Drink Me

Wayne Curtis is a freelance writer who's written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Preservation, and American Heritage, and is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. He recently traded Maine winters for New Orleans summers.

I was hiding out from New Orleans' early summer heat in a Magazine Street bar last week, when a woman walked up and asked for a cocktail and a water. "Bottled or tap?" the bartender inquired.

"Tap," she answered.

"Wow, you're brave," he said.

"It's not for me," the woman said theatrically, and everyone along the bar laughed.

Sort of.

New Orleans has long been estranged from its own water. Having just moved to the city, I feel like I've wandered into a complicated domestic dispute. I figured I should try to sort it out before I develop any unfortunate drinking habits.

Tastes Like Big Muddy

The first thing I learned was that the city gets its water from the Mississippi River. Now let me repeat that: The city gets its drinking water from the big brown thing that flows past the city.

The Big Muddy rolls past at the rate of some 600,000 cubic feet per second -- that's about 8 million six-packs every second. Even by New Orleans standards, that's a lot of liquid. Some of it gets diverted just a few miles upriver of my house at an intake plant. The famous mud is settled out, and the water filtered, treated, and sent on its way to my kitchen faucet. (Much of it goes elsewhere.)

The best thing about having tap water from the river is that when visiting friends ask to see the Mighty Mississippi, I can walk over to the sink, turn the spigot with a flourish, and say, "With ice or without?" The worst thing about getting drinking water from the Mississippi is ... well, where to begin?

How about with the fact that the river drains some 40 percent of the continental United States. That's home to many millions of people, and all of them pee and poop in the river daily. OK, perhaps not directly in it, but in the watersheds whose rivers run into it.

Granted, New Orleans is not alone -- some 18 million people in the 2,500-mile valley get their drinking water out of the Mississippi. But we're very nearly at the end. If you view the serpentine river as the nation's digestive tract, that's us way down in the lower intestine. We can almost see daylight.

Furthermore, upriver of the intake station is one of the world's greatest collections of chemical plants, oil refineries, smelters, sewage treatment plants, and other impressive human-made structures that constantly flare and belch with great toxic eructations -- about 350 such facilities in all. Half have federal or state discharge permits to dump things in the river.

A few years ago the state set something up called the Early Warning Organic Compound Detection System to let us know if a problem has surfaced upriver. I don't know if it involves sirens or what, but in any event it's not very comforting. Nor is this sentence from the FAQ page of the city's water authority: "Very infrequently, tap water has had a taste or odor due to industrial discharges in the river." No further elucidation is offered.

Well-off New Orleanians have bottled water delivered to their houses; the Kentwood water trucks making their rounds are a part of the landscape in the better neighborhoods. "Uptown they get Kentwood," a local aphorism goes. "Downtown they get cancer."

Sinking In

I've taken to asking everyone I meet, especially those involved in water issues, whether they drink the city's tap water. Surprisingly, many say they do, and none of these people, to my eye, is visibly afflicted with cancer. Often, they issue a caveat of one sort or another -- they only cook with the water, for instance -- or they employ some sort of voodoo. "I use a Brita filter to make me feel better about it," Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network, told me. "But I recognize that it doesn't do anything."

The water, of course, is regularly tested by the state and by the city's Sewage and Water Board. The city says the water is perfectly fine when it leaves the plant. Strikingly, nobody seems to argue otherwise. Chalk it up to the mighty powers of dilution of the Mississippi and modern cleansing technology.

But still, you have to wonder, particularly in the wake of Katrina. After all, billions of gallons of putrid, brackish water poured into the city and sat there for weeks. The flood swept up automobiles and their fluids; paint thinner that had been stored in sheds; and the sewage that backed up when power was knocked out to the 82 pumping stations that keep effluvia moving up and out of this bowl-shaped city.

No surprise: the sediment the flood left behind is proving a bit nasty. A study recently published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that fecal microbes of the sort commonly found in sewage have turned up in much of the sediment. The "good news" -- and New Orleanians are always looking for good news -- is that the authors think this may have been an issue prior to the storm. Anyway, no problem. Don't drink storm runoff, I say to myself. The city's water pipes are below ground and sealed up, safe from contamination.

Or not.

It turns out that Katrina's winds and waters ruptured an estimated 20,000 water pipes. As trees blew over, their roots acted like great levers, prying open underground pipes. Then the spongy New Orleans soil settled erratically after the floodwaters were pumped out, causing still more water pipes to burst.

By some estimates, about 100 million gallons of water per day were leaking out in the months after the storm. By late 2006, the loss had been reduced to about 40 million gallons per day -- but that's still a lot of six-packs.

New Orleans is full of unpredictable sights, and among these today is the abrupt appearance of great chasms in the city streets as errant water washes away the soil beneath. In my neighborhood, a concerned citizen deposited an old queen-sized mattress in one fissure as a marker, like a flag in a golf hole. It was scarcely visible.

If the system's integrity was that compromised, might one worry that stuff -- like that nasty flood sediment -- was getting back into the pipes?

One might, but the news here is surprisingly upbeat. The most recent testing at the kitchen taps was performed last September by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which tested tap water from 30 sites around the city. Only one produced signs of coliform bacteria, and that happened on a retest. The bad news? It was the site seven blocks from my house.

The good news: That tap didn't produce any evidence of E. coli, which, the report reassures, "means any coliform present were a non-fecal type." And while Non-Fecal Drinking Water lacks a certain allure as a brand name, I have to say at this point it sounds pretty good to me.

So do I drink the tap water?

Sure. Sometimes you just gotta have faith.