It’s snowing outside …

For the past 10 days, the city of Vancouver has been without clean water.  And for the same 10 days, the citizens of Vancouver have been pretty quiet.

I’m really quite surprised that there hasn’t been some sort of protest of rally somewhere downtown yet.  There have been rallies carried out for everything from raising transit fares to Bush’s visit to China.  “Educated” people have called for the demolition of the provincial legislature, and demanded that groups of sqatters be permitted to use buildings slated for demolition as their homes.

Yet when it comes to the state of the city’s water supply, there has been very little noise.

Today I cleaned my home, and aside from the mirrors and windows where Windex is used, I can’t tell if anything is clean or not.  There is a fine powder coating my bathtub, the kitchen sink, my floors, the counter … everything where I had used water with the cleanser.  This makes me wonder what the water was like before purification systems.

It’s clear that the water we drink in Vancouver doesn’t go through much filtering before it’s passed into the water pipes.  If the water facilities in Southern Ontario were like this, I’m quite certain that I would have died long ago from whatever mutagenic enzymes and bacteria currently exist in Lakes Erie and Ontario.

I understand that some cities are fortunate enough to be surrounded by a bountiful natural environment where resources can be tapped without much processing, but with the rising populations in the Vancouver area, can we really afford to ignore the possible consequences of such contamination in the future?

I know that it would cost millions to upgrade the filtering systems for Vancouver, North Van and Burnaby, but how long can we go with bottled water?  Rather than attacking the next over-budget item on the Olympic agenda, perhaps the city can look at upgrading the water systems to ensure the everyday citizens and world-class athletes can rely on the basics.