Or worse, we have a water bottling plant in the community I live in. The City built a pipeline 30 miles up into the mountains for their tap water, the bottling plant just pumps the water out of the river here in town. But we measure rainfall here in feet, as in we only get 4 feet on the flatlands, 8 feet in the hills and 12 feet in the mountains every year, so river water is fairly pure until it reaches the agricultural areas.
Except for all the plutonium, the Columbia River discharges an obscene amount of fresh, pure, mountain spring water into the Pacific.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s germane to the conversation here:
I’ve lived in places in Florida where the tap water was terribly sulfurous. If made into ice cubes, you could taste the sulfur over Coke. Blurgh. Even a filter doesn’t help much. As a result, I didn’t drink tap water until I moved to the Boston area (which has really good tap water).
These days, I have a Brita, but use it for a) fussy houseguests, b) ice cubes, and c) the coffee maker.
The best tasting water I have ever drunk was NYC tap water. Consumer Reports uses it as the standard to compare the taste of bottled water with. At home I use a Brita filter because the water here is not great. But I have finally convinced my wife not to use bottled water. My main argument is all the plastic that is wasted.
What’s strange is the SF should have some of the nicest drinking water in the nation, coming from next to yosemite. But the pipes are so old due to incompetence and corruption, that the water often comes out tea colored and tasting nasty.
I do also wonder about the long term health effects about drinking water stored in plastic, only, particularly on the very young. If you have no reason to avoid your tap water for your child, why would you?
I lived on raw untreated well water in two different places over a 12-year period. It was better than most treated municipal water I’ve ever had, and vastly better than the barely-treated sewage some cities serve up.