Each year cities and towns in the US spend millions of dollars on water filtration apparatus, staff to operate it, and the process of cleaning the water itself. You may have wondered just what it is that makes this so mandatory. Of course , our forefathers drank natural water from wells and streams and appeared to do all right, didn’t they? That is, until some type of epidemic seemed to hit with regularity. They didn’t know what was causing the illnesses and attributed them to things such as the night air and watermelons. Little did they know that their drinking water was the culprit. After all, it looked clear and pure, so what could potentially be wrong with it?

People are the largest culprits when it comes to dirtying up our water sourcesand have created the need for municipal water filtration. Any place there are plenty of people there is waste and debris and contamination that flows into the water. That is why it’s up to our tax dollars to fix the situation to maintain public health, but is enough being done? Diseases passed through dangerous water,such as cholera, malaria, or yellow fever, have all but vanished in America. However , more than 5 million folk worldwide die every year due to hydrogenated diseases or those spread by insects that breed near water,such as mosquitoes.

Providing clean, pure drinking water to each household isn’t a new idea , however , the new age in community water treatment started in the US with the Clean Water Act of 1972. At that point, each city in the country was needed to have a water treatment plant. Though this sounds great, the intent wasnot truly to clean up the water for human consumption. Decades of permitting commercial waste to be pumped into our lakes, streams, and brooks had left them dirty and tarnished, and the objective of water treatment was to wash them up. Even today, two thirds of America’s tap water continues to contain pesticides, industrial waste, pathogens, hormones, and pharmaceutical compounds.

As American citizens, we need to continue to press for more harsh laws referring to the standard of the water we drink. Though some cities are providing their citizens with water that surpasses current standards of sanitation, we want to keep on making our demands until every town in our country has a portable water system that is offering the very best water to its customers.