Our view: E. coli scare in northeast San Diego is cause for concern, but don't give up on the tap yet

Folks living, working and especially drinking water in northeast San Diego got a scare this weekend when a positive test for E. coli forced residents to boil water before drinking and restaurants to close. Though subsequent tests cleared the water in communities from Rancho Penasquitos to Lake Hodges by Sunday afternoon, a lot of folks in that southern stretch of North County are undoubtedly still a bit wary of their water supplies.

That's good business for companies that sell bottled water; fear is their best marketing, and they have sunk millions of dollars into contaminating our perceptions of public, almost free water.

But we can't allow the occasional scare to scare us away from drinking tap water. We can't get too comfortable paying for our water from private bottlers. There's too much at stake: Clean, contaminant-free water is a right, not a privilege, and we must demand that it remains cheap, widely available and above all, safe to drink.

A water main broke last week in a Rancho Penasquitos neighborhood off Black Mountain Road, leading to a hasty repair and a round of mandated water testing. One of those tests came back positive for E. coli, a potentially fatal bacterium, prompting city officials to urge residents to boil water before drinking and shut down restaurants throughout the affected communities. Where that E. coli came from is a mystery still, though the San Diego mayor's spokesman speculated Monday that it could have come from contaminated dirt getting mixed into the water supply when the broken main was repaired.

Whatever the cause, the water scare itself caused a lot of economic damage to local businesses forced to close for the weekend, and threatened the health of some water drinkers in the area (though it's not clear whether anyone got sick because of the contamination). It certainly forced us to fear for our water.

But E. coli contaminations in municipal water supplies are extremely rare: According to an April 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only three out of 350 outbreaks reported to the CDC between 1982 and 2002 were due to tainted municipal water supplies, though this small number caused a disproportionate amount of the related diseases. For comparison, 75 E. coli outbreaks were attributable to ground beef over the same 20-year span.

For every bad test result, there are millions of good ones. Our nation spends more than $22 billion each year to operate and maintain the systems that send clean water flowing from our faucets. Environmental Protection Agency regulations require all agencies providing water to more than 25 people to test for more than 100 different possible contaminants on a regular basis. In the areas affected by the weekend's boil-water order, San Diego's water department samples and tests water at 17 different locations twice a week.

In a water crisis, we turn to bottled water; many of us drink from bottles routinely, whether for taste, convenience or, most commonly, concerns about quality. But bottled water isn't necessarily safer than tap water.

While EPA standards also apply to bottled water, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for bottled water safety and sets some standards slightly lower for bottled water than for tap water. For instance, bottled water doesn't have to be tested for bacteria as frequently as municipal tap water.

Many folks believe bottled water tastes better than tap water, and that's often traceable to the aging pipes delivering it to your glass. San Diego officials acknowledge billions of dollars' worth of deferred maintenance to the city's water infrastructure, and given that city's fiscal straits, that investment won't be coming anytime soon.

But infrastructure is also a problem with bottled water: Consider the billions of plastic water bottles ending up unrecycled in our landfills every year, as reported by the California Department of Conservation in 2003.

Or worse: A harrowing story in last week's Los Angeles Times depicted the floating tide of discarded plastic as one of the gravest threats endangering the health of the world's oceans. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the ocean. Anyone who has witnessed it first-hand knows how much of that jetsam is plastic water bottles and their caps.

Such environmental concerns are but one reason we must insist that our municipal water supplies provide us with clean, drinkable water. It's not too much to ask. If government can't supply us with clean drinking water, what is it good for, after all?