New York's 'champagne tap water' under threat

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1188866.ece

Urban sprawl and climate change have combined to put yet another comforting certainty of American urban life at risk. New York City's tap water, held by admirers to be the "champagne of drinking waters", may now have to be filtered to protect its legendary purity.

Until now, New York has been able to avoid hugely expensive filtration plants thanks to a string of remarkably farsighted decisions during the 19th century. Instead of relying on dubious local water sources, the city fathers of the era invested in an elaborate system of reservoirs and aqueducts to collect water from pristine watershed areas upstate, and let gravity carry the pristine liquid south to the city itself.

Every day the network delivered 1.2 billion gallons of drinking water fit for the gods (at least in the opinion of boastful New Yorkers) to the eight million inhabitants of America's largest city. The H20 that flowed out of taps in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn would beat established mineral waters in blind tasting tests. It used to be shipped to other cities to make bagel and pizza dough - even to England, it is claimed, as an ingredient in the perfect cup of tea. But that may be true no longer.

In the early 1980s, the Croton segment - smallest and closest of the three segments into which the system serving New York is divided - had started to suffer from pollution caused by rapid suburban development, and a decision was taken to build a filtering plant, due for completion in 2009. Now, however, the two main systems - the Catskill and the Delaware - are also under threat. The culprit again is land development, but also the increasingly severe storms that many scientists attribute to climate change and global warming.

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1. This enrages me 35 years after Clean WAter Act was passed--same thing is

happening here in CT. Our water in the hills ends up in city reservoirs and other water supplies but the water cos. are selling their land and suburban sprawl is polluting the water. I just ended a bitter battle with my town over protecting water related to a schools project and the town acted like it was no big deal to literally tear up the landscape with no protection for surrounding waterways and the aquifer the land sits on. And the water co. said there is no problem with building this huge project on top of the aquifer, to make things worse.

:grr: