Don't drink the water

Clean water supplies are a problem everywhere, as well as lying water authorities. When I lived in the dinky town of Nucla, Colorado our water supply came from the San Miguel River. There are precisely 4 towns which get their water from that river - 3 of them are small, poor ranching and mining communities. On the top of the river in the mountains is the wealthy ski resort of Telluride/Mountain Village. With the haughty disdain of royalty for peasants, the town of Telluride dumped raw sewage into the San Miguel a year ago last summer. EVERYTHING became contaminated and the residents in the towns down valley had to drink bottled water for months. Telluride tried to absolve itself of all responsibility by claiming that the pollution was due to upstream "Manufacturing." The only thing upstream of Telluride is a couple of marmots and the peaks of several 14,000 foot mountains!

[Elspode]

The PUR filters are a *very* cost-effective solution to bottled water. We had a Hinckley & Schmidt cooler for a couple of years. We paid something like $6.00 a bottle for the water, and $9.00/month for the cooler, and it got rather pricey.

Now, I can get three filters at Sam's Club for $40.00, and that gives me 300 gallons of filtered water. Even factoring in the $30.00 purchase of the filter housing unit (which gave me a filter included), that gives me the equivalent of 100 bottles of water for the cost of about 17.5 cents per gallon, and that drops as the filter housing amortizes out. All I give up is the pre-chilled water, which I can remedy using nice, filtered-water ice.