sweet, sweet waters

One of the best things about living here these past three years is the well water. It's on the verge of being hard, but dammit it's sweet. Sweet sweet sweet. We are probably the only folks on the block that drink the water, but for the life of me I don't know why. We got our mandated well water test results yesterday, and here's a brief synopsis.

Volatile organic compounds: NONE detected. The list has 27 items on it from benzene to 1,4-dichlorobenzene.

Coliform bacteria: NONE detected.

Pesticides: NONE detected.

As for metals:

Iron: NONE detected
Mercury: NONE detected
Lead: NONE detected

Sodium is well within the expectations and limits, but then there's the manganese. This is a secondary drinking water contaminant, which is to say there are no health issues, just taste and odor. However, it was tested for only prior to the neutralizer (oh, yes, the pH of the water is a brisk 5.2 before neutralizing, and that's enough to leach copper out of our plumbing). This is enough to fail the well, so we have to put in a softener, which will adversely effect the taste of the water, in my opinion. Then again, it's not my problem anymore.

If you ever have time for a nice jaunt through the history of the south-central part of NJ, read John McPhee's The Pine Barrens. He writes a lot about the sweet potable water, water that rises here in springs and aquifers, and doesn't drain into the area from elsewhere, and which will taste as sweet a year after bottling. That's what we've been drinking. And I did bottle it up and keep it in the basement in case of a sustained power loss. (I got carried away and had 8 cases of 1-liter bottles down there.) In preparing to move, we poured the bottles into our PUR filter and drank it, but it was clear and odorless when we opened the bottles more than two years later.

There is a lot of pollution and not a little contamination of wells around here. The Ciba-Geigy site is perhaps the most well-known of blights on the Jersey Shore landscape. I knew we weren't within that site's seepage, but I didn't know a lot about the high aquifers nearby.

I guess I know something about that now.

For all of you who have been guests here at the labs and have had the water, I thought you'd want to know. It doesn't get much purer than this. And I'll bet my bottom dollar that the municipal water in Port Townsend doesn't taste half as good as this. Perhaps we should bottle some and take it with us.