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Comment by jen_h | Hacker News Reader

Filter your water if you live anywhere near an airport or military base anywhere, it's not just California.

In Satellite Beach, Florida, the contamination from Patrick AFB was discovered after a group of Satellite Beach High alumni realized they all developed cancer around the same time and decided to start digging. [https://pfasproject.com/2018/08/08/satellite-beach-florida-f...]

They dumped everything in a trench...not realizing there was an underground waterflow there. :/

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I'd also just filter/test your water everywhere :( I'm in Chicago, and my daughter and I decided to test some public water fountains near the city zoo for lead. Thought it would be an interesting way to expose her to more science. I also had a suspicion of water fountains I've been finding now "capped" and no longer working. One of the fountains we tested with a home test kit from Home Depot came up positive for lead. Luckily I know some folks in the city we reached out too about our test and now that water fountain has been capped too.

This has made me super paranoid now of all water everywhere.

There's also an epidemic of cyanobacterial (also known as blue green "algae") contamination around the US.

We've traveled all over the country and have personally encountered it everywhere -- from Oregon to New York to central Florida...it's all over the midwest, in the Great Lakes -- seems to be anywhere there's farming.

I'm not sure what you do for that, though -- not sure it can be filtered, and boiling just makes it worse as it's toxic when it's dead. I'm honestly more terrified of cyanobacteria than PFAS, and it's everywhere.

It's cumbersome, but I think you can use something like Steripen for that (UV).

That might kill the algae but likely won't destroy most of the toxins in the water that the algae produce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotoxin

Do the toxins get carried on along with distillation as well?

That's ridiculously energy-intensive and you'd probably have to re-mineralise it before storage or consumption to be on the safe side. Cooking might actually be the worst issue here, low-mineralisation cooking water would leech minerals out, leading to lower nutrient intake (unless yo keep the cooking water for drinking).

Distillation would make the water safe, reverse osmosis should also work. You don't need to remineralize water, you get minerals from food not from tap/mineral water and you don't need to worry about leaching your pots and pans.

> You don't need to remineralize water, you get minerals from food not from tap/mineral water

That's exactly the issue I'm pointing out in using distilled water from cooking, you will lose those minerals in the food to cooking water unless you drink it, so a normally proper died would not be anymore.

I doubt it, tap water and distilled water are both substantially lower in minerals than food, effectively 0 in comparison, I suspect if you boil your foods in either water the mineral content of the resulting food will be roughly the same.

The trick with algae is to stop it before it happens, which mostly deals with agricultural runoff.

Herbicides, specifically (https://ohioseagrant.osu.edu/news/2009/fe052/researchers-stu...). The stuff has adapted to eat glyphosate like candy. Makes sense when you see where it flourishes (like wheat and sugarcane-growing areas -- The Army Corps of Engineers' Lake Okeechobee releases fuel the blooms on the west and east coasts of Florida).

FWIW I witnessed a tweaker perched on top of one those public water fountains on the LFT, washing his bottom. I'd need to be nearly dead from dehydration to drink from one at this point.

Yeah. I’ve been running 10 miles now at a time and I still refuse to use those things. I’m thankful the zoo has vending machine that that Apple Pay :)

My father, who was in the aircraft refueling industry for decades until his passing earlier this year, would routinely rant about his customers' (the airports, generally) tolerance for leaking jet fuel into the ground.

He reported, and I have no source aside from him, that JFK allows up to 10,000 gallons of jet fuel to leak into the ground. Per day. And he claimed that most airports with hydrant systems had similarly large allowances.

I used to live across from the FedEx section of Memphis International, could see it over my fence. I used to watch with binoculars. They absolutely spill(ed) tons of fuel and did nothing to try cleaning it up.

> not realizing there was an underground waterflow there

I'm amazed whenever I see this. (A) what makes it okay to just dump stuff in a ditch? (B) are these people really clueless that no leaching through soil occurs?

> what makes it okay to just dump stuff in a ditch?

Lack of accountability. They did a calculation, and decided the risk of lawsuits several decades down the line is worth not paying to properly dispose their waste today.

There's a big difference between accountability and having to base your actions around what makes you the least sue-able and I think we can all agree that the latter has some serious side effects.

The various secret government programs did whatever it took to protect our precious bodily fluids from foreign contamination. Visible hazardous waste disposal is a great indicator that something interesting going on. So you hide it in a hole and pretend it's for the greater good of whatever dogma you sold your soul to.

Lord knows how much hazardous waste has been carelessly buried under orders from dogmatic maniacs obsessed with "winning" at all cost, including our future.

"Earth Day" was an event that happened only every decade up until 1990 when it became an annual event. This concept that what we do has a direct impact on the environment has only been a mainstream idea since the mid-1990s. Outside of super liberal areas like California, things didn't really kick off until Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. By the standards of the day, just digging the ditch and covering it afterwards was considered forward-thinking in most rural locales.