Stuff You Should KnowGetting the rain and melted snow from upstate NY into the taps of every NYC resident and business is one of the great feats of engineering. Does it taste great and make perfect bagels and pizza crust? Sources say yes! Learn all about it in this classic episode.
Hell to everybody. I hope you're having a lovely Saturday wherever you are in the world. Chuck, here with a Saturday Select selection, and I'm going to go with from November twenty nineteen, not even so long ago, as the Crow Flies. The episode is NYC Water Colon an Engineering Marvel. I love New York City. Everyone knows that I go on and on about that city on the show, and I'm constantly amazed that city runs, and that the trash gets taken away and the mail gets delivered, and that people have enough drinking water and water to bathe in and cook with. And so it's a pretty unique situation there in New York how they get their water. And here's that story. Please to enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles so B, Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer Andrew. This is Stuff you should Know. Let's get this a.
I'm excited about this one.
This was your pick and I was like, what is Chuck talking about? Were you really yes? And then Chuck, I happened to stumble upon I don't know what I was looking for, but an email from somebody who sent like a Google doc or something that was a list of episodes we said we should do, and people have set those in before, but this one was kind of condensed and that was on there. So I've stumbled upon your dirty little secret.
I don't think that's where I got it. Oh really, I don't think so, but maybe Okay, I just know that I am always fascinated by not only New York City, but by the fact that New York City functions with that many people and all that everything. It's just all amazing to me that that city functions with that many people, that many buildings, that like, I want to do an episode on out trash removal.
Okay, I want to do one on the mail on wastewater treatment. Yeah, oh yeah, that's just New York in general.
That's been long brewing.
Are you okay with that?
Yeah?
Just I mean, we can mention New York or whatever.
Big thanks to Dave Ruse though, one of our great writers. They put this together and it's really really fascinating.
Dave's just an amazing human. All of our writers are amazing, for sure. Dave is great as well. He's one of a few select amazing people.
Right.
So the reason why New York, why anybody would ask about New York's water is because if you've ever interacted with the New Yorker, they talk about their water a lot. It's like kind of a thing in New York where they're like, our tap water is the best water in the country, and they have like a lot of stuff to back that up with, and so much so that that they say this, this water is actually the reason why our bagels and our pizza are so good.
Yeah, I was. We were both just there for our final shows of the year at the Bellhouse thanks to people who came out. Yes, they were great, a lot of fun. And by the way, the guy that fell asleep on the front row on night number two, I think it was night number two. I was walking down the street and he randomly passed by driving in a car and rolled down his window and said, hey man, He said great show the other night.
Right, And I was waiting for him to say, is that Freedom Rock?
And I said thanks dude, I was like front row And he was so excited that I remembered that, and he said front row and he drove on before I had a chance to say you fell asleep.
He's like, I feel like I was there. Maybe I felt like a dream too.
I don't know, but we were just there. And there are many many restaurants in New York where there will be like a water cooler or a place where you can help yourself to your own cup of water, and it will have a big sign on it that says New York City tap water and proud all caps underlined letters.
Yeah, And they mean like they're just getting water out of the tap, Whereas in other cities that's a dirty, shameful secret that people don't talk about.
That's right.
In New York, they proudly boast about it. And just the fact that New York or any New Yorker in the city gets water at all is pretty spectacular. It's like you said, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of buildings, and something like more than a billion gallons of water flow into New York through the taps every day.
Yeah, I said day with the d yes. It is the largest water system in the United States. People from all over the world, government officials fly in and take meetings with the New York City water people just to see, like how have you done it?
They're just agog, how could we do better? So that's impressive enough that a billion, more than a billion gallons of water is delivered every day to New Yorkers. Pretty great. But the idea that you can just drink it straight from the tap and it is ninety percent unfiltered, yeah, that is a truly impressive feat.
Yeah. And by ninety percent unfiltered, we mean ninety percent of the water is unfiltered and ten percent is filtered.
