Parched City (21 page)

Tap water tastes

As the new decade unfurled, at least one company was confident about the quality of municipal tap water. By transforming it from banal to beautiful, Soda Stream imagined a whole new wonderful world of tap water joy. In its 1980 television advert, broadcast in the U.K., a quirky technicolour-clad cast, aged eight to eighty, spring collectively from the sofa to mix a smorgasbord of tap water cocktails. Red water in a wine glass topped with a cherry, or a plain carbonated draft transformed in an elegant Martini glass with a slice of lime on its rim.
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Sipping their ‘mocktails’, the cast react with a string of contorted, fizzed-up faces. Coincidentally, as Soda Stream was inspiring people to sex up their tap water, the first national tap water survey had just been published.

Drinking Water Consumption in Great Britain
was the work of the government-funded Water Research Centre (an amalgam of institutions that evolved from its sewage treatment research remit, originally in the 1890s).
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3,564 people from across England, Scotland and Wales were enlisted to keep a diary of their drinking water consumption habits over the course of a week.
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Although nine geographically and socially diverse areas
of London were included in the survey, these statistics were absorbed generally into the south of England.
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Any drink that involved turning on one’s domestic tap, from plain water to a Soda Stream brew, was included in the survey. Its purpose was to provide evidence about the quantity of drinking water that was coursing through the average British body. The research publication further qualified its objective: ‘In recent years a great deal of scientific effort has been expended on the possible relationship between drinking water quality and human health.’
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In order to establish if positive or negative health factors could be linked to drinking water, daily consumption had to be quantified. Previously, all liquid in-take was merely estimated to be two litres per person per day with no breakdown into different liquids. In 1945, America’s Food and Nutrition Board pronounced as a prescription for industrial workers, that ‘a suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances’.
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Were the British dehydrated in comparison to this standard?

Britain’s tap water survey revealed that though the average liquid consumption was circa 1.8 litres per body per day, tap water-based beverages only accounted for 1.1 litres of that total.
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Tangentially, it also recorded how little bottled water the British were drinking, in comparison to Europeans. France far outstripped any other country’s bottled water consumption at 50 litres per-head-per-year, with only Belgium coming anywhere close at 31 litres.
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In Britain, of the surveyed slice of the population, 70% recorded that they drank no bottled water during the week surveyed and 21% drank one 500ml bottle.
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Conducted in collaboration with the British Market Research Bureau, any savvy researcher-cum-entrepreneur working on the survey would have done well to note the medical establishment’s qualms about the potential relationship between tap water consumption and major health problems, such as patterns of coronary disease, alongside the low national consumption of mineral water. There was clearly a gap in the market that might
rapidly widen if tap water was connected with the proliferation of serious diseases.

Arteries, pipes and pollutants

Following the deliberations in the House of Lords about lead in drinking water, in 1977 the Water Research Centre was commissioned to collaborate with London’s Royal Free Hospital to carry out a national study. The researchers’ task was to determine whether trace elements in drinking water, including lead, and water hardness or softness correlated geographically with heart disease statistics.
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By the early 80s, water scientists also became concerned about lead: ‘Evidence has been presented of the correlation between water lead concentration and blood lead levels …Lead has also been cited as a causative agent in various disorders including hyperactivity, decreased intelligence, hypertension, mental retardation and renal failure.’
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These disorders’ relationship to lead consumption had been published in high-profile medical journals such as
The Lancet
. However, the water industry was struggling to find a method for the population’s exposure to lead from tap water, because of variables in consumer behaviour and plumbing materials. Increased exposure might be caused, for instance, by people who drank the first draught from a tap in the morning rather than those who left their taps to flow for a minute or two, hence flushing out any lingering traces of lead.
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1981 was a bumper year for disturbing findings by water researchers. That year marked the opening of a floodgate of evidence about the dangers of organic micro-pollutants, from sewage effluent to trace chemicals found in drinking water, ranging from ingredients of cleaning products to known carcinogens. EC environmental policy was causing closer scrutiny of the contents of its member states water supplies. One research publication exposed concerns about a group of organic chemicals — or compounds containing carbon — called
trihalomethanes. Disturbingly, trihalomethanes were produced as a by-product of the reaction of organic materials with chlorine. Fred Pearce commented on the findings: ‘It is an unfortunate irony that the chemical pioneered in Britain as the great water-cleanser, chlorine, has become a prime suspect in the organic pollutants controversy.’
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The prospect of chlorine’s safety being de-stabilised was not a good prospect for drinking water treatment professionals (chapter ten returns to this subject).

In 1982, when the Water Research Centre’s part in the, now extended, heart disease research programme concluded, accurate methods for determining the population’s exposure to lead had been developed. Previous research identified that information about indoor plumbing’s ‘stagnation curves’ and ‘household water use patterns’
both
had to be known before lead concentrations could be predicted.
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The research to date had also concluded that a household’s lead exposure was not exacerbated by soft or hard water.
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Water sitting in lead pipes for extended periods of time, whether it was hard water or soft water, was now conclusively known to present a problem. From the heart disease perspective, medical research continued. The relationship between water’s chemical composition and this condition had neither been ruled out, nor proven by the Water Research Council and the Royal Free Hospital’s joint study.

