Everythin$ Is OK
My work is about the water I drink, the water I take a shower in, and the water I use to make my coffee. It is about the water in my house, at my workplace, at the gym, and at the opera house or the restaurant. It is about where the freshwater in my region comes from—the nearby rivers and the industrial and mu- nicipal discharges, the stormwater runoff and water spilling over the nearby dams, the water suppliers’ treatments including settling, flotation, UV, activated carbon, and filtration—and about how it flows into my glass. It is about how government standards are neglected, how legal does not necessarily equal healthy, how the limits for contaminants in tap water have not been updated in almost twenty years, and how there is no control over the stages my water goes through. The tap water of the Hackensack region has an arsenic level that is 220 times over the healthy limit, levels of bromo/dichloromethane, chloroform, and lead that are 25, 26, and 18 times higher than recommended, respectively, and unsafe levels of eight more contaminants that, following those first four, I can’t even care about.1 All of this is in my house. All of these contaminants cause cancers of the liver, lung, bladder, and kidney.2 They also produce behavior change and aggressiveness and correlate with crime in my community.3 The arsenic and mercury ingested through water affect the brain and thus modify the learning and future lives of people in Hackensack.
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