Clean Drinking Water is Now a Luxury

Photo by Joe Brusky of the Overpass Light Brigade

This year, for the first time ever, Americans will drink more bottled water than soda. Zero calories and sugar free, we’ve been told since we were children that drinking more water leads to a healthier life. This exciting switch shows that Americans are finally waking up to the health benefits of drinking less sugary drinks... Right? Wrong.

Americans aren’t drinking more water. They’re just drinking less tap water, because our tap water is no longer drinkable. Despite bottled water costing 2000 times more than tap water on average, according to water researchers at the Pacific Institute, more and more people are coughing up the cash for store bought water and expensive filters because they feel like that’s the only way to avoid harmful chemicals.

Others, less concerned with chemicals, prefer filtered water because they just “don’t like the taste” of tap water. But what’s that taste, anyway? What makes our tap water so gross and undrinkable? According to new surveys of Pittsburgh water, it’s the taste of lead.

In August, Pittsburgh residents were mailed out letters “informing them of their right” to water pipe inspection. The dry, lifeless letter let residents know that 17% of Pittsburgh homes in a recent sample had lead levels above the EPA’s safety action level of 15ppb. A whopping 40% of homes had lead levels above 5ppb, the maximum allowed amount in bottled water. 4% of homes had levels over 50ppb.

Because our water supply is so poor, city government is now legally obligated to engage in measures including testing your home’s water, treating pipes for corrosion, and replacing service lines and pipes. In order to access these services, residents are invited to call (412) 782-7554 to request a test, which will place them on a waitlist. The letter included no details about how many days, months, or years it would be before any pipes would actually be replaced.

How did our water supply get this bad? Didn’t we see this coming?

They sure did. Lead pipes have been corroding at steady rates for over 30 years, and we’ve long known how harmful it is to ingest lead. The problem is, they just didn’t care. Instead, they allowed corporations to convince us that tap water is inherently unhealthy.

“When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes,” Susan Wellington, president of the Quaker Oats Co.’s U.S. beverage division told industry analysts in 2000. She didn’t say this out of her passion to create a healthier public. She said it to sell bottles and make money.

For the next 16 years, beverage and water filter companies poured billions of dollars into making us believe that their water is somehow better that tap water. They showed us cute animations of their filters pulling little dirt particles out of tap water, like Febreeze pulling odors out of the air. They let us know that as long as we’d keep buying their products, we’d be safe.

The third option - putting pressure on governments to fix the damn pipes - was never mentioned. The fact that just 30 years ago our pipes were relatively fine was never mentioned. The fact that replacing these pipes would lead to cleaner water was never mentioned. Dirty tap water was painted as an inevitable, perpetual fact of life.

While filtered water started out as a luxury item, praised by urban yuppies and ridiculed by the working class, it slowly became seen as a necessity. Now that the problem has worsened, those who can’t afford filters are left to drink lead or not drink at all.

Half a year after news broke in Flint, little has been done. Instead of putting pressure on governments, charities responded by distributing a free - but temporary, and now mostly gone - supply of bottled water.

People have responded by telling us there’s just not enough money to fix the pipes - because, for some reason, public health is not considered a priority.

But can you imagine if we needed funding to develop vaccines for a new virus known to cause delayed neurodevelopment, learning difficulties, decreased memory, aggression, osteoporosis, and heart disease - all proven long-term effects of lead poisoning - that was infecting millions of American children? Can you imagine the media outrage and fear? We would find the money.

Because our water is still relatively clear instead of yellow, because we haven’t been educated on how harmful lead can be, because we’ve been trained to only use tap water for “showers and washing dishes”, because we’ve been told the solution is to avoid tap water altogether by investing in fancy gadgets, this is an invisible issue. Because it really only affects the poor, this isn’t an issue worth worrying about.

Clean, safe water is a government responsibility and a human right. It’s time we started acting like it.

#health #water #socialwelfare #humanrights #class