I trust the city government with my water much much more than companies trying to save every penny bottling water.
And I'm more likely able to get the people responsible for poor quality water or death in result of this in jail over the likelihood of sending billionaire CEOs with their golden parachutes to a minimum security vacation "prison".
whoopsie daisy, we shipped 500 million bottles of tainted water, "we're sorry". Meanwhile if a city did that it'd be national news for years.
While I'm a huge fan of municipal water (I live in the city that invented it), lots of cities have horribly mismanaged their water supply, often from privatization, but not exclusively. See Jackson Mississippi.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120166328/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis
Oh not saying it doesn't happen at all, but it's blown out of proportion for the most of the US. Main point is exactly that, when a city fucks up it becomes national news, if Pepsi fucked up it's bottling (which comes from city sources anyway), they say "Oh no, we're sorry"
cough cough Flint cough
I manage utility services - among other things - for a group of properties - and have had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination at various times. The results have always been absolutely fine. Not just with EU limits, but far, far, far within them for almost everything and definitely well within them for all measures.
I've got no issues at all with drinking tap water in the UK, even given the state of the rivers etc.
had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination
Can I ask how you go about doing that? I may want to test some water soon.
I am sure G! will find local water testing for you.
But, before you do that, check your municipal water web site. Mine publishes their testing results. Monthly, iirc.
Of course, this is only part of the puzzle. Your exact tap may have very different results.
In my case, I approached our usual plumbing contractor who have a couple of labs that they usually used. I now go directly to those labs.
The fda tests bottle water. The epa tests tap water. The standards for the fda are lower than the epa. You’re being bambozzled.
How exactly? /s
I never said what I thought in any direction. I simply stated some leading observations without conclusions about their meaning.
Once upon a time I worked for an asphalt company as an operator at the plants and rock quarry. When the test inspector showed up, so did the test and inspection mix running through the plant.
That is why I asked in the way this post was worded. I am looking for someone(s) like myself that are experienced and perhaps smart enough to read between the lines of corruption. It is an unlikely person(s) to find here.
Discovering the various perspectives, along with the spectrum of Lemmy that engages with this post are also interesting from a couple of angles.
The water characteristics you're worried about sound like aesthetic problems, which might be displeasing but pose no real health risks. These vary significantly between public water systems. If the system pulls from surface water, the water might need more treatment in the dry season since contaminants concentrate in surface waters more that time of year. I'm lucky to live somewhere that has no noticeable taste/odor/color issues. For places that do, you should be able to drink it from tap without issue, but it might taste/smell better if you run it through a filter or even just let it sit in a pitcher in the fridge.
If a municipality were to cut corners with their water treatment in a similar way to the asphalt plant you mentioned (which sounds kinda shady btw), people would get sick and potentially die. Most municipalities are very risk averse and take liability seriously to avoid litigation/losing money. So, it's not impossible, but I think it'd be unlikely for a city to skimp on water treatment just to save a few bucks. Water treatment facilities are also required to constantly test for things like pH, turbidity, and chlorine residual and report to the state, so it's not as simple as hiding things from an inspector the day of.
The asphalt company is basically all of Los Angeles' roads. They came up with a way to use recycled asphalt grindings in a MUCH higher percentage of the mix in a process that involved soaking it with diesel fuel for a specific amount of time and mixing it. The loader operator feeding the plant had just enough down time to do the soak and mixing process. This recycled grindings mix was added to the hot aggregate strait out of the drum burner right at the liquid asphalt mixing point. If I recall correctly (after two decades), the allowed limit for recycle was 15% according to the state, but they were able to run between 30%-45% recycle with their methods and it was undetectable in the company engineering test lab. You be the judge of how that falls into corruption versus innovation.
Interesting, thanks for the context. I don't know anything about asphalt, but if it didn't cause any health or safety issues I'd place it on the innovation end of the spectrum. I'd be interested in things like how the spent diesel fuel was disposed of and if any petro chems would leach into stormwater from asphalt made this way.
Water and Wastewater operator here. In Texas, where I work and live water is sampled, tested, and reported to TCEQ the Texas specific extension of the EPA. If a water system continually fails to meet water quality standards set out by TCEQ, that system will be taken over by TCEQ and brought back into compliance. All this to say, yes, I drink it because I help make it.
I work in food manufacturing and get the local water test results emailed to me monthly - they are alway well within limits
I used to live in Los Angeles and lived in Charlie Chaplin's house that was on the old lot(the current Broadway shoes).
The water coming into the house was probably clean, but the home's pipes were all lead. I did one of those lead tests and it failed.
So your sulfur taste could be from the home and not from the municipal water.