Water Workers’ Power

Back in the House of Lords, in July 1982, Baroness Birk was concerned. ‘Who will deal, for example, with the problem of lead in water?‘, she wondered.
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Another heated environmental debate was in progress. This time the subject was the proposed dissolution of the National Water Council. It was the body, born from the 1973 Water Act, which regulated regional water authorities. Apart from the National Water Council’s coordinating role strategically, the Baroness also alluded to the Council’s more sensitive role in negotiating wage rates for workers. As she
spoke, National Health Service employees were the latest public sector workers to dispute their wage packets. Proposals to abolish the Council suggested an ulterior motive: to break up the power base of the water industry’s representation of the interests of its manual workforce.

After Parliament’s summer recess in 1982, the bill to abolish the Council was presented to the House of Commons in November by Tom King, the Minister for Local Government and Environmental Services. He talked extensively about the evident problems with water and sewerage undertakers’ management since the new authorities had been created, however he felt that the National Water Council’s role as ‘midwife’ to the ten newborn authorities had served its purpose: ‘Significant costs are involved in the operation of the NWC. We believe that economies can be made.’
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In the context of high unemployment levels, the Right Honourable Mr Bennett pointed out that the Council’s 448 employees would lose their jobs.
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Despite these concerns, and potential industrial unrest, it was clear that the Bill had momentum. Unions mobilised around the issue by the New Year.

On 18
^th
January
The Times’
Labour Correspondent, David Felton, asked ‘Will the water men go over the brink?’ Felton explained the situation thus: ‘Union leaders see the current negotiations as their last chance of achieving a deal which puts the pay of the 29,000 manual workers firmly into line with the gas and electricity staff…’ The same day as this report was published, tension was mounting inside the House of Commons. An M.P. from Birmingham stated in the evening sitting of Parliament: ‘Clearly, there is a grave threat of a national water strike for the first time in our history.’
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That threat had not subsided three days later. An article in the
The Times
on 21
^st
June considered a strike’s implications for consumers. ‘Waiting for a mineral tidal wave’ ran the article’s headline. The photograph which illustrated the article, featured the grocery supervisor for
Tesco’s Catford branch stacking shelves with a range of bottled water products, including Highland Spring and Perrier.
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The scene appears to be staged but despite this the products were real and the accompanying article confirms that the sight of such quantities of bottled water in a supermarket trolley was novel at that time.

A peace process set in motion between the water industry’s negotiators and the Government broke down two days later. Britain’s first national water strike commenced on 24
^th
January 1983, making front-page news in
The Times
. Catford’s Tesco branch was in luck because, by the 27
^th
January, south London residents suffered the greatest loss of tap water supplies. Their only alternative to bottled water was temporary street plumbing in the form of standpipes plugged into the mains.
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No warnings to boil water were issued to Londoners, as was the case for 2.5 million people in Greater Manchester.
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Unsurprisingly, because of its population density, London had the highest loss of water supplies during that first week of the strike at 2560 households.
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North of the Thames, the neighbourhood of Finchley also suffered the effects of the strike. Coincidentally, this hit Margaret Thatcher’s own constituency, or perhaps it was no accident. In the affected neighbourhoods, nobody knew when they might be able to make tea; brush their teeth; flush their toilets, or use their Soda Streams without having to fetch water from outdoors. For how long could such uncivilised conditions be tolerated?

By the 4
^th
of February, the number of properties in London depending on standpipes had almost doubled from the previous week to 5,061; a sight not seen since the Blitz.
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Some ten days later Thames Water Authority was blaming consumers for not cutting down their water use.
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One result of the depleted water workforce was unrepaired mains pipes. Members of 11,417 households were now queuing up for their water on the street.
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On London’s scale, this was a fraction of the resident population (inner London: 2.52 million outer London: circa 4.5 million),
however it was the threat of further standpipes springing up across the capital that pressurised the wage negotiators.
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A potent symbol of the power struggle between the usually invisible hand of water and sewage labourers (such as flushers) versus the state would be blatantly on view.

Not far downstream from Westminster, a Pimlico resident pronounced that he would hire private contractors to repair his area’s mains pipe, but the Thames Water Authority warned that such attempts could lead to physical restraint.
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The risks associated with public hands meddling underground, in the professional sphere of civil engineers, were not to be entertained. Like the smattering of standpipes, this was another glimpse of what risky unofficial arrangements might appear if the industrial dispute lasted for months rather than weeks. On 16
^th
February — some three weeks into the strike — Margaret Thatcher, still defiant, spoke in the House of Commons about efforts to resolve the industrial dispute. ‘…there is absolutely no point in prolonging strike action, which is causing so much hardship to so many people’, she urged.
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By 18
^th
February, London remained at the top of the nation’s leader board of homes without running water, at 20,022.
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However, one M.P. declared that ‘very little was happening in London’ in terms of a loss of water supply, in comparison to his constituents in Cornwall where schools had closed down and ten per cent of people had lost their water during the strike.
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Such conditions did not deteriorate any further because the strike ended on 22
^nd
February. Water workers had secured their desired wage increase.
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Thames Water Authority’s manual workers went back to work exactly a calendar month after the strike began. David Felton dubbed the episode a ‘gentlemanly dispute’, arguing that the 29,000 strikers could have unleashed sanitary chaos by not providing emergency cover or ‘insisting on strong picketing to block deliveries of chlorine…’
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He also noted how no major machinery casualties had prevented a catastrophic
breakdown in civilisation. For the Government, the greater disaster was the precedent now set by the water workers for other public sector employees. Most notably, the miners’ strikes were mounted the next year.

Turning to the Bottle