by Nicasio Angelo Agustin
When I was a kid, I never liked rainy days. I am little older now, and I still hate getting wet by rainwater. I feel unfairly shackled at home when the rain starts to fall and going becomes such a hassle.
As a kid, I learned from school that the same amount of water on earth then was the same when the earth was first created millions of years ago. I was told that the water that came from our faucet could contain the same molecules that carabaos and cows, Moses and Abraham, or even the dinosaurs, drank.
In college, and that was very recent – relatively speaking, I could not divine what our professor meant when he said that in the future people would be buying bottled water like the cola drinks. It was an unthinkable and a very remote preposition then. But now, the unthinkable has become big business. Bottled water is easier to find in supermarkets, sari-sari stores and even in drug stores, just like any other commodity.
Water has actually become an expensive albeit unsafe commodity. One study reported that “bottled water can be up to 1000 times more expensive than tap water and it may not be as safe”.
Availability of quality potable water or the lack of it is a big issue. Each day almost 10,000 children under the age of 5 in Third World countries like the Philippines die as a result of illnesses contracted due to ingestion of unsafe water.
What makes water so scarce now that in most instances, we have to buy it? Consider these:
Fact 1: There is the same amount of water on earth as there was when the earth was formed. The overall amount of water on our planet has remained the same for two billion years.
Fact 2: The earth’s total amount of water has a volume of about 344 million cubic miles, 80% of which is surface water. The other 20% is either ground water or atmospheric water vapor.
Fact 3: Water moves around the earth in what is called a water cycle. The water cycle has five parts: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration and surface run-off. I also learned this from school.
Fact 4: In a 100-year period, a water molecule spends 98 years in the ocean, 20 months as ice, about 2 weeks in lakes and rivers, and less than a week in the atmosphere.
Fact 5: There are two kinds of water– salt water and freshwater. Salt water contains great amounts of salt, whereas freshwater has a dissolved salt concentration of less than 1%. Only freshwater can be taken as drinking water.
Fact 6: Only 1% of the earth’s water is suitable for drinking.
Fact 7: Humans use more and more water as more humans are added in our planet each year. Today there are many more people using the same amount of water that we had 100 years ago.
Fact 8: What may seem as ordinary activity uses large amounts of water. Consider the following as examples: it takes 20-50 gallons of water for an average 10-minute shower; 9-20 gallons to hand wash dishes for an average household; 62,600 gallons to produce one ton of steel; 1,500 gallons to process one barrel of beer; 120 gallons to produce one egg; 11.6 gallons to process one chicken; 9.3 gallons to process one can of fruit or vegetables; 6,800 gallons to grow a day’s food for an average family of four; 1,850 gallons to refine one barrel of crude oil; and 39,000 gallons to manufacture a single unit of ordinary car.
Fact 9: Humans and all its agricultural, residential, manufacturing, community and personal needs largely influence the factors that determine water quality, as they depose off their waste in water and add all kinds of domestic, industrial and commercial substances and contaminants that were not originally and naturally present in our water. We now know more than 70.000 water pollutants. The principal sources of contamination are associated with the post World War II chemical age.
What may seem to be bleak and irreversible condition of our water could still be fixed, as another study indicated that “if all new sources of contamination could be eliminated, in 10 years, 98% of all available grounds would then be free of pollution.”
Water is part of a deeply interconnected system. What we pour on the ground ends up in our water, and what we spew into the sky ends up in our water.
Feel free to send your comments to nic_agustin@yahoo.com.
