NYT: NYC's Water Supply May Need Filtering (first time in 100-yr history)

[DeepModem Mom]

New York’s Water Supply May Need Filtering
By ANTHONY DePALMA
Published: July 20, 2006

New Yorkers are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them bragging about the city’s water — so pure it doesn’t need to be filtered, so delicious it is better than bottled.

So it may surprise, perhaps even insult, proud residents to hear that federal officials are worried that the fabled water — coming from the largest unfiltered system in the country — is getting muddier and may have to be completely filtered, at a cost of billions of dollars, if it cannot be kept clean.

For much of the last year, the century-old water system that delivers 1.3 billion gallons a day to the city has been clouded by particles of clay, washed into upstate reservoirs by violent storms in quantities that make the water look like chocolate Yoo-hoo...(The) city has been dumping 16 tons of chemicals a day, on average, into the water supply as an emergency measure to meet federal water quality standards. The treatment does not change the taste of the water, but the city cannot rely on this stopgap approach forever.

Turbidity — the condition that makes water cloudy and interferes with chlorination to eliminate contaminants — appears to be getting worse because of changing weather patterns and increasing runoff from land development upstate.

If the city cannot find a permanent solution to the silt, it may not be able to avoid building a huge filtration plant that could cost about $8 billion....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/nyregion/20water.html?hp&ex=1153368000&en=88dea190ae8e17b9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[w4rma]

1. Suck it up and build it. (nt)

[NYC]

2. What's $8 billion? One day in Iraq?

I think it's a shame, but if it's unavoidable, it's unavoidable.

[Tellurian]

3. There you go...

We give the soldiers the weekend off..
BINGO! water filtration plant paid for!

[BeFree]

4. $ 8 billion

That kind of money could buy a lot of the land around the reservoirs. That land is the natural filter that is being destroyed.

Let me get this straight.... they have a natural filter that has worked well for 100 years, they are allowing it to be destroyed, and they want to replace it with an artificial filter?