People with experience working in and around municipal water infrastructure: Do you drink tap water? Are there times when you do not?
People with experience working in and around municipal water infrastructure: Do you drink tap water? Are there times when you do not?
This question is obviously intended for those that live in places where tap water is "safe to drink."
I live in Southern California, where I'm at the end of a long chain of cities. Occasionally, the tap smells of sulfur, hardness changes, or it tastes... odd. I'm curious about the perspective of people that are directly involved and their reasoning.
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I live in Minnesota. Close to Minneapolis. My brother does testing for swimming pools. He tested the city water for contaminates. He says do not drink it. If the level of chlorine in the city water was in pool water the pool would be shut down. It would not be safe to even swim in it. Yet the city claims it's safe to drink.
Not that I don't trust your brother who... works for the pools, but is there any data to back up this claim? The claim that, if I read right, that there's more chlorine in tap water than in the pools? Sounds like something we could easily have tested.
I'm going to message my brother to get a better answer of what I just replied with. My answer still needs more clarification
Good, because as for my anecdotal evidence, I have family and friends who have lived in MSP for decades without any health issues and they all drink tap water.
I'm going to do my best to explain this.
When a pool is tested to see if chlorine needs to be added (if there are impurities) they will typically add free chlorine. The free chlorine will combine with the impurities. The odor that you smell when you go to a pool is the free chlorine evaporating out. but some of the chlorine will stay in the pool as combined chlorine. it combined with the impurities.
After a while there isn't enough chlorine in the pool and the impurities build back up.
Repeat the process.
The real problem is when you get to much combined chlorine in a pool. The health authorities will tell you to either fix it or close it.
How do you get rid of combined chlorine? You add free chlorine with will break the combined chlorine.
The combined chlorine can cause health issues. (that is why the health authorities will tell you to fix it). usually a good pool maintainer will detect the issue and just fix it before a notice is handed over.
Now our city puts chlorine into the drinking water to get rid of impurities (in laymans terms : the bad things in the water you don't want to drink). We used to put free chlorine into the drinking water.
The nice thing was they would add the free chlorine it would get rid of the impurities and most of the free chlorine would just go away. (evaporate) .
the down side? we kept having to add more and more (that was expensive.
some genius decided to switch from free chlorine to combined chlorine for the drinking water. combined DOESN'T go away by itself. you have to break combined chlorine.
the benefit was it cost a LOT less doing it this way.
the downside is you shouldn't be drinking combined chlorine. Think about it. if there is to much combined chlorine in the pool and it's listed as unsafe to swim in , then why would be it safe to drink it? to fix food in it? to bath in it ? to take a shower in it? it's illogical.
yet that is exactly what the city did.
i hope that i got that explained correctly.
prolonged exposure to combined chlorine can lead to asthma, allergies and other health issues
Sure, that all makes sense, but it's still anecdotal.
I'm not a chemist, but "combined chlorine" from what I read is also known as "Chloramine". Going from there, I went to both Minneapolis and St Paul's water supply. I couldn't fine chloramine levels for St Paul but Minneapolis does have it, and it's listed at 3.9ppm.
Now, knowing that, I went to the EPA to figure out what a safe level was, and turns out they have an entire page about this mostly due to fear mongering and misinformation. In fact they have a blurb describing exactly what you're talking about:
Many public water systems (PWSs) use chlorine as their primary disinfectant. However, some PWSs changed their secondary disinfectant to chloramines to meet disinfection byproduct requirements. Since then, consumers have raised questions about this switch in disinfection.
From the EPA's basic information site, The drinking water standard for chloramines is 4 parts per million (ppm) measured as an annual average.
They also included a full scientific study on how it affects us, if you're good with it I'd suggest reading up.
It also looks like the EPA and most cities started doing this back in the 1930s, so this is not a new thing Minneapolis just started doing, it's actually been standard practice for a while.
By pure luck you got someone who's SO worked for years making pool testing kits, and I asked them about this. They said:
Sure, it can be an issue, and what they're saying is true, but the combined chlorine isn't really the issue. The bigger worry is that it easily binds to create carcinogens, so they check regularly to make sure both levels are low. We had machines that had automated sensors monitoring both to make sure they stayed in safe levels, it's very regulated at the municipal level.
If this is what you meant by "impurities", then yes, they track carcinogens extremely closely. They also have automated testers constantly running verifying that the water that passes through is safe.
Both St Paul and Minneapolis post their carcinogen numbers, and they are both well within safety parameters.
So, again, I am not a chemist, but this is one of those things that I have extreme skepticism on when someone says we don't have safe tap water. Our tap water is one of the only things I trust about governments because I know what happens when it doesn't work, and when it doesn't work we really know it doesn't work.
And hey, even if it is flying under the radar, you can buy kits to test them, my SO confirmed it's a pretty standard test and would show as failed immediately. If it did fail, from what I've read and what my SO tells me, you wouldn't be here, you wouldn't just be drinking bottled water, you'd be going to the press about it.
