Drink it up!

The city of Kirkland, WA (along with several other nearby cities) prides itself on the quality of tap water. "You can even drink the water right out of your faucet" - they say in their newsletter. "So what?" - I always thought to myself, - "This is OK water, nothing particularly great... Not like it's some kind of mineral spring miracle water, right? And besides, I always used to drink water right out of the faucet, what's so special about that?"

Well, as it is becoming more and more of a tradition, I was dead wrong about that. Turns out, it is pretty special. Turns out, that really was great tap water.

The best way to get rid of naïve illusions? Just drink from a Boston faucet! Wait, what the heck am I talking about?! You don't even have to drink (might actually be dangerous) - just smell it.

No, really. The tap water in Boston smells like garbage. And I'm not exaggerating here: it really, really, smells exactly like the inside of my kitchen trash can (and for those in doubt, I'd clarify: the trash can itself is located on the other side of the kitchen - farthest from the sink).

We actually have a water filter installed (a good one, not that junk type that you screw on the end of your faucet), and I'm used to put a couple drops of lemon juice in my water glass, but even these measures don't eliminate the smell completely.

Yes, I've heard that story about old pipes, most of which are leaking, and it's very expensive to replace them, but they're still doing their best, blah-blah-blah... But wait a minute! Ok, the pipes are old. And leaking. But I still don't see where the trash smell would come from. Is it that all the good smell is leaking out of old pipes, and only the bad smell stays in, just to spoil our lives, because, you know, it's just bad? Or is it that somehow something external is leaking into the pipes? Well, that external stuff must be under a lot of pressure then: you know, the water in the pipes is under pressure, so you have to have even greater pressure to sneak something in.

And speaking about the old pipes. Just about a week ago, one of those broke down. A big one. Or, to say it more precisely, the big one. The pipe in the city of Weston that all the water for the eastern Massachusetts goes through. That includes Boston, Brookline, Newton, Cambridge, and a couple dozens other cities.

[Update: according to a nice anonymous commenter, Cambridge was not affected. It has it's own water supply]

Of course, in the richest country in the world, in the most "for-the-people-by-the-people" state in that country, there must be a back up. Some kind of reserve, just for this kind of situation. And there was, of course, mind you. But guess what? Not for drinking. So the Water and Sewer Commission has issued a "boil order" - that is, all the good people of eastern Massachusetts, please be so kind and boil your water before drinking, while we're trying to clean up the mess. And for the whole week (there was apparently no way to fix it quicker than that), all the good people of eastern Massachusetts were boiling their water and saving it in pans and pitchers to cool down - because, just coincidentally, this turned out to be some of the unusually hot days for this time of year, so nobody wanted to drink it hot.

A quick side note: some of the Starbucks coffee shops that I've happened to come by were closed, with a note on their doors saying: "We're sorry, but our corporate office ordered us to close due to water pipe break". Poor Seattle-based Starbucks corporation, scared to death by some minor disturbance like this. It sits on it's clean water supply and just doesn't know what the real life is, apparently.