This week is National Drinking Water Week. Officially it’s May 1st through the 7th 2022. It has been in existence since Ronald Reagan. His administration decided that there should be a week where we celebrate water and all of the vital roles that water plays in our lives. That tradition has continued on through today but, sadly, water quality continues to decline all across the US.
Yes, water is critically important to our lives. We drink it. We bathe in it. We water our plants in our pets with it. It waters our crops. It washes our clothes. It boils our vegetables. Plus many many more important applications in our life. Water is absolutely essential to life.
But during this week that is devoted to our water, it seems like a missed opportunity to not talk about what is going wrong with our water supplies. For example, the quality of our drinking water in particular has never been worst. A combination of pollution, drought, corroding pipes, and an influx of new contaminants all have made our drinking water unsafe. Over 30,000 contaminants have been identified in our drinking water and our water treatment plants only treat a few hundred of them.
Politicians have been gutting the EPA and the Clean Water Act for decades. Now there aren’t enough water treatment plants to remove the numerous amount of contaminants in our water supplies. There also isn’t enough money to upgrade existing municipal water treatment facilities to be able to remove new contaminants. Because of this, over half of our waterways are unswimmable and unfishable and our drinking water is unsafe to drink.
Drinking Water Week 2022 could be a great opportunity to bring up all of these issues to public awareness. We need to have a serious discussion about what to do next. The sad reality is if we don’t start treating our water better, it’s going to get worse and worse. The people drinking it are going to get sicker and sicker. And maybe one day it won’t be safe for our kids to ever swim in a river or lake again. We certainly hope it never gets to that point. But having a week that celebrates water without addressing all the problems with water seems like a wasted event.
The bottom line is that it’s imperative for all of us to use advanced filtration to treat our tap water before we drink it. It’s simply not safe to drink straight out of the taps. Water ionizers offer multistage filtration plus water ionization to restore antioxidants to your drinking water. But not every household in America can afford a water ionizer. More has to be done. We certainly hope that our country can have a serious discussion about water quality soon. We are running out of time and our children are counting on us.