So, this stuff sounds really scary when you first read it. Hell, when I read what you said my stomach dropped, but then I thought "wait a minute, let's find out for sure". And by reading into it, I found out a lot of neat information and learned more about water treatment. So my main take away is that we need to stop believing what our friend told us and listen to the actual scientists. Things like water treatment sound really scary when we don't understand that science behind it, but that's the cool thing, we can let them. Passing on information we haven't vetted ourselves is a dangerous thing as we've learned over the last few years. It's on us to go personally validate if what we hear is true.
thank you for posting your information. and i will take some time to read through it.
also the guy i got this info from is one of the smartest individuals that i know (my brother). he has the ability to understand information in a way that many will miss.
does that mean that he is perfect? nope. he has made mistakes. and i will bring this up to him to see what he says.
but with the fact that he has tested the water, while i'm not going to blindly trust him. it does still make me concerned.
again i will bring this info to him. it should be an interesting conversation.
unrelated note here, but it will help you to understand his ability to look at things : when he messed up his heal of his foot. several doctors said there is nothing that you can do. it's permanent. he didn't like their answers, there was something in how they answered that just said "keep digging" . so he kept digging. he found out that if nothing is done (and time was running out) then it would be a life long issue .. he would (if I remember right) he would lose permanent feeling in the heal.
he kept doing research and calling people. he found a doctor in the cities. the doctor works on Minnesota Vikings players who had the same injury. the doctor said if he operates soon. it could be fixed. it got fixed. no issues at this point.
again i'm not saying my brother is perfect, please don't think that i am saying that he is.
he's definitely been wrong before. but with his ability to look at things in a different way and to not give up. he's found answers where others said there were none. he's found problems where others have missed the issue.
again thank you for the information.
edit: there are very few people i trust at the level that i trust my brother. it's the only reason i'm going to keep digging after you gave me the info.
Just remember to keep facts and figures as the most important thing when discerning the truth. Family may be trustworthy, they may be smart, but that doesn't mean they're experts in fields. You don't need to feel bad for trusting your brother, but know their limitations too.
Absolutely correct.
I apologize if I worded that poorly.
There are two types of chlorine. Free chlorine and combined chlorine.
I forget which is which. But one of the two you can only have a certain amount in swimming pools. If it goes above that amount then the pool is closed. They treat the pool to make sure it doesn't go over that amount. They use city water to fill the pool and then treat the water to fix the amount of chlorine (can't remember if it's free or combined,sorry). They say if the amount is to high there are health issues for swimming in it.
Yet somehow the amount of chlorine that is in the city water is ok to drink.
I think hey are talking about the chloramine that Minneapolis uses to disinfect. It is more stable and isn't just chlorine, so it would be in a "combined" result. The levels are page three of this report https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/media/content-assets/www2-documents/residents/2022-Consumer-Confidence-Report-FINAL.pdf It looks like 2023 isn't posted yet, but I doubt it changes much year to year.
I just learned about this, was kind of a fun dive! I just wrote up a big comment below with my findings, and you're exactly right, it's at perfectly safe numbers.
Either way, important to call out misinformation. I don't think this person did it on purpose, but their facts are definitely only partial, it took some research to get the whole picture.
Nice work on the write up! It is hard sorting things out when they're half true. For me, drinking water is especially important to get the fact straight on because of how bad it can go if the system fails. It would be silly to disregard anyone saying water wasn't up to a safe standard, but separating things I would care about out from the fluoride and chlorine background noise is tricky. Thanks for the deeper dive!
Thanks, yeah it can be a lot, and I think for a lot of people hearing that there's anything in the water sounds scary. It's great they publish reports monthly to verify everything
Chlorine levels so easy to test for, I’d be curious to see such a measurement… This sounds like a class action waiting to happen.
I'm going to do my best to explain this.
When a pool is tested to see if chlorine needs to be added (if there are impurities) they will typically add free chlorine. The free chlorine will combine with the impurities. The odor that you smell when you go to a pool is the free chlorine evaporating out. but some of the chlorine will stay in the pool as combined chlorine. it combined with the impurities.
After a while there isn't enough chlorine in the pool and the impurities build back up.
Repeat the process.
The real problem is when you get to much combined chlorine in a pool. The health authorities will tell you to either fix it or close it.
How do you get rid of combined chlorine? You add free chlorine with will break the combined chlorine.
The combined chlorine can cause health issues. (that is why the health authorities will tell you to fix it). usually a good pool maintainer will detect the issue and just fix it before a notice is handed over.
Now our city puts chlorine into the drinking water to get rid of impurities (in laymans terms : the bad things in the water you don't want to drink). We used to put free chlorine into the drinking water.
The nice thing was they would add the free chlorine it would get rid of the impurities and most of the free chlorine would just go away. (evaporate) .
the down side? we kept having to add more and more (that was expensive.
some genius decided to switch from free chlorine to combined chlorine for the drinking water. combined DOESN'T go away by itself. you have to break combined chlorine.
the benefit was it cost a LOT less doing it this way.
the downside is you shouldn't be drinking combined chlorine. Think about it. if there is to much combined chlorine in the pool and it's listed as unsafe to swim in , then why would be it safe to drink it? to fix food in it? to bath in it ? to take a shower in it? it's illogical.
yet that is exactly what the city did.
i hope that i got that explained correctly.
and yes i can forsee a class action lawsuit.
prolonged exposure to combined chlorine can lead to asthma, allergies and other health issues
Are you talking about using chloramine in disinfection? I think conflating pool water and drinking water standards is a bit of a mistake. Things get added to pools from people's bodies after chlorination that cause weird combined results. Drinking water is disinfected (chlorinated) as a final step. I would object to my municipality using chloramine, but not because I wouldn't drink it.