Even here in the mountain valley splendor of Paonia,
Colo., where the people are pleasant, the summers fine, the winters
mild and the autumns spectacular, things go wrong sometimes. A few
weeks back, everyone in town came home to find a piece of colored
paper taped to his or her front door. The door-postings announced,
in what amounted to screaming headlines, an official BOIL ORDER. It
seemed as if a plague of God had rained down upon previously nearly
perfect Paonia.
If not biblically cataclysmic, the
situation was serious. What Paonians had always taken as a
birthright – pure mountain spring water, piped straight down from
Mount Lamborn – now contained turbidity. And not
just a bit of turbidity. Because of heavy rains, Paonia’s water now
contained as much as 25 units of turbidity – way more than a
Paonian could withstand.
So we needed to boil our
drinking water. And if you want to understand the value of water,
all it takes is to have a BOIL ORDER lying around the kitchen.
Suddenly, water is – why, it’s in everything!
With a boil
order in effect, you do not brush your teeth first thing in the
morning. First thing in the morning, you boil the water with which
you will brush your teeth. You do not fill up the coffee maker. You
boil a big pot of water, and then decide whether you’ll use it all
making coffee, or maybe settle for a teabag thrown in a cupful of
boiled water. You do not measure out cans of water to mix with
frozen orange juice concentrate; you give the kids milk for
breakfast instead, because after two or three days, you’re good and
sick of everything to do with the BOIL ORDER.
So you go
out and buy a couple of 5-gallon jugs of bottled water and quit
boiling water. For anything. Even eggs. After a week or so, during
which every restaurant in town competed as to which would have the
largest sign announcing its food had been prepared entirely with
bottled water, the turbidity was conquered. The order was lifted,
and Paonia was back to being very nearly perfect.
But as
Peter Friederici explains in this issue’s cover story, “Facing the
Yuck Factor,” dry places across the West are facing water supply
and purity problems that make a BOIL ORDER seem quaint. Some
Western cities, in fact, are so close to being completely out of
water that they’re planning to directly recycle their own sewage
treatment effluent as drinking water.
In some sense, of
course, we’ve been drinking effluent – recycled through lakes,
rivers, oceans, clouds, rain, snow and aquifers – for all of
history. And today’s purification technology can turn effluent into
drinking water that’s cleaner than what now comes out of many
big-city taps. Even so, San Diego has discovered that “toilet to
tap” isn’t exactly a winning political slogan. As the journalistic
cliche-makers might say: Only time will tell if another explanation
of direct effluent recycling will be more palatable to the voting
citizenry.
I don’t imagine “Just one BOIL ORDER this
year!” is going to excite the pleasant voters of Paonia, either,
but we’ll just have to wait and see there, too. It’s kind of hard
to predict how the winds of change may blow, in a town that’s
already very nearly perfect.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Effluent, effluent everywhere.
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