Where I am most people are happy to drink the tap water, and we're all oddly proud of it. Which is fair, it's great water. Very soft too, I remember seeing ads on TV for products to remove limescale but that doesn't really happen here much. I find it a little odd that some places' tap water is so full of impurities that it leaves mineral deposits on their appliances.
Come to Scotland, try our tap water!
Those aren't necessarily impurities in the nasty sense, just mineral content.
If you have any reason to suspect the quality of your water, get it tested! It's not that expensive, you just ship a sample to a lab and they email you a report. Because so many people depend on well water there's a bunch of labs all over the country that do water quality testing, it's a relatively cheap and accessible service.
Unless you need a full pathogen panel, you can just buy the tests for pretty much anything at hardware stores. There are kits that include several.
Not a water person, but it might be the fire departments fault. If they use a hydrant upstream of you it flows so much water so fast that it can stir up some older stuff that's been sitting in there a while.
I was in the industry for a decent amount of years. I know the operators of the water plants around me. I never hesitate to drink the tap water in my area. At home it goes through the filter in my fridge, which manages the runoff taste in the spring, and keeps the water cold.
I live in Grand Rapids, MI where the tap water is 2.4 ppt PFAS. I buy reverse osmosis purified from the store for $0.50 a gallon for drinking, and will continue to do so until I get my own place where I'll install an under-sink one
I just wonder about PEX tubing. Occasionally, the water has a strong plasticky taste/smell like hose water and I feel like that just can't be good for you.
Gotta get those excess micro plastics somehow
[people drinking out of lead pipes] 🗿
Just generally, you can get a report of your municipal water testing. The biggest safety variable that I would be worried about testing at home for is lead in the pipes between me and the treatment plant. That includes my house/building and the municipal pipes.
Now taste, that's a to each their own situation. Sulfury water is my limit for sure. No thanks!
I love in NZ, most places in the country have good tap water, sometimes slightly over chlorinated.
I live in SE Michigan, so... ... ...yeah, I want to trust my city water, but I can't. Not since Flint, Michigan.
I'm in mid Michigan, and you're fine. The circumstances that lead (ba-dum) to the issues in Flint are unlikely to occur elsewhere, particularly if you're closer to Detroit.
why trust or not? Just get it tested if you're worried. Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you can take a sample and send it out to find if everything is in safe levels. (Just remember all water is going to have impurity, the key words are safe levels)
Municipal drinking water is tested multiple times per day in Toronto, as it should be. Testing once and assuming the complex machinery and chemical levels are the same a week later is pure folly.
Note that this is different from testing well water, which shouldn't change much. Testing well water once a year is a good idea though.
Get an undersink reverse osmosis and uv filter kit. Some come with a remineralizer so it doesn't taste flat. Don't go for a cheap one or it will leak. SoCal isn't known for its water purity or consistancy.
I used to work in a municipal city water department. Part of its job was to deal with some chemical blooms from bad waste disposal. While I am not a water science person, I trusted the water science people who told me it was safe and got to tour some of the cool filtration things.
I didn’t drink the water because water in that area has a “green” taste that’s hard to describe unless you’ve had it. Totally fine to drink, just personal preference. Most people I know gave me a lot of shit for it.
The water is pretty solid in a lot of developed countries. If it tastes bad then it might have to do with the pipes and tubing.
If you're living in the US, I feel like it's almost cheating to complain. A certain political party had worked for decades to lower safety, standards and oversight to the point that I would really feel nervous living in the States.
I work as a disaster/contingency planning consultant in Central Europe,not only in terms of water but for everything,but of course water is always an issue. Good friend of mine is the head of the regional government agency controlling the municipal water works around here. While we could do much much more in terms of disaster preparedness there is literally nothing wrong with the water itself - we don't even have any Chlorine in it, it's simply not necessary around here. Only when something goes wrong (e.g. main-line breaks) Chlorine will be added for a few weeks.
Yes. At one point I "designed" chlorination buildings/ rooms. At least where I live, probably due to the historical happenings with the water, everything is very heavily monitored and systems are redundant. Everyone in the city got this big notice about a failure in the water system. I actually read through it and it was because one station didn't get one of their scheduled samples. My parents have well water which I grew up on, and think it tastes easy better. But they need a water softener and filters. There's also a guaranteed amount of heavy metals, even if it's in a "safe" range.
North East, US here. probably fine but I don't trust it. we use a water filter for drinking
Same. I can take tap water fine but my wife hates it. But even so, we both can tell by taste when the filter is toast. We can also tell from the way our bathroom counters get white buildup just by incidental water droplets during handwashing that we have excessively hard water. Not dangerous but not pleasant.
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