New York City Officials Urge Some to Boil Tap Water First
Jul. 1–City officials warned sick and frail New Yorkers to boil their tap water until noon today after muddy runoff into one of the city’s reservoirs caused a glitch in purifying drinking water.
Infants, the elderly and pregnant women also should avoid drinking tap water, and should consider using boiled or bottled water for brushing their teeth, Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said.
“We don’t think this is a major problem. [But] we are asking people to take precautions out of an abundance of caution,” Frieden said of the rare citywide warning — only the third of its kind in the past several years.
Frieden rejected the notion that city officials should have issued the warning sooner, since monitors first detected the tainted water Wednesday evening at the Kensico Reservoir, about 15 miles north of the city.
A portion of that water then reached the Hillview Reservoir just north of the Bronx-Yonkers border, causing the cloudiness there to rise just above the acceptable level around 2 a.m., Frieden said. The city issued its warning at 12:10 p.m. yesterday.
“We made the decision as soon as we had all of the information we needed,” he said. Test results “weren’t so clear. It was a judgment call whether or not to issue an advisory.”
The problem began when a storm dumped nearly 5 inches of rain over Kensico, causing runoff from a nearby construction site, which then raised the water’s cloudiness, or turbidity, said Natalie Millner, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees water quality.
Dirt-laden water can interfere with chlorination to kill waterborne bugs such as giardia and cryptosporidium, which can cause severe diarrhea.
“The chlorine just doesn’t work when there’s a lot of dirt,” Mayor Bloomberg said at a news conference with Frieden.
Though potential health risks are minuscule for healthy adults, Frieden said, people with weaker immune systems should see their doctors if they suffer from diarrhea or jaundice in the coming days.
In particular, people with HIV or AIDS, leukemia patients and those who have recently received bone marrow transplants should drink boiled or bottle water.
About only 1 percent of the 1 billion gallons of water used in the city every day is actually consumed as drinking water.
With Celeste Katz
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