The Big Muddy: Plenty of Drops to Drink
By Jefferey Spivak
Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
It starts in that brown and sandy mess known as the Big Muddy, the Missouri River.
Then, after a day or more of sifting, mixing and testing, it comes out of your tap bright and clean and free of pollutants.
Drinking water. Don’t think much about it, do you? You just expect it to be good.
In Kansas City, it’s not only good, it’s arguably the best.
SustainLane, a for-profit group that studies healthy living, recently ranked Kansas City No. 1 in tap water quality among major American cities.
“It’s one thing about life here — you don’t have to worry about the water,” said Frank Pogge, director of Kansas City’s water department.
The rankings from SustainLane were based on five years of water quality tests done by city water systems or utilities. The tests had been compiled into a database by the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit environmental research organization in Washington, D.C. The database represented the first time this information had been made available in a comprehensive and easily accessible form. (On the Internet, go to www.ewg.org and click on “Tap Water Database.”)
The tap water tests from 1998 to 2002 showed Kansas City had zero pollutants, and no contaminants above health limits set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. That means Kansas City’s water was about as close to pristine as a major city can get.
Meanwhile, St. Louis’ water was found to have six pollutants, including chemicals linked to cancer and heart problems. Omaha’s water had 26 pollutants, including traces of arsenic and various acids. And at the bottom of SustainLane’s list was Los Angeles, whose water contained 46 pollutants, including lead, asbestos and even gasoline additives.
It’s rare for tap water in America to contain contaminants above federal legal limits. Still, all big-city water systems contain some contaminants, and some of those exceed federal health guidelines, meaning there are some small health risks.
What kind of health effects should show up if someone spent a lifetime drinking Los Angeles’ water instead of Kansas City’s? Experts don’t know yet. But some wouldn’t want to try it.
“We do know that (Los Angeles’ combination of contaminants and chemicals) is troubling,” said Tim Knopp, a senior scientist for the Environmental Working Group.
Kansas City’s pollution-free water has small and subtle effects on residents’ quality of life. It lathers up with soap easily in the shower or the washing machine. It’s soft and doesn’t corrode pipes as much. And it tastes good, so it often replaces bottled water in restaurants and in cooking.
What makes Kansas City’s water so great? There’s no simple answer.
There’s the water source, the Mighty Mo, which although muddy is still mostly uncontaminated. There’s the city’s lengthy treatment process. And there are the disinfectants used to purify the water.
“It’s a whole bunch of things that have evolved over time,” said the water department’s Pogge.
In the beginning
There, in that glass jar sitting on the black countertop of the Kansas City water laboratory’s sample room, is how your drinking water starts out. It’s cloudy, with a brownish-grayish color and sand collecting at the bottom. That’s what the water looks like directly from the Missouri.
“You can look at the river and see that it has a lot of junk in it,” said Lorene Lindsay, the laboratory’s manager.
Sure, you can see the empty cans and trash along the banks. But the real bad stuff, you can’t see. That’s the chemicals and minerals and viruses that trickle in.
They come from pesticides and fertilizers used on farms and lawns. They come from industrial pollutants dumped from factories. They come from gasoline and oil spilled onto pavement. They even come from cow manure and other wildlife excrement. When it rains, bits of all these things find their way down sloping hills, into groundwater or through storm drains and then into the river.
Still, the Missouri doesn’t have as much industrial development along it as the Mississippi River. And the Missouri collects relatively clean water from snowmelts along its way to Kansas City. So it’s considered a cleaner water source than a lot of urban rivers.
Kansas City’s Water Works plant draws in this water from a river bend between Riverside and North Kansas City. From there, the river water is pumped into round settling tanks, each as wide as a football field. The water sits still for hours as chemicals called coagulants are added to help clay, silt and sand particles sink to the bottom, where they are cleared out.
After that, the primary treatment chemicals are added — principally lime to soften the river’s metallic minerals like calcium and magnesium, the basis of the river water’s “hardness.” And there are many more hours of mixing, sitting and settling.
Finally, the water is poured over 30 inches of river sand. It acts as a filter and strains out any remaining particles because the openings between grains of sand are so small.
The theory behind this entire process is to provide more settling time — up to a day and a half — which decreases chemical usage and costs.
“There’s a lot of science involved in this, and the juggling of the physical, chemical and biological processes is pretty important,” Lindsay said.
The process
Indeed, you might look at water treatment kind of like baking bread — where each loaf contains slightly different amounts of flour, yeast and salt, but still must taste the same.
Because with water treatment, the ingredients are constantly changing. River water is never exactly the same. Every rain can wash in new amounts of pesticides or manure. Or something illegal might get dumped hundreds of miles upstream. So Kansas City’s lab and plant test the river water and treated water every few hours, then adjust the chemical treatments based on what they find.
This adjustment process gets even harder in some cities. There, the treatment process itself causes chemical reactions. In these cities, the chlorine used to disinfect river water forms harmful chemical byproducts that potentially increase cancer and other health risks.
In Kansas City, however, the treatment process doesn’t use straight chlorine but a combination of chlorine and ammonia called chloramine. It doesn’t work as quickly on bacteria as straight chlorine, but it doesn’t produce the bad byproducts, and it lasts longer as a disinfectant.
“It gives us a continued ability to kill bacteria,” said the lab’s Lindsay.
In the end, Kansas City’s standards for its treated water are higher than what the federal government demands or even suggests. And some people can tell or taste the difference.
The water department occasionally hears from out-of-towners who take home Kansas City’s water. Ken Deason with the regional EPA office says he can smell the chlorine in St. Louis’ water whenever he visits there.
Then there’s a place like the Broadway Café, a coffee shop in Westport. Specialty coffee houses are pretty particular about their ingredients. Many baristas like to pick out their own coffee beans. And there’s even bottled water specially made for coffee brewing, since coffee is 98 percent water. But at the Broadway Café, the water they use is city tap water.
“It’s pretty important that your water taste good,” said Jon Cates, the café’s roastmaster. “I like the taste of our coffee through the tap water.”
