Water Pipes In Cities Are Old, Dirty, Broken. Backdoor For Disease.

Perception is reality.

When you go to your nice shiny stainless steel sink, or your expensive dark granite undermounted basin, or your finely polished porcelain with premium brushed nickel spaghetti arm faucet.....you're only seeing .01% of what your water goes through to get into your glass.

When we work in cities that have lead in the water, such as Salmon Arm, Vernon, Cache Creek, Merritt, and others...people are most commonly surprised to see the results showing lead. They say "But I just replaced all the pipes in my house a few years ago." People really think the only pipes water is exposed to, are the ones in their home.

This post was shared to me as an example of what our city workers deal with regularly here in Canada.

The biggest threat to the safety of city drinking water are its pipes, and nobody knows about it because they're buried underground and never seen by the public. As pipes break, corrode, and crack...anything can get in. This is THE reason more and more chlorine has been added over the years, which has been proven to be a major cause of many common diseases, including cancers. Chlorine is added to kill the organisms, sewage, parasites and coliforms that get into the failing pipes, so you're drinking the dead bodies of those organisms along with an excess of chlorine.

Pipes all across Canada look like this, and there's no funding for proper replacement of this failing infrastructure. Because nobody can see it! To replace these failing pipes would cost well over $100 Billion.

It's estimated that 35-45% of treated water in Canada is lost through holes in these kinds of pipes. Are water meters making much sense to you now? One broken line will lose millions of liters every year. A 2009 study said leaky pipes cost Ontario 25% of its drinking water to be lost — enough to fill 131,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools and equal to a loss of $700 million a year.

Just to inspect the pipes properly costs up to $60 - $80 per meter (3ft). Kamloops alone has over 400 Km of pipes winding beneath its streets, which would cost just that one city $28,000,000 *just* to look at the pipes. However, to chlorinate the water in Kamloops, it only costs $60,000 per year. Which option do you think the government will choose? In Montreal, the city is proposing a plan that calls for spending $400 million a year for 10 years to repair its aging water infrastructure.

If we know anything about government, this will take either decades or centuries to fix. In the interim, if you put clean water through a dirty pipe, it's not clean water anymore. Get a filter.