Do you drink the tap water where you live?

[MikeTbob]

You know what they say......that which doesn't kill you, will make you stronger. I drink tap water daily and it isn't the best tasting water but it's safe and mostly free. I think in this day and age we are way too overbearing about our water drinking habits. I think mankind has survived a long time before bottled water became available and we'll continue to do so into the future. There are a few places where I would not be tempted to drink water from and the Nevada Desert is one of them, after 50 years of nuclear testing, you just know the underground springs and aquifers are becoming contaminated.

[thornspear]

In Mexico where a lot of my family now lives, we boil the water (which is chlorinated, but stored in cisterns that can get contaminated) and then put it in a big earthenware ceramic jug to cool and aerate. The boiling and aeration helps get rid of the excess chlorine so the resulting water tastes pretty good. We use the boiled water for drinking and cooking there. The tap water is used for washing only. That's been the process there for going on 50 years since my sister moved to Mexico in 1961, and nobody in the family has gotten sick from the water yet.

That's pretty intense, now I feel like I take mine for granted. Although for years at my cottage we had no electricity or running water, so we had to bring buckets from the lake for washing and flushing the toilets, and drive into town and collect clean drinking water from a tap at the fire-station.

[Rubberman]

When I was living in a 'burb outside of Boston, the town water supply had some sort of leakage that contaminated the water for weeks until it was repaired and all the lines flushed. We could only use the water for the toilet and clothes washing. This was in the 1990's. In a suburban community south of Chicago they found out that the water has been contaminated with dangerous chemicals for years, causing who knows what sort of problems. A big kerfuffle arose from that, for sure! It had been covered up by the town authorities for about 5 years from the time they found out about it - they were falsifying their reporting records to the state and federal authorities! So, you just never know! These are reasons why I prefer to drink bottled water, and use a good filtration system if I'm going to drink tap, though that doesn't always help with the chemical impurities. However, activated carbon filters combined with a good reverse osmosis filter will deal with most chemicals and bacterial contaminants to a greate extent.

[Rubberman]

You know what they say......that which doesn't kill you, will make you stronger.

Or, it will just give you cancer in 10 or 20 years!

[thornspear]

Or, it will just give you cancer in 10 or 20 years!

Hahaha, nicely put Rubberman!

[Rubberman]

My dad and I built a cabin up in the Colorado Rockies back in the '60s where we had a fairly deep well dug down into the water table. I think the well was a couple hundred feet, with clean water at about 60'. It was cold, clean, clear, and pure enough to drink without anything but particulate filtering, but it had a lot of disolved iron in it. Great tasting, but one problem was if you used it to water your whiskey it would not lighten the color, so people tended to over-water their hooch!

[MikeTbob]

Or, it will just give you cancer in 10 or 20 years!

See my comment above on Nevada water...I try to avoid cancerous water tables.
On a more serious note, we have a lake here in N Texas that is considered "unsafe" to consume fish from but this same lake provides most of the drinking water in the region (is that crazy or what?) and we also have a lot of people who do consume these fish without any apparent ill effects, so far. Of course the guy who told me about consuming the fish, did not have any teeth, very little hair, bad skin and was just generally an ugly dude.

[thornspear]

Of course the guy who told me about consuming the fish, did not have any teeth, very little hair, bad skin and was just generally an ugly dude.

LOL, well hopefully those aren't first hand personal side-effects from consuming the fish :s

[Rubberman]

MikeTBob's comment about the guy w/ the fish kind of reminds me of this old joke.

A guy goes to see a doctor for a check up. He tell's the doctor that he smokes 2 packs a day, drinks a pint or more of whiskey, has a different woman every night when the doctor asks if he has any lifestyle habits that might affect his health. The doctor says "That's remarkable! You are in excellent health for a man 65 years old!". The guy replies back to the doctor "Doc, I just turned 35 last week!".