Drinking Water (15 page)

Commemoration of the drinking fountain adjoining St. Sepulchre’s church, April 30, 1859

The Victorian period prized charitable works. It also prized ostentatious shows of good works. As a result, many of the drinking fountains were quite ornate and impressive works of architecture in their own right. This extended to a number of public drinking fountains whose pillars, arches, and filigree seemed to hold themselves out as a cathedral to the good works of free drinking water.

The origin of the drinking fountain in America, perhaps not surprisingly, was more commercial. The first bubbler was marketed by the Kohler Company from Wisconsin, whose device sent a stream of water straight up, mimicking the action of a vertical fountain. The invention was a hit and coincided with the popular rejection of communal drinking cups in the early 1900s. Soon the market was dominated by two companies, the Halsey Taylor Company and the Haws Sanitary Drinking Faucet Company.

Both companies’ founders were motivated by more than commercial gain. Halsey Willard Taylor’s father had died from typhoid fever, contracted from drinking contaminated water. Luther Haws worked as a sanitary inspector for the city of Berkeley, California. Legend has it that Haws was inspecting a public school and was disturbed by the sight of children sharing a common drinking cup. Both companies’ devices employed the same basic design. The building’s water supply line was piped directly to the fountain. Pushing the bar or button released a stream of pressurized water at a constant flow. Releasing the bar or button put the seal back in place, stopping the water flow. Taylor soon improved his fountain with a double bubbler design. Twin jets of water were released, intersecting a few inches from the opening. This provided both a larger drink of water and moved the mouth (and any germs it might impart) farther from the fountain itself.

In a Victorian monument from Kidderminster, for example, the drinking fountains seem almost an afterthought to the grandeur of the civic edifice
.

As the popularity of drinking fountains grew, a number of developments were rapidly adopted. The early fountains provided water at room temperature. The demand for chilled water was met by larger units that contained twenty-pound blocks of ice. In time, these were replaced by refrigerated units. The Berkeley school system
adopted the first public drinking fountains, and public schools soon became a major market for both companies. Because school halls were narrow with many students passing through, freestanding drinking fountains gave way to wall-mounted fountains. In time, these were replaced by recessed wall fountains that freed up even more space in the halls. Such units also became fixtures at hospitals, factories, and airports.

In recent years, the most significant changes have been in response to the needs of people in wheelchairs. Responding to this market and pushed by the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, drinking fountains are increasingly provided side by side at different levels, offering comfortable sipping heights both for those standing and those seated.

Sadly, the days of easily available public drinking fountains seem to be drawing to a close. As we shall see later, the meteoric rise of bottled water and public acceptance of bottled water as an alternative to drinking fountains have increasingly led to construction of new stadiums, airports, and other public places that hide or even eliminate the presence of drinking fountains. When drinking water is viewed as a commodity, free provision becomes not only unnecessary but anticapitalist. When is the last time you saw a dispenser of free bread, fruit, or vegetables in a public place?

T
HE BURIED PIPES THAT CHANNEL WATER TO OUR FAUCETS AND
carry wastes from our drains form the skeleton of our distribution system. Out of sight, our water and sewage pipes never inspire a second’s thought until they fail. This willful ignorance creates a real problem, however, because our nation’s water infrastructure has become increasingly enfeebled.

While a rough measure, every two minutes a major water line bursts in the United States. It may be in Topeka, Kansas, or Tucumcari, New Mexico. In our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., the rate is about one pipe break a day. When I lived there, I was shocked to come home one day and see a geyser bubbling in the middle of the road in front of my house. The massive pressure
from a burst line had forced water from five feet underground up to the surface, casting aside large slabs of asphalt.

The cause in all these cases is the same: inadequate investment in our pipes and treatment plants. Some of our water and sewer lines date from the Civil War. Many more were built in the 1900s. The massive pipes described in
Chapter 2
that supply New York City are leaking thirty-six million gallons per day. Engineers fear that their structural integrity has become so compromised that draining the pipes for repair might cause them to buckle and collapse under the weight of the soil on top. Residents in some areas of Washington, D.C., cannot drink from their taps because of lead in their water, released from the lead soldering used to join the household pipes decades ago. On average, Philadelphia has to deal with more than two breaks in water and sewer lines every day.

Despite the obvious importance, gaining funding to rebuild our water and sewer lines has proven elusive. In recent memory, when hundreds of billions of dollars of TARP money was being disbursed by Congress for “shovel-ready” projects, only $2 billion was dedicated to water projects. People point to the Clean Water Act’s tough regulations as the explanation for why our nation’s water quality has improved in recent decades. These regulations have been significant, but equally if not more important were the billions of dollars provided to states and municipalities for the construction and enhancement of water treatment and sewage plants.

