Travel - A Discussion of Water Supplies
One of the least-considered parts of travel, for most people, is the quality of water supplies wherever one visits. This is a common consideration for me, because I inherited a condition where my kidneys don't process water efficiently, so I wind up closely acquainted with the water supply wherever I am.
For the most part, municipal domestic water supplies in the United States are safe to drink, and it is mostly a matter of taste. There are, obviously, exceptions, most notoriously Flint, Michigan, but it is generally a safe assumption that municipal water won't kill you outright. The differences are mostly in flavor and mouthfeel, rather than anything else. Collected in sufficient volume, it's often easy to tell when, for instance, there's a higher sulfur content than comfort strictly allows - the entire southern half of Louisiana seems prone to this, for instance, but the Atchafalaya Bridge rest area used to be one of the worst offenders in this regard. I generally try not to single out negative examples, but I do this one because I've been drinking from that rest area for more than forty years now and the state of Louisiana has made great strides in the quality of water that it produces. It is absolutely not the case now, but it used to be moderately sedimented and yellowish coming straight from the tap, one of the worst examples of potable but unpleasant water.
The causes of this are manifold, but generally are trace minerals in the water, which can render it unpleasant but not unhealthy to drink. Sulfur is the most common offender in aquifer water, but it is hardly the only one. Water in the Texas Hill Country, since it generally comes out of limestone aquifers, is full of calcium carbonate, which may give it a slightly milky taste. Another frequent offender is contamination from the transport system - to give a local example to me, much of the surrounding community here draws water from one of two lakes, with identical water supplies; most of the municipal water companies which provide water are much the same, but there is one particular offender whose network is clearly run through older metal pipes that have not been well-maintained, because the water from that particular provider is always metallic and is the one time I have ever bothered with a filtration system. It is also, in summer, sufficiently warm that you do not need to run the hot water to take a hot shower. This is easily one of the least pleasant domestic water supplies I've ever come across, and the various agreements they've made with towns in the area are a sordid version of small-town politics that frankly astound me that lawyers haven't gotten involved, just because they charge money for water that is offensively unpleasant to drink.
Frequently, water that has these kind of impurities can be purified at least partly by stilling - this is why wells typically have a reservoir where the immediate output stays before being fed into a domestic supply. Sulfur, for instance, will typically evaporate out, as will some calcium, and most chlorine. On a large enough scale, this will lead to calcium deposits in a water heater, corrosion of pipes, or the formation of stalactites, but that's unlikely to impact most travelers, who operate in a much smaller scale. Travelers who find themselves the recipients of unusually bad-tasting water may find it greatly improved simply by leaving it where it can stand for a day, if that is an option. There are other options, obviously - water filtration is a common one, and I have an aunt that only drinks commercially purchased distilled water because trace minerals do strange things to her digestive system - but I have found that stilling is generally the easiest, cheapest way of dealing with the problem.
Now, sometimes you hit the other extreme. Some domestic water supplies - Fort Davis, for instance - are, for their own reasons, very pleasant to drink and are not burdened by excess mineral or chemical flavor. I did not have a single unpleasant drink of domestic water the entire time I was in Japan, either. I suspect that most of this is due to source quality. Because of their remoteness, many national parks have their own water supplies. They tend to be boutique solutions with minimal contamination from other municipalities, so their water quality tends to be quite high. Often, the work required to get water to a park is a fascinating story all its own. Grand Canyon and Guadalupe Mountains both have minor miracles of public works, and also water supplies that tend to run cool even in the hottest parts of the year, with a clear, pleasant flavor. Grand Canyon's especially is excellent water, piped from the north rim of the canyon, spring-fed and untroubled by outside contaminants. However, the best domestic water supply I've ever found is practically cheating, because it starts with quality ingredients and does precious little with it.
Lake Crescent is a pristine body fed by snowmelt and glacial runoff from the Olympic Mountains. It is wholly controlled by the Parks Service and they manage its water quality rigorously. It is cold enough that you are more likely to encounter saponification (where a body turns into soap through mineral substitution - like fossilization, but much faster) than you are bacterial contamination, and so clear that it is deceptively deep even in its shallowest waters. It is the water source for much of the surrounding area, including the Lake Crescent installation of Olympic National Park. Your odds of having problems drinking straight from the lake are not zero, but are pretty small (now, keep in mind, I define this based on having drank out of the Euphrates, so my scale is a little broken); all that has been done to it is what the law requires for clean drinking water. It is clean and clear year-round; in winter it is bone-chillingly cold straight from the tap. There are other places with similar water quality - Rainier, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone - but Lake Crescent has a special place in my family, and I think it's still my favorite even with other supplies of similar quality.
Of course, none of this addresses scrounged, purchased, or filtered water; this is because most places that travelers are likely to visit, they can get water without too much extra work. This is also because this was a filler post to get something out of my head I'd been thinking about for a while, rather than a discussion of how not to poison oneself, which is an entirely separate subject!
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