Water's Journey

drewprops

There's a great documentary that's been running in Florida and the southeast about how aquifers coincide with human development and how they're inextricably linked. While two fully kitted divers swim through the aquifers two other guys track them with a handheld antenna setup. The guys on the ground follow the divers as they travel underneath golf courses, a Sonny's BBQ restaurant and a neighborhood. Along the way they found emptied 55 gallon drums, emptied 5 gallon containers of roofing tar and antifreeze. All of these pollutants are being dumped into the same water that is used to supply their drinking water.



People simply can't connect the water below-ground with the water above-ground, but this documentary has been doing a great job of getting the point across. It's quite intriguing to cut between the divers and the trackers. At one point the divers discover the bones of a Mammoth that have lain deep at the bottom of a sinkhole for 10,000 years or more.



Check your local PBS stations for a listing of this movie and try to catch it yourself because it's more than likely that YOUR part of the country benefits from these underground rivers....why do you think that people have wells everywhere?

chinney

There is a whole other river system down below the ground. Sounds like a worthwhile program.

buonrotto

Sarcasm and snideness aside, it does sound interesting. Thanks.

dmband0026

I live in Chicago, get my water from Lake Michigan. It's clean as a whistle...sorta

trick fall

I grew up on Long Island and we got our water from an aquifier. Can only imagine how polluted it is with all those golf courses and suburban lawns. I now have a house in upstate New York that has well water and would definitely think twice before putting any kind of chemical in the soil. Funny how you think about these things when you're that little bit more connected.

paul

NYC tap water is the best... possibly in the world... but most definitely in the US... only place that might have us beat is the villages in the southern mountains of italy that get all of their water from springs... (San Pellegrino is bottled there... they have sparkling and natural coming out of the ground... good stuff)



yet we seem to go through ungodly amounts of bottled poland spring anyway...

drewprops

There's a scene in the documentary where the divers run across the collector end of a homeowner's well, while above you see the trackers walking past the outside of a house and making a comment about the diver's being beneath the house's plumbing.....not knowing how right they were.



The problem with aquifers is that you don't know what your upstream neighbor has been dumping into his/her lawn. Apparently old school in Florida is to just dump your junk in a sinkhole. This doc could be helping to educate the residents, but since I don't live in the Sunshine State I have no idea if this is getting any play down there.

progmac

i remembered hearing about this on the radio...this town near me apparently has the best tap water in the world, literally



http://www.news8austin.com/content/t...es/?ArID=62567

gilsch

Quote:

Originally posted by Paul

NYC tap water is the best... possibly in the world... but most definitely in the US... only place that might have us beat is the villages in the southern mountains of italy that get all of their water from springs... (San Pellegrino is bottled there... they have sparkling and natural coming out of the ground... good stuff)



yet we seem to go through ungodly amounts of bottled poland spring anyway...

There's tons of other places where people get their water from unpolluted springs, rivers etc .



Where did you get that NYC tap water is the best in the world? Do you have studies that prove that? What exactly does "best" mean? The least amount of chemicals? What?



Tap water in a lot of places is better than a lot of bottled waters.



I am currently drinking water produced through a wonderful japanese machine that filters the tap water (chlorine and fluoride are not good)first, then breaks it down into smaller molecule clusters and alkalizes it through electrolysis.



The machine can produce highly acidic water(good for disinfecting, killing bacteria), mildly acidic water (great for the skin, astringent), purified water with a pH of 7, purified alkaline water(pH from 8 to 10) , and highly alkalized water (pH of 12+). I never knew water could be so powerful.



The water that I drink(pH of 9.5)has a higher absorption rate thanks to the smaller molecule clusters, has been purified, has a very low ORP(oxidation reduction potential) of around minus 400mV compared to tap water which is around plus 600 ORP.(n the plus range indicates oxidation.). It's awesome water. What water should be. Plus it's great for preventing hangovers.

giaguara

Quote:

Originally posted by Paul

NYC tap water is the best... possibly in the world... but most definitely in the US... only place that might have us beat is the villages in the southern mountains of italy that get all of their water from springs... (San Pellegrino is bottled there... they have sparkling and natural coming out of the ground... good stuff)

Yep. NYC tap water is cleaner than e.g. Evian .. which is weird, especially as it's so much more in to buy bottled water from Europe than drink the tap water..

trick fall

NYC water has won a lot of taste tests over the years. It actually comes from the Catskills and the towns around the upstate reservoirs signed a deal a few years ago that basically gave them cash to not develop any land near the reservoirs.

drewprops

Gilsch, give some links for that Japanese water machine!!!!!!!!!

chinney

There was a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine 2 months ago about NYC?s water supply. The aqueduct system through which an incredible amount of water is brought to the city from the countryside is a marvel of engineering. But there is one problem: no new aqueducts have been brought on line for many, many years and the existing ones are crumbling (the amount of water leaking along their length is enormous). Further, the existing aqueducts cannot even be shut down temporarily to allow for maintenance because the shut-off valves are so old that that if they were shut off the system engineers are not confident that they could ever open the valves again. NYC is spending a considerable amount of money to build a new aqueduct, but this is taking years: if I recall the article correctly, work on the new aqueduct started in the 1960s and is still far from being completed. According to the article, it is a race against time to see if the new aqueduct can be finished before one of the two main existing aqueducts fails.

danmacman

When I drink bottled water, it is Nestle's Aberfoyle Spring. At our house we have well water, which is surprisingly tasty. Has anyone had Fiji water? Ive heard so much about it, is it worth the hype?

trick fall

Fiji's pretty good. My favorite though is Volvic, but that might just be because of the movie the player.

t.fall

powerdoc

Quote:

Originally posted by trick fall

Fiji's pretty good. My favorite though is Volvic, but that might just be because of the movie the player.

t.fall

My favorite is Volvic, not only because i live only at one hour of the volcanoes, but because i love it's taste.