Drinking water in plastic bottles contains countless particles too small to see. New research finds that people who drink water from them on a daily basis ingest far more microplastics than those who don’t.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
That was a really interesting read, thank you for the insight.