Assemblywoman Mary Salas, D-Chula Vista, has proposed legislation, Assembly Bill 1521, that would require water labels and water vending machines to identify the source of the water. The bill would also require bottlers to file an annual consumer confidence report addressing the source of the water and the results of water-quality tests.

There is, however, another vexing question that needs to be addressed. How effective are the methods used to sanitize multiuse water bottles for home deliveries?

Last year, I was pouring a 3-gallon bottle of home-delivered water into our ceramic dispenser, when I noticed something inside the plastic container. I realized there were two large paper towels floating in the multiuse container, looking very much like the stingrays one sees on the Discovery Channel. Thinking it was an aberration, my wife and I asked the bottled water company to pick up the contaminated container and replace it with a purer (we assumed!) bottle of water.

Several months later, shortly after I had placed another water bottle on top of our ceramic dispenser, I heard my wife yelling in the kitchen. When I entered the room, she was spitting into the sink and pointing at the ceramic dispenser. She had been talking on the telephone, when she poured herself a glass of water and quickly drank it. She immediately knew that something was terribly wrong because the water tasted rancid.

When we looked into the ceramic dispenser, we saw the remains of a huge garden spider and parts of a cricket. We also saw that the multiuse bottle contained a large, milky spider web, several dismembered insect legs and a larger part of the spider's body. The water smelled the way one would expect from a bottle that contained the decontaminating remains of two large insects and a huge spider web.

Someone had obviously left the bottle outside, and a garden spider had turned it into a home. It was equally apparent that the process used to clean and sanitize the bottle had failed completely.

The water company offered to pick up the contaminated bottle and run an analysis on it, but we decided to report the incident to local authorities before yielding control of the bottle and its contents.

Subsequent telephone calls to the city and county to report the incident were futile. We were shuffled around from agency to agency until someone acknowledged that local and regional government authorities really do not have much control over bottled water standards. He suggested we file a report with the state. The state authorities, however, admitted that not much would happen unless there was a pattern of similar incidents that had been reported.

After hitting so many dead ends, we finally decided to call the water company to cancel our home deliveries. We also accepted their offer to run an analysis on the contaminated water so we could learn what my wife had ingested. That was in September of 2006. We have yet to receive the report the bottled water company promised us. However, they did send us a bill for $2.04 for picking up the contaminated bottle of water.

Reverse osmosis anyone?

Escondido resident Dennis M. Clausen is a freelance columnist for the North County Times.