Well water is bad for you? Hmmm...seems to me that my well water is cleaner, tastes better, and has less crap in it than most muni supplies.
Well, then--if you don't have a bad case of the liquid shits, it must work.
Anyway, I tested water for 13 years. The amounts of chlorine a water authority needs to add, to kill everything in it, all depends on where the supply is located/has to run through (if it comes aboveground). If it comes through/originates in old cow pastures (such as the City of Amsterdam in NY is rumored to have), lots of chlorine is needed. This produces chloroform in the water when it reacts with dissolved methane. Chloroform tends to sediment out of water fairly close to the point of chlorination, so either 1) There's a lot of chorination points, or 2) A whole buttload of chlorine is added at once.
'Course, if a muni
brominates its' drinking water, all of the above still applies, except the chloroform part--it becomes bromoform. And, if a muni goes high-tech and
ozonates its' drinking water, you get things like acetone in the water.
What's the solution (no pun intended)? 1. Drink well water . . . but have it tested! We had an incident a few years ago in Putnam County where dry cleaning solvents were showing up in private wells. It was pretty random. So, one Saturday afternoon, I huddled with the field investigator over a topo map of the area and the results, matching them up to individual houses. The only thing we could think of was that some dry cleaning outfit was illegally dumping their used dry-cleaning solvents. So, I suggested to the field investigator that she drop in to a few of the local dry cleaning outlets, and mention that we had found solvents in private wells. Also, she should suggest that we were pretty sure
which dry cleaner it was, but couldn't nail it down . . .
yet. For some
unknown reason, the contamination in that area
suddenly stopped.
Oh--almost forgot Option 2--Buy a filter and
use it.
