly reusable) jugs of water are delivered to office and shop water coolers. That business, like the sale of smaller bottles, is huge as evidenced by a fawning piece in the pathetic business section of todays right-wing Washington Post (WP). The Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area is supplied by an oligopoly composed of two multi-national firms Crystal Springs and the Nestle owned Deer Park along with a much smaller local firm DrinkMore Water (also peddling small bottles with custom labels through its division called DrinkMore Custom Water). Those firms will deliver to private residences, but the bulk of their sales are to large customers in offices, retail establishments, and factories. The evidence in the piece published today by the WP is the market is growing.

The reasoning for having water delivered rather than using tap water for employee and customer drinking is complicated, but a simple analysis would suggest that it is almost never justified. By any measure, bottled water, even that in large jugs, is far costlier than water from the tap. Instead of fractions of a penny per liter, the bottled water costs 10 cents or more per liter, often substantially more. The cost is quite variable depending on how much water is delivered to a given location. For home delivered water at $7.50 per 19 liter container (5 gallons) advertised by DrinkMore Water in the DC area, the bottled water  is about 40 cents per liter. Fairfax Water tap water costs its residential customers between $1.94 and $2.08 for 3,785 liters (1,000 gallons) or about 0.55 cents per liter at the county water agency's highest rate.

The water delivered by the oligopolistic companies is generally safe water, at or below maximum acceptable levels of bacteria and other contaminants, but the water delivered by urban water supply systems through the taps also meets that requirement. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established maximum allowable levels for various contaminants, and it requires frequent testing of water by suppliers to ensure water is not contaminated beyond those levels. Advertising to the contrary, it is not at all clear that bottled water is any healthier or safer to drink than tap water, except in a very few special circumstances when local tap water is contaminated. In the end, taste is the primary selling point, and the companies argue their water has a better taste because of special filtration.

Recent postings have noted water supply issues in the Maryland area served by Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. At the moment there are no restrictions or advisories, but ones in the recent past have been alarming. In the District of Columbia, lead in the water remains an issue and will until a vast investment is made in replacement of aging pipes, though the use of orthophosphate and other treatment has reduced the levels of lead in almost all of the water to the EPA maximum or less. The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority offers lead testing for concerned customers with lead problems frequently occurring within private structures and not in the public water mains. The water in Fairfax County, Virginia the largest suburban jurisdiction, tastes foul to many of us, but it meets or exceeds EPA standards, and the foul taste can be removed using simple filters like those sold by Britta. Despite those reservations, all of the evidence suggests that there is really little reason for the vast majority of commercial sites in the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area to depend on delivered bottled water. In addition to the monetary costs noted above, each of those oligopolistic companies selling bottled water has a fleet of trucks driving many kilometers each day in order to serve customers scattered over several thousand square kilometers of territory and contributes to environmental contamination in several other ways as well.

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Drought II -- A Drought in the Washington, DC Area?

Last week it was confirmed that the June just ended was the hottest and nearly the driest recorded in the eastern states of the United States. Thus far this year there is a rainfall deficit in the Washington, DC area. Farmers in nearby area of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia are beginning to worry about their crops. The  lack of rainfall is a problem even when temperatures are normal as there is little use of irrigation in the normally humid region. [Just as I started writing this posting, heavy rain associated with a thunderstorm started to fall.]

Should the lower rainfall amounts continue through the summer, there could be problems of urban water supply in Washington, DC and its surroundings. Unlike most American cities of comparable size, Washington does not have large storage reservoirs to augment low flows during droughts, reservoirs filled in seasons and years of normal or above normal rainfall. Instead Washington depends on run of river flows on the Potomac River, its major water source. The Potomac and tributaries are the source for almost all of the water consumed in Washington, DC and its Virginia suburbs. Part of the demand in the Maryland suburban counties is met from the Patuxent, a river that flows parallel to the Potomac but enters the Chesapeake Bay directly.All of the streams are dependent on precipitation falling in the two adjacent watersheds, rain and snowfall in a roughly 40,000 square km area

[By the way, the water restrictions in suburban Maryland noted a few days ago have been lifted as the pipe has been repaired, but the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission is aware that much of its infrastructure is old and potentially at risk for failure. Meanwhile the Montgomery county seat of Rockville, which has its own water system, had declared an emergency and called on residents to curtail water use. That emergency caused by a water main break was ended earlier today. ]

The Washington DC Metropolitan area falls at a boundary in the (arbitrary) division of the US into climate regions. The Drought Monitor at the end of June from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln suggests that the Virginia suburban are at the early stage of drought.

