I’ve written before about the City of Tacoma water and my office style water cooler/filtering system.
But yesterday I got this letter in the mail:
Dear Tacoma Water customer,
In the last several weeks, you may have noticed a yellow tint to your water. If so, I can assure you that your water is safe to drink. Tacoma Water prides itself on supplying you with clean, aesthetically pleasing water. Frankly, the discolored water that we are delivering does not meet out visual quality standards. I apologize for that.
The letter goes on to exlpain about the seasonal drop in oxygen levels in the reservoir, the higher iron and manganese mineral levels when this occurs and about how the water is treated so as to make it safe to drink.
I had been noticing the yellowish tint of the water in the commode bowl the last few weeks, wondering if maybe I was having plumbing problems, so this letter is welcome.
But not just for that reason. The fact that I actually got an apology from a city official, John Kirner, Tacoma water Superintendant, is just so shocking to me that I had to re-read the thing. After having lived in either King County or Seattle for decades, to find an apologetic letter to a untility customer, even one taken out of a pile probably 50,000 pages tall, was just about enough to make me sit down (someday I’ll have to tell y’all about how Seattle’s CNG supplier cut my block off from heat, in one of the coldest February’s in recent memory, for a 10 days, on purpose).
King County/Seattle wouldn’t have done that, and if you called to ask if there was a problem their response would have been along the lines of “Yeah, what do you want us to do about it.
And the fact that there wasn’t a single word about how this is all the fault of Global Warming, was nice as well.
Thankee, John Kirner and the City of Tacoma.