Do you know what they're pumping into your drinking water?

As it is, we struggle with fully understanding the regulations in place for our drinking water. If you've read previous posts on water, you'll notice the regulations for what exactly is allowed in our water are slim to none. On numerous occasions, certified "clean" drinking water as defined by the government has been found to have traces of lead, bacteria, & carcinogens to name a few. This is water that has been approved clean! Do you trust the government with the water you drink? Ok fine, maybe they just don't manage to get all that is bad out of the water we drink...so they miss a few things? Not too harmless since we can always filter the water to make it pure before drinking. But to now read that the government is catering the idea of possibly purposely pumping in polluted water to our main back up water supply, that's just disgusting! Read on...

A recent article in the Sun Sentinal reported that greater amounts of polluted water could get dumped into Lake Okeechobee to boost South Florida water supplies under a new proposal to roll back restrictions on "back-pumping."

Five years ago, state water managers rebuffed Big Sugar and stopped the controversial practice of redirecting stormwater that drains off South Florida farmland to store it in the lake — while also washing in pollutants from farming.

But now, with the strain of competing Lake Okeechobee water supply needs growing, the South Florida Water Management District is considering a return to back-pumping to help store more water in the lake that serves as the region's backup water supply.

Supporters of back-pumping say the farmland storm water runoff that would be pumped back into the lake would make more lake water available for agricultural and environmental needs alike. They say more water in the lake would enable sending more freshwater to the West Coast to help the parched Caloosahatchee River during dry times, without threatening to sap lake water needed to irrigate South Florida farms.

"It's to prevent the taffy pull, the tug of war between the Caloosahatchee and the [agricultural] lake users for the last drop of lake water," said Barbara Miedema, vice president of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. "We support back-pumping as a water management tool."

But environmental advocates contend that the phosphorus-laden water that flows off sugar cane fields is supposed to be cleaned up and sent south to the Everglades, not pumped back north into Lake Okeechobee.

The potential damage to wildlife and water quality from dumping more polluted water into Lake Okeechobee wouldn't be worth a slight boost in water supply, environmental groups say.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you want to let the government control the water you consume? Bottled water is definitely not the answer because many of these bottled water brands have been tested positive for traces of bacteria. So what's the answer? Filtering your water with a trusted water filtration system.

Click here for more information on how you can protect your family with crystal clean water.





 Click here for more on this Sun Sentinal article.