When I was a boy, we all used to drink from a spring that came bubbling out of the ground, a couple hundred yards from my house. People around the neighborhood used to come and fill bottles with the water. No one ever got sick.
The spring has been paved over. Gotta expand the school parking lot.
A little farther away there was another spring, a bigger one, in Roosevelt Park, a county park. My father used to send me there with half a dozen bottles at a time, in the 1970s. There would always be a crowd of people there. The water was pure and cold and delicious, and free.
I went to visit that spring yesterday. It’s still there; but for the first time ever, I found myself alone there. No one was getting any water. Maybe that’s because the County Water Dept. had posted signs all over the place, warning people “consume at your own risk: the source of this water is unknown and unprotected. We recommend boiling for a full two minutes before consuming.” In other words, they don’t know where the water originates from or how it gets to that precise spot in Roosevelt Park, and they don’t know whether it’s been tainted by pesticides or germs along the way.
The warning is certainly justified, but it’s a shame nonetheless. God gave the people in my neighborhood two springs of lovely drinking water, and one we’ve paved over and the other might be poisoned.
I know what actually happens when lib politicians–we don’t have any other kind, where I live–promise “to protect the environment.”
You’d better develop a taste for asphalt.
I know what you mean. When we lived in Idaho, there was a spring coming out of the mountainside beside the road. People, including us, went and took jugs full home, and it was wonderful. Wonder if it is still there. I know the town would not permit lot developers to drill their own wells; but everyone had to accept the inferior city water. A shame.
And why can’t they test the water to see if it is safe to drink? And why can’t they determine its source? Talk about imbecility! Here in Fort Smith, AR we have first use water from a lake north of us about 20 miles that is fed from the mountain runoff. No need for store-bought water in a plastic bottle. But recently they did begin putting fluorine in the water which was against the will of the people (yes, we have Rhinos in our Arkansas Assembly).
Well, our neighborhood spring is under a parking lot now, and I don’t know why they can’t test the water from the spring in the county park. You’d think they could do that easily enough.