Bottled Water: I A Personal History: When it seemed a good idea

Antique Soda Siphons, Antiques Street Market, San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2008 © EOP

This is my week to be self-indulgent, so I thought I would take a few minutes to write about a subject that has become quite central to the discussion of water, bottled water. Peter Gleick's new book Bottled and Sold has generated a lot of buzz, as have various print and television advertisements - some of them promoting bottled water and others suggesting that it not be used. There is an online newsletter treating bottled water in somewhat the same fashion as wine, Bottled Water of the World. It would appear to have links to companies bottling water for sale and the publisher is FineWaters. The newsletter promotes the distinctive tastes of various waters bottled in countries around the world. On the other side various environmental groups have websites telling us it is best to drink tap water, for bottled water is horrifically expensive and environmentally destructive. Alternet Water is a good source of postings on the environmental problems of bottled water.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I was but vaguely aware of the existence of bottled water, encountering it only on vacation trips to Southern California. I was an adult travelling overseas when I first encountered widespread use of drinking water in bottles. The glass of tap water taken for granted in the US and Canada was not on offer in the restaurants of Continental Europe. One accompanied a meal with a purchased bottle, in my case usually con gas. When travelling in the poorer countries of Latin America and Asia bottled water was a necessity if one wanted to avoid cholera or similar water borne illness. In the mid-1970s  a cholera epidemic in Leningrad led to a US State Department recommendation to drink only bottled water, and I became accustomed to the rather foul taste of mineral water available in Soviet restaurants and hotels on a sojourn to attend a meeting in Moscow and Leningrad. Elsewhere bottled water generally tasted good, and drinking it seemed a small price to pay for avoiding disease.

For a number of years I thought little more of the issue and mostly drank tap water in the US and bottled water overseas, though I did become rather fond of carbonated water (I have never much liked soda pop) and bought it as a periodic treat, especially after prestige brands like Perrier became widely available. One summer we rented a farmhouse in the Cevennes not far from the Source Perrier, so we made a day trip, crossing the Canal du Rhône à Sèt adjacent to the Perrier bottling plant where we took a tour. The tour itself was a little strange, for it had a great deal to say about the manufacture of the bottles and the bottling process but said nothing whatsoever about Source Perrier, the fountain from which the special water is presumably drawn.

A few years later a brief period of residence in the Los Angeles area where the tap water is somewhat saline, or so it tasted to us, led us to join many Angelenos in mostly drinking bottled water and also using it for cooking. Then we moved back to the Pacific Northwest where tap water tasted good. Once again except on overseas trips we rarely drank bottled water with "fizzy water" as only an occasional treat. Abroad we were often thankful for bottled water in areas where the sanitary standards were questionable. An image remaining in my mind's eye is of porters carrying many bottles of water (and beer) on a trekking holiday in northern Thailand (that presents a bit of an ethical problem, but it was a long time ago).

The first awareness that bottled water was something more than an occasional luxury and a necessity in areas where tap water is unsafe or has an unpleasant taste came watching the film The Player where a comic theme is the lead character's obsession with bottled water. Shortly thereafter I became aware of people running and speed walking with bottles of water in hand and, using a word that irritates me like fingernails on a blackboard talking about "hydrating" themselves. Restaurants began to offer bottled waters, and all seemed well with the world. On a trip to Washington, DC before returning to live here again, we even noticed that some water fountains in the city had been turned off because tap water was declared unsafe, the problem was lead contamination ongoing to the present. Given that water in Fairfax County where we were condemned to live  tastes foul, I foresaw years of drinking bottled water. And bottled water was everywhere with whole sections of Costco and entire aisles of fancier grocery stores devoted to its sale.

What I failed to recognize was the long list of problems accompanying widespread consumption of bottled water. Fairfax water continues to be foul tasting, but we have deigned to drink it and use it in cooking. Why we have in a subsequent posting.