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Martha and I were sitting on our patio last Tuesday
afternoon when we heard a police bullhorn. It sounded
serious, like a SWAT team on TV, but it was coming from a
couple of blocks away, and my ears aren't what they used to
be. The only word I could make out clearly was
water.
My first thought was They must really be cracking
down on people who irrigate their lawns on the wrong
day.
I half expected to hear something like I'll
give up my watering when you pry my cold dead fingers off
the nozzle,
followed by This is your last chance to
drop it,
and then gunfire.
Martha thought it indicated some kind of general water
alert, and as usual, she was right: we Salidans were being
told to boil our drinking water until further notice. This
was confirmed by reverse 911
calls (are those 119
calls
?) that the answering machine caught an hour later
while Martha walked the dog and I attended the monthly
gathering of the local single-malt tasting society.
There we joked about boiling the Glen Keith, and agreed
that the city's utility department had just provided an
excellent reason to sip it straight, without dilution or
chasers. One frequent attendee (the word member
doesn't fit because there are no dues or roll calls) said
he'd heard that they'd found a dead cat somewhere in the
distribution system, and thus the boil order.
Boil orders are not exactly a novelty in Salida, but it's been a while. The last one I can remember was about 20 years ago, and came about after a serious thunderstorm on the east side of Marshall Pass poured so much muddy water into a city collection ditch that the treatment plant got overwhelmed.
One problem with a boil order is that it raises so many questions. Do you boil for one minute or ten? And does whatever answer you find take into account that water boils at 198 degrees here at 7,000 feet, not the sea-level 212 degrees?
Can you trust the dishwasher if you use its drying cycle, which was, back in my home-brewing days, hot enough to sterilize beer bottles? Is there some danger of infection if you shower or bathe with cuts or scrapes?
The coffee maker doesn't reach boiling point, but is it hot enough to produce a safe jolt of morning caffeine? What about pets -- or does it even matter, since they drink out of ditches, puddles, the river, anything that's wet?
Search as I might, I couldn't find definitive answers to those questions, so we took the easy course and bought bottled water.
In this age of instant technology, I was surprised to learn that it would take three days to determine whether Salida's water was safe to drink. A sample had to be cultured, which took 72 hours, and there was no rushing the biological process.
During those days, details emerged. The city was installing a new 12-inch water main near the courthouse. It had not been connected to the rest of the system. During a routine flush, the remains of a cat washed out. But Salida's water supply was apparently fine the whole time.
In a scientific sense, the boil order was probably overkill, getting us all worried when we didn't need to be, and I considered going to the next City Council meeting to complain.
But then I thought about how gossip works here. Word of
the feline cadaver would have gotten out. As the story
moved along, it would have been amplified, so that by
Thursday or Friday, we'd have been hearing that My
second cousin's ex-husband's brother-in-law knows somebody
at the water plant, and he said he heard they found a dead
mountain lion and a couple of bloated elk in the main
outlet tank, and the city's trying to cover this up because
it could really hurt tourism, but I'm worried about typhus
or cholera or something.
So even if the boil order was unnecessary in a scientific way, it was the right thing to do in a sociological sense. We're back to drinking tap water now, and if this had just happened at another time of year, say a slow month like April or November, it could have evolved into something good for tourism.
After all, if Nederland can host Frozen Dead Guy
Days,
we could have La Fiesta del Agua con Gato
Muerto.
The feline remains could be interred on a spur
of Tenderfoot Hill next to the monument to Duke, a beloved
water spaniel who greeted every passenger train for 13
years before his death in 1902. An enterprising
micro-brewery could issue Totes Kazenbier,
and we
could invite one and all to help us celebrate a wonderful
occasion -- the day we could go back to drinking tap
water.
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