Going Back to Bottled Water

Click post title to go to article about one Albany councilor's campaign to enclose the water canal, running from the Santiam River in Lebanon through Lebanon and fields and parts of Albany, in a pipe. The article claims most of Albany's water now comes from a treatment plant on Scravel Hill. Most of the water?

I don't want to drink any water from that yucky canal. I don't want to drink any water that picks up the "muck" of Lebanon through the storm drains, as the article describes, nor the chemical run off from all those farm fields. To read about how disgusted officials were to see the "muck" as they described the run off from Lebanon, made me want to retch. I'm not sure if one can trust water officials really, that the water isn't full of all sorts of bad things. It's so hard for the average jane and joe to know anymore.

I don't even want the asphalt and car run off in my water as it comes through Albany. There was an article once in the paper about a man who was swimming in the canal looking for his false teeth.

The Santiam River itself is a problem as a water supply in the summer, because of Foster Reservoir. In the summer, that lake is alive with jet skiis that pour out enormous amounts of gas when they run. That gas and oil ends up in the Santiam. I didn't understand the full implication of how much these jet skiis give off when running until I began swimming in Foster Reservoir now and then. Sometimes, when I'd swim up there, the smell of gas from jet skiis was overpowering. There would be a sheen of gas on the surface of the water in places.

I'm going back to drinking bottled water. I know, it probably comes from some other municipalities contaminated water too. I just read some article that the majority of city water supplies are highly contaminated. Before, people would say city water supplies are the safest to drink. I believed that, since you really don't know where bottled water comes from.

But I guess, according to the report, they're not really testing for most contaminants in city water supplies, like farm and yard chemicals, and pharmaceuticals passed into the water supply due to improper disposal methods of hospitals and individuals and through people's pee, in our society where people take handfuls of over the counter and prescription drugs each day.

There is concern too over the safety of sewage sludge, hauled to eager farmers for cut rate fertlizer, to use on crop fields. This is due also to the large numbers of contaminants flushed down the toilet, or in our own waste passed through our bodies and improper disposal of hospital drugs that ends up in the sludge waste and perhaps in anything grown in that. At least in the valley, most of the farm land is not used for food crops, just for growing grass seed, which is sold as a garden product for growing yard grass and sports fields, but not for eating.

My brother's mother in law got breast cancer. She's depressed, I hear, over it, because she's led a healthy lifestyle with healthy eating habits. My brother has tried to console her, telling her there is no way to avoid cancer causing chemicals anymore in our world. He's probably right.