Today's tap water concerns
are a drop in history's bucket
By Kevin Dougherty,
Staff writer
According to Finnish folklore, the first offspring yielded three
sons.
The youngest son born to Air was Iron. Before him came Fire. And the
“oldest of the brothers,” as the story goes, was Water.
From time immemorial, water has been a central element of life on
Earth, both in substance and in spirit. Whether one peruses the Bible, the Koran or any of
the national epics, such as Finland’s “The Kalevala,” references abound to
water’s dominion over life.
The Incas, for instance, viewed Titicaca, the largest lake in South
America, as the center of the ancient world. Early inhabitants of the Canary Islands
believed an indigenous tree turned mist into life-sustaining water.
The Greeks and Romans revered water, and later sought to harness its
vast powers and potential. And the Chinese grasped the natural cycle of water 500 years
before the birth of Christ.
“Water,” said Heiko Welp, the chief bioenvironmentalist at
Ramstein Air Base in Germany, “meant power.”
And concerns about water quality and water rights didn’t spring
up yesterday.
It was the Greek philosopher Aristotle who advised Alexander the
Great to have his men dispose of animal and human feces far from camp.
“Alexander the Great had his soldiers boil their [drinking]
water,” said Dirk Schoenen, a professor at the Institute for Hygiene in Bonn,
Germany. “He also told them to use silver vessels to carry their water.”
The ancient Greeks and Romans knew little, if anything, about
bacteria and what caused certain diseases. Microbiology just didn’t exist. But
through trial and error — sometimes at great cost — these great societies
figured enough out about humans, animals and plants to advance their world and
subsequently ours. With water being such a central component to life, it was only natural
for them to give it great attention.
“There was general knowledge that water had problems,”
Schoenen said.
One of the ways expanding empires, such as the Romans, monitored the
quality of the water around them was to assess the health of the people living near its
source.
The Romans also sought to harness water for public and private use.
One of their most enduring legacies are the aqueducts they built to transport water. Some
still stand to this day, a testament to Roman ingenuity.
Another advancement for the ages was the evolution of plumbing, lead
in particular. In fact, the Latin term plumbus means lead. The use of lead pipes, however,
gave rise to lead poisoning.
The Barbarians (basically primitive people, which, at one time,
included Anglo-Saxons) weren’t concerned about hygienics or water management when
they filled the void created by the fall of the Roman Empire. Those indifferences were
some of the reasons Europe slipped into the Dark Ages, an era characterized by poverty and
intellectual and cultural stagnation.
Europeans eventually emerged from those dark days, but it wasn’t
until the 19th century that significant progress in water treatment and sanitation
advanced the world in ways relative to those ancient empires.
But even then there were problems. Water-borne diseases devastated
European communities well into the 19th century. The 1854 cholera outbreak killed almost
150,000 people in France alone. Cholera, an intestinal disease, is still a concern in many
Third World countries.
A crucial step toward improving water quality was the development of
a filtration system using sand, Schoenen said. That process originated in Scotland between
1810 and 1820. While the United States today tends to treat its water with chemicals,
European nations, such as Germany, opt for filtration even though it is costlier.
“We don’t think water should be disinfected” with
chemicals, Schoenen said.
The value of having clean drinking water — whatever the process
— is readily apparent to the U.S. military, which spends millions of dollars each
year to ensure a safe supply of water. And the focus isn’t only on water pipes and
chlorine.
Whenever troops deploy to a new location for a contingency operation,
pallets of bottled water arrive early and often. At other times, desalination plants are
set up to turn salt water into something drinkable, though it’s an acquired taste.
On an individual level, walk into any office on any military
installation in the theater and you are likely to see a couple of 1.5-liter bottles
perched on desktops. Americans, especially those in the military, are accustomed to
drinking water — clear, clean water.
That may explain why so many residents have been so critical of the
water that emerges from their apartment faucets in the military housing areas in Europe.
“The water is not that great,” said Carol Sunday of
Baumholder, Germany.
In some respects, it isn’t.
On the other hand, it is.
Consider these tidbits:
Earth is pretty much an enclosed system, neither losing nor gaining
much matter, including water. So the water we consume today is essentially the same water
the ancient Greeks and Romans drank and bathed in epochs ago.
According to the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., the
United States uses more water per capita than any other nation. The daily domestic
consumption for an American family is 100 to 176 gallons. In Africa, that figure is about
5 gallons.
A Stockholm Water Foundation brochure states that a billion people
spend three hours of their day walking for water.
There is great irony with respect to this irreplaceable fluid, what
“The Kalevala” called “the oldest lotion.” Water covers roughly 70
percent of the Earth, and yet only about 1 percent of it is fresh water. It’s as if
the Gods or Mother Nature or whomever are teasing us with a full glass of water that we
can only sip.
English explorer James Cook confronted this dilemma when he toured
the South Pacific in the 18th century. When Earthlings set sail later this century into
the vastness of deep space, presumably en route to Mars, they’ll probably carry with
them some type of divining rod.
The Gods would have it no other way.
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