03.23.08
Water, Water, Everywhere…
I’m on the email mailing lists of a number of different charitable organizations, and I receive emails about their activities on a fairly frequent basis. Some of these lists receive postings from other organizations, which is nice, because it allows me to be informed about related work that is going on in other organizations. I received one such email a couple of weeks ago, from a group that is starting up a clean drinking water program for schools in developing nations. “Great idea.” Was my first thought. Drinking water for schools means that an entire community (potentially) has access to clean drinking water. This is such an important thing for everyone - clean water means a reduction in disease, and an increase in crop harvests, and is in general, a critical part of human survival.
Which started me thinking (or rather, made an internal conversation surface again): what about clean drinking water in this country?
According to the Center for Disease Control, “Approximately 40-45 million Americans rely on private, household wells for drinking water. Contamination of a private well is not only the concern of the household served by the well, but also the households using other nearby water supplies and the aquifer that the water is drawn from.”
On NPR the other day, I heard a story about water in some parts of the US is contaminated by pharmaceuticals… partly because of the fact that our bodies do not completely absorb the medications that we take, and partly because the standard recommendation for disposing of expired medications is to flush it down the toilet! (There are organizations that will dispose of medications so that they don’t enter into the water table, but they are not supported by the pharmaceutical lobby, or many other organizations. But that is another story.
The Natural Resouces Defense Council has done some work on drinking water in the United States. They state that source waters (the bodies of water from which a city draws its drinking water) vary in origin and in quality. Source water in the 19 areas they surveyed may be contaminated by:
* municipal sewage;
* polluted runoff from stormwater or snowmelt in urban and suburban areas;
* pesticides and fertilizers from agricultural fields;
* animal waste from feedlots and farms;
* industrial pollution from factories;
* mining waste;
* hazardous waste sites;
* spills and leaks of petroleum products and industrial chemicals; and/or
* “natural” contamination such as arsenic or radon that occurs in water as a result of leaching or release of the contaminant from rock.
(You can check out the cities NRDC surveyed and the results at: http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/uscities/execsum.asp)
State and municipal governments are responsible for public water treatment in the United States; and most municipalities have water treatment plants, but remember those 40-45 million Americans who use private wells, that aren’t on the other end of a treatment plant.
Yesterday, in honor of World Water Day, there was a story on NPR about a week long effort called the Tap Project that is raising money in the US, for drinking water programs in developing countries. I think this is a great project, but what about the people in the United States who don’t have access to clean water. Who is helping them?
