The Water Detectives

SO what is coming out of the tap?

You might not want to know. The water comes out of streams in which fish have sex and pine cones rot. New York’s watershed does not exist in an aseptic vacuum: people drive around reservoirs, acid rain falls everywhere, and mud tends to slide downhill.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection monitors it all. It samples water at 500 locations throughout the distribution system, and at 965 monitoring stations within the city. In 2005, technicians working around the clock drew 33,200 samples from little silver boxes on the streets, measuring such things as temperature (warmth can indicate stagnant water), chlorine, specific conductance (a measure of mineral content) and level of orthophosphate (added to create a film on pipes to prevent lead contamination).

After recording all the data on the streets, from the backs of their white sport utility vehicles, the technicians converge on a high-rise in Corona, Queens, the agency’s urban nerve center. They wheel their plastic coolers full of samples to a lab on the sixth floor and hand the day’s catch to a team of 30 chemists and microbiologists.

It’s the microbiologists’ job to find bacteria in the water. And make no mistake, they are there, many different types, including the occasional E. coli, which can cause severe illness.

from the NY Times