My Water.....Where does it come from?

This week I am going to take a closer look at our drinking water; both tap (water supplied by the city), and bottle water. It is my impression that bottle water will be cleaner and thus safer than the water that comes out of the tap. My experience tells me that bottle water taste better anyway. First I need to examine where my city tap water comes from and what governmental agency is responsible for insuring its quality. Also I need investigate what standard does the water have to meet to be considered "safe" for public consumption. Then I will compare it to bottle water and the agency's standards regulating it.

To find out where my water comes from and the standards it must meet I referred to Riverside's Annual Drinking Water Report at http://www.riversideca.gov/utilities/water-wqr.asp. According to the site my drinking water is provided by the Riverside Public Utilities (RPU) and the water is drawn from groundwater sources located in the San Bernardino Bunker Hill Basin and the Riverside Basin. RPU treats some of its wells and all water sources are blended at a central location before entering into distribution. The thing that I found the most interesting is the allowable chemical and particulate contamination that is allowed in tap water, but this allowable amount is measured in parts per million (ppm), so we are talking really really slight amount of contamination. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in charge of setting and enforcing the standards of drinking water.

The information about the "allowable" contamination was reinforce my preconceived notion that bottle water is better. Then I examined whom is responsible for regulating bottle water. It turns out that, unlike tap water, it is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that over sees bottle water. The standards set by the EPA are far stricter than the FDA. The list of regulatory gaps is long so I will only high light a few that I got from National Resource Defense Council website at http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/exesum.asp:

• FDA's rules completely exempt 60-70 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States from the agency's bottled water standards, because FDA says its rules do not apply to water packaged and sold within the same state. Nearly 40 states say they do regulate such waters (generally with few or no resources dedicated to policing this); therefore, about one out of five states do not.
• Bottled water plants must test for coliform bacteria just once a week; big-city tap water must be tested 100 or more times a month.
• Repeated high levels of bacteria (i.e., "heterotrophic-plate-count" bacteria) in tap water combined with a lack of disinfectant can trigger a violation for cities -- but not for water bottlers.

What's more is the FDA says they have only one person assigned to writing and reviewing the standards they set forth and less than a person assigned to enforcement.

I personally was blown away. There is no guarantee that the bottle water is safer. This information does not say that bottle water is unsafe, but it does say no one is monitoring it  most bottle water to insure that it is safe. After this information I think it may be better to filter my own tap water. That way I know my water meets EPA standards then filter it further to get the rest of the contaminates out. This would also eliminate all the plastic bottle pollution.