Re: Don't Drink Water Tower Water

employee2 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As an engineman on the C&TS from 1970 - 1980, I,
> and the other trainmen, drank (and filled our
> water bags) from the Cumbres and Sublette
> standpipes daily, and no one I knew of ever got
> sick. These standpipes got their water from
> spring-fed underground cisterns, and the water was
> sweet and ice cold.
>
> However, I remember that one year John Oldberg
> (then Superintendent of the C&TS) began sending in
> water samples from the Cumbres reservoir for
> testing. They (almost) always came back with a
> bacterial count of "0", but one time came back
> with "TNC" - "Too Numerous to Count"!


Like Rich, I daily drank and filed by water bag from the overflows as Cumbres and Sublette with no effects, other than quenching my thirst.

In fact (Rich will also remember this...), there was an annual event in Chama in late spring where the municipal water system would fail, leaving much of the town without water, and what water that came from the tap was deemed unfit unless you boiled it for 15 minutes. At these times, I would run to Cumbres with water bags, plastic jugs, etc. and fill them from the standpipe.

The annual failure of the water plant was caused by spring runoff plugging up the filtering plant. It needed to be constantly backwashed to keep it clean. In the "Land of Manana" ("manana" does not mean "tomorrow" - it means "not today") this did not happen. The filters plugged up, the pumps burned up, no water. The pump would be replaced and the filtering system bypassed to keep the water flowing. Lots of people got sick, including my wife. I somehow escaped what we called "General Palmer's Revenge".