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Introduction Water. It’s all around us, and we barely take notice. Of all our daily needs, inevitably we think of clean drinking water last. We inspect our clothing carefully and we worry about the condition of our homes and automobiles. At the same time, we are painstakingly aware of the nutritional value and freshness of our food and, should the cost of a head of lettuce go up by fifteen cents, we would gladly lead a boycott. So why is water rarely in our thoughts? It’s not as if we don’t use much of it. A ten-minute shower in the morning uses twenty gallons. The dishwasher uses another twelve gallons each time it’s run. The toilet is the biggest offender of all though. Every man, woman, and child in America flushes away twenty-seven gallons a day. Are you planning on driving through a car wash today? Don’t ask. The average person in the United States uses 156 gallons of water daily. In Sunbelt states, where people religiously water their lawns, the figure exceeds 200. The residents of Phoenix, Arizona each use a whopping 220 gallons daily. On a July day in 1998, the citizens of Dallas each consumed a record-breaking 372 gallons. In Florida, more than half of the treated drinking water is used for watering grass—at residences, businesses and, especially, golf courses. There are, of course, scaremongers who don’t miss an opportunity to tell us that we are running out of water. According to them, we are dangerously close to a time when either we will once again be forced to dip buckets in the nearest river or submit to some draconian form of rationing. Can that be? Are we running out of water? All the gold ever mined would fit in a twenty-yard cube, but what about water? Exactly how much is there? Better stated, how much will we be able to harvest and turn into the pure, healthful liquid that we all know so well? The answer to these questions is both frightening and curiously optimistic. To begin with, only one percent of the water in the world is potable. Ninetyseven percent is seawater and the remaining two percent is frozen. Tell me…did the part about the one percent knot up your stomach a little? Now for the optimistic side of the equation. There is just as much water on the face of the earth today as there was three billion years ago because water can become polluted but it cannot be destroyed. Perhaps we are so wasteful because we know that there are talented hydraulic engineers waiting patiently to rescue us from ourselves. America’s history teaches us that, as a country, we can accomplish anything and providing good, clean drinking water will probably be no exception. There are approximately 55,000 community water companies in the United States (serving 500 customers or more). In this huge collection of water utilities, the fifty largest metropolitan areas quite naturally boast the biggest water works xiv and Hartford’s Metropolitan District Commission is the thirty-ninth largest in the country. But this only tells part of the story. Based on a recent study, of the fifty largest water companies in the United States, the MDC ranks fifth for the quality of the water it produces and distributes. (Of note here also is that, of the fifty largest water works in the nation, the cost of the MDC’s treated water falls smack in the middle of the pack; a little more than Richmond and Chicago and almost half the price charged in Norfolk and Seattle.) One of the reasons for such an astonishingly good product is our state legislators. The Environmental Protection Agency classifies water sources as to quality. Class A supplies are those of impounded waters with protected watersheds. Class B sources are lakes and rivers to which the public has access—meaning that effluent can be, and is, introduced therein. Only two states in the country, by law, forbid the use of Class B sources for drinking water— Connecticut and Rhode Island. A second, and more important, reason for the top quality drinking water that we enjoy in central Connecticut is the superb work of the hydraulic engineers, chemists, and other employees of the MDC. While the EPA requires tests for 111 pollutants and contaminants, the staff at the MDC routinely does 130 tests for everything from color and turbidity to protozoans, microbes and...

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