Tap water is bad.
But so is bottled water.
Filtered water is better but it filters out minerals.
Remember when the city of Flint was drinking lead and how it killed the population.
Not quite.
After decades of having its users not pay their water bills, the Flint Water Utility could no longer afford to operate. As a cost savings measure, politicians decided to switch from water supplied by the City of Detroit, to water from the Flint River, while a pipeline to Lake Huron was being built.
The Flint River is of low water quality and required high chlorine doses for disinfection. Leaving water with a high chlorine residual in the water lines promoted the formation of TTHMS and the leaching of lead out of the homeowner’s lead water services. There was an outbreak of Legionnaires disease that killed people, but lead didn’t.
So after decades of not having their customers pay their water bills, the Flint Water Utility did not have the money to replace the lead services lines up to the homeowner’s property line. Of course as many of you know, the homeowner is responsible for replacing their own water service from the property line to their house (which the citizens of Flint did not do).
The result was an increase of lead levels in children, which is harmful and can cause a number of serious health issues. So what happened....the citizens who didn’t pay their water bills and who didn’t replace their part of their water service lines...protested until the taxpayers footed the bill for new lines, new water transmission lines, new water distribution lines, new treatment facilities, bottled water and home filtration units.
That’s a condensed version of what really happened. Understanding the demographics of Flint, MI makes this a lot easier to figure out how something like this could happen.