Perhaps the failure to invest in our water infrastructure should not be surprising. These arteries and veins of our water system are invisible, buried beneath roads, fields, and buildings. The only time we think about them is when they no longer work. And the sums required to remedy the decades of underfunding are massive. The EPA estimates we need $335 billion simply to maintain our drinking water systems. New York alone claims to need $36 billion to maintain its wastewater systems. To be sure, these are large sums, but compared to what? How much would it cost were our water distribution and treatment systems to fail? It is no exaggeration to say that we are playing on borrowed time as our aging water infrastructure continues to give way.

S
O HOW ARE WE DOING
? F
OR THE PAST CENTURY, THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
has paid increasing attention to eliminating the scourge of waterborne contaminants, and the results have been impressive. Most people can drink their tap water, confident in its safety. Most, but not all. Estimates vary, but the
New York Times
reports that roughly nineteen million Americans become sick each year from waterborne parasites, viruses, and bacteria. A study by UNESCO found that
E. coli
and other waterborne pathogens result in about nine hundred deaths of Americans every year. Not all of this is the result of tap water, but safe water is by no means guaranteed, even today.

The single greatest outbreak of waterborne illness in U.S. history occurred just two decades ago, in 1993, when the city of Milwaukee was terrorized by a tiny parasite in the drinking water,
Cryptosporidium parvum
. For two weeks, the city’s Howard Avenue treatment plant provided contaminated water to people’s faucets. The plant’s intake was located at a site in Lake Michigan that directly received the discharge of the Milwaukee River, making the plant’s intake susceptible to a recent fecal contamination. More than 400,000 people, roughly one-quarter of the city’s population, became ill with stomach cramps, diarrhea, and fever. Those with weak immune systems were most at risk, and sixty-nine people died.

The problem here was not failure to regulate.
Cryptosporidium
is a well-known microbe. Rather, this was a simple case of human error—with tragic results. Just as in ancient Rome and Victorian London, safe drinking water cannot be guaranteed without proper source identification, protection, treatment, and distribution. Breakdowns in any of these areas can lead to disaster, and the sheer scale of modern-day water consumption virtually ensures that some contaminants will eventually make it through. Looking back through history, however, we can take heart that even though the dangers remain very real, we’ve come a long, long way toward controlling the risks. Of course, it is one thing to combat disease-causing microbes, which generally present obvious symptoms and can be diagnosed quickly. But what if the problem is harder to detect and takes much longer to show its harm?

HOW DID VENICE GET ITS DRINKING WATER?

Venice is one of the great marvels of the modern world and a most unlikely place. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Venice reigned as the wealthiest city in Europe and arguably in the world. Its fleets dominated trade in the Mediterranean region. Yet it was entirely artificial. Originally a series of settlements on 117 small islands lying across a shallow lagoon, the city we know came into being through ingeniously reclaimed land. Over centuries, thousands of wooden piles were driven into the thick sand and mud until resting on the harder layers of clay below. These provided solid foundations for the sea walls and infill creating the larger islands we admire today, stunningly interlocked by canals and footbridges. Its admirers call Venice “La Serenissima”—The Most Serene.

In terms of drinking water, Venice more resembles a ship than a city, for there are no ready sources of surface water or groundwater. An early observer wrote, “Venice is in the water and has no water.” How did one of the most populous cities in the West provide water to its citizens? It looked to the sky.

Rainwater falling from roofs and streets flowed into town squares (
campi
), where it was directed into specially designed cisterns. The cisterns were built by digging a ten foot pit beneath the
campi
, its sides lined with impermeable clay. A hollow cylindrical shaft would be built in the center of the pit, rising to street level and formed by special curved bricks known as
pozzali
. The rest of the hole would then be filled with sand and the pit covered over with stones. Someone strolling along the
campi
would notice a well-head in the center (capping the cylindrical shaft below) and, at each corner, perforated stone slabs through which water could flow into the pit below. Over time, the pit would become saturated with rainwater, purified as it passed through the sand. The water would make its way through the bricks forming the cylindrical shaft and into the well, but the larger sand particles would be filtered out. From the wellhead, water was free for the taking from the shaft below. Centuries before science knew the first thing about microbes, Venice likely provided the cleanest urban drinking water in the world.

A cross-section of the well shaft and sand drainage in a Venetian square

This system served well until the 16th centurye. Venice had stopped reclaiming land so the increasingly dense population needed somewhere to live, making open space scarce. This posed a real problem because the system of cisterns beneath the
campi
required large amounts of unbuilt urban areas to collect rainwater. The Venetians adopted an ingenious new strategy.
Campi
were lost to new construction, but dwellings were now required to build a cistern within their foundations. Rainwater falling on the roof was collected by gutters into clay pipes built into the walls that led directly down to the cistern below the basement. By the middle of the 19th century, there were over 6,000 of these “inside cisterns.”