My wife is wonderful in every way, but I realised over the weekend that she is simply not built for the apocalypse. On Sunday, I was scrolling through Twitter and having a nice cup of tea when I saw a tweet from a guy called Ya Fav Trashman about a chemical spill that might affect Philadelphia drinking water. “Equipment failure” at a Trinseo chemical facility had dumped more than 8,000 gallons (about 30,000 litres) of “latex emulsion product” into the Delaware river. You can’t just boil or filter these chemicals out of your water.
I immediately spat out my Delaware River tea. (Perhaps the latex was why it was going down so smoothly?) “Yikes,” I said. “We’d better get some bottled water.” My wife volunteered to go to the nearest shop. She came back with … two bottles.
A human prune, I live in a permanently dehydrated state, but my wife chugs water like her life depends on it. “That’s going to last you half an hour,” I said. “I hope this crisis only lasts half an hour.”
Reader, it did not. At that moment, everyone in Philadelphia, about 1.5 million people, got an emergency phone alert. It told us that, starting an hour later, at 2pm, we should use bottled water for drinking and cooking, out of an “abundance of caution”.
I grabbed a bag and ran to Rite Aid, the nearest purveyor of bottled water. It was crammed and the atmosphere was very jolly. There was still plenty of water available and nobody was buying ridiculous amounts, so there was a general feeling of: “Ha ha, we’re all going through dystopia together!”
After every single bottle of water in Philadelphia had been bought and panic had escalated, the city put out an update. The gist of it was: “Whoops! Looks like you didn’t need to buy all that bottled water after all, because the tap water is fine until 11.59pm on Monday.” What might happen then? Good question. Presumably, tap-drinkers would turn into toxin-laced pumpkins.
I say “presumably” because details of what these chemicals might do to your innards is still scarce. City officials have said that “people who ingest [contaminated] water will not suffer any near-term symptoms”, which begs the question about long-term issues.
Meanwhile, a Trinseo executive told local media that the chemicals his firm had spilled into the drinking-water supply were no big deal. “It’s like the material you find in paint,” he said. “It’s your typical acrylic paint you have in your house; that’s what, really, this material is, in a water base.” This is not particularly reassuring, seeing as not many of us go around drinking paint. Maybe this is the sort of corporate statement you come up with when you work with toxic chemicals all day.
The cherry on this dystopian cake? Not even the bottles of water that people were snapping up were guaranteed to be safe. Some Philadelphians discovered that the jugs of water they had bought because of the chemical spill were being recalled because they might be tainted by chemicals released by the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Accidents happen, of course. But there is a difference between an unavoidable accident and a series of public health disasters caused by corporate greed, deteriorating infrastructure and a lack of regulation. The US is the richest country in the world. Clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – and, yet, that is increasingly what it is becoming.
The most high-profile example of dirty water in the US was in Flint, Michigan, which had lead-poisoned tap water for years. But tap water across the US is laced with disturbing amounts of “forever chemicals”: a 2021 investigation by the Guardian and Consumer Reports found that millions of people across the country are exposed to potentially toxic chemicals in their drinking water – disproportionately people in poorer regions.
It is starting to look like the water in Philadelphia will probably be OK. But this episode has served as a disturbing reminder that clean drinking water may not be something we can take for granted much longer. Investors already know this, of course. In 2021, the owner of one hedge fund called water in the US “a trillion-dollar market opportunity”. Meanwhile, other investors have been snapping up rights to the Colorado River. Capitalism is going to poison us all.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
