James Werrell: Just how pure does our drinking water need to be?

I was raised on tap water. If I wanted to stay hydrated, I didn’t have much choice.

No one drank bottled water when I was growing up. The idea of paying extra money for water would have been regarded as idiotic.

Why buy a bottle of water when you could get it from the sink or a drinking fountain? We figured that if you were going to pay for something to drink, it at least should have a flavor.

We didn’t worry much about the quality of the water coming out of the tap, either. If it was treated by the municipal water system, it must be OK.

The John Birch Society wanted us to believe that fluoridation – adding fluoride to the public water supply to help prevent cavities – was a communist plot. But only kooks believed that.

I have tasted some nasty tap water over the years, notably in West Texas, where sulfur in the aquifer made the water taste like rotten eggs. But I eventually got used to even that.

Lately, though, especially with the scandal in Flint, Mich. – where officials decided to save money by pumping water from a polluted river and failed to protect residents from dangerous amounts of lead – I have been thinking more about the safety of the water I drink. Should I be purifying my water?

Rock Hill officials this week offered reassurances – and ample documentation to back up the claims – that the local water supply is safe to drink. It meets and exceeds the federal safety standards, and the city has been commended by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control for the quality of its water.

I already am aware that bottled water is no solution. Bottled water is a hoax. In many cases, it is just some city’s municipal water, treated at the local plant, bottled and given a pretty name. So, Tropical Dew or Aspen Sky Mist might actually come straight from the tap in a town in Michigan near Flint.

A friend of mine, I recently learned, goes to great extremes to create a supply of pristine drinking water. First, he buys bottled water. Then he pours it into a water filtering pitcher available just about anywhere. And then he pours into another filtration device that promises to remove close to 100 percent of all harmful contaminants.

I thought about trying to one-up him. From now on, I would drink only the tears of virgin Inuits who had never ventured south of the Arctic Circle. Or I would drink nothing but holy water from the font at the Vatican – before the pope dipped his hands in it, of course.

But this level of precaution seemed a little inconvenient. What if I need a drink of water in the middle of the night, as I usually do?

Now, I just walk into the bathroom, turn on the tap and fill the metal cup on the stand next to the sink. (The cup, by the way, probably is teeming with colonies of intestinal parasites, bacteria and other impurities.)

Am I supposed to keep a pitcher of filtered water next to the sink? That seems like a lot of complicated pouring in the dark.

And what about using ice cubes from the refrigerator dispenser? Defeats the purpose of filtering your water, doesn’t it? But there’s no way I am going back to ice trays.

I truly will consider getting a filtering pitcher. Why buck science?

Meanwhile, though, on a hot day, my dog and I still will get a drink from the hose in the backyard.

This story was originally published February 25, 2016 at 10:14 PM with the headline "James Werrell: Just how pure does our drinking water need to be?."