Right, And you might say, look, how can you just filter ninety percent of the water. Well, it comes from different places, that's right. So ninety percent of the water comes from two places, two watersheds that combined are called the Catskill Delaware Watershed or water system I think. And then the other one from the Crow Croton I always want to say Crow toWin. Yeah, but from the Croton Reservoir. That ten percent is actually filtered. We'll get into all of that. But ninety percent of New York's water is not. It doesn't go through a filtering process. And that makes New York one of only five major cities in the United States to get a waiver from the EPA that says your water is so deliciously pure and delightful that you don't need to filter it. Almost every other city has to have a filtering process before it gets delivered to taps.
That's right. And the other four naturally Seattle, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco. The one that's a bit of a surprise is Boston, Massachusetts.
What's that's how surprising it is, Chuck, Yeah, that's right.
So let's talk a little bit about the history of New York and their water, because back in the day, we've always talked about how what a disgusting, disease ridden poop and horse urine ridden place New York City was.
Yeah, supposedly there's a good twelve inches of horse manure on the street at all times. They before they really started cleaning their place up.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
I think that was in the wind Criest Typhoid Marry episode, which is a great.
One, another great New York episode. So if we're talking New Amsterdam, pre New York City, they got water where you would think from ponds and natural springs, underwater springs, and they had a forty eight acre pond it's about sixty feet deep in Tribeca. What is now Tribeca called the Collect and also the little Collect that was just south of there, And that name comes from the Dutch word caulk, which means small body of water. And the Collect was where they got their water for a long time until the city let some tanners built a tannery on the shores of the Collect, not smart New York, which ruined everything.
Yeah, because it started to get polluted. They all were able to drill wells and stuff around places where people pooped and peed and then dump their poop and pee. It was a dirty, dirty place because this is pre germ theory, or at least around the time the germ theory was being developed and people didn't understand it. And I think it was our great stink episode where they traced a colera epidemic to a public well, a public water pump. John Snow, if I remember correctly did that. And this would have been around the time that New Yorkers were suffering from cholera epidemics, one of which took place in I think the eighteen thirties, eighteen thirty two. It killed thirty five hundred New Yorkers and that was a substantial amount of the population at the time, and another one hundred thousand New Yorkers had to flee just to get away from this colera epidemic, and it was because their sewage and their water was coexisting in very unhealthy ways. So New York said, maybe we should try something else. Let's look a little further outside the city where we're dumping our waists and everything. See if we can get our water from there.
And they did.
They built the Croton Reservoir. They damned the river, and reservoir collected and they said, now we have some beautiful pure water. We will never need to do anything again to get our water.
That's right. Previous to that, though, in the eighteenth century, they had these public pumps like you were talking about on street corners, about every four blocks or so, a big wooden pump where you would get your water from underground streams and springs and stuff. But there were only a few of these that actually delivered good water. A lot of it was really brackish and gross tasting, and Americans and early European settlers obviously loved their tea, and so they marked this was almost like an early yelp or whatever. They had these pumps that actually delivered like the two or three good pumps in the city that delivered good water labeled tea water.
Pumps, but like it was good enough to use for tea.
Good enough to use for making good tea, okay, so they would go to these tea water pumps. You would have to buy the water. The best one was apparently at Chathaman Roosevelt. There was another and sort of what the Lower east Side is today that was a good tea water pump. And this worked out for a long time until the collect and all this stuff. It started to sort of get nasty and stinky, and so they built a canal to channel that water into the river. Like that, we got to get rid of it and drain this thing. So they build this canal forty feet wide, they channel it. Right after they finish it, this canal begins to sink, and in eighteen twenty one it got so bad. The smell was so bad that they eventually just covered up the canal. And guess what that became.
I don't know, Central Park Canal Street. Oh, how about that so stupid? I wasn't even in the right part of the city.
That's all right.
We've even done an episode on Central Park and that wouldn't it forget it? Yes, Canal Street obviously.
That's where Canal Street came from. That was literally a canal and then eventually an underground sewage system under running under Canal Street. Right, And there's another cool little tidbit if you want like your little New York history, if you like to walk around on subways and tell people about cool things. Yeah, one of the first public reservoirs in the city was dug by Aaron Burr and his Manhattan Company, and that didn't work out. They transported it through wooden logs as pipes bury beneath the city.
Somebody found a piece of that wooden log. It's in one of the museums up there. Now, Oh no way, Yeah.
That is very cool. But the water didn't taste great and it didn't work out for Aaron Burr, so he changed. He still kept the Manhattan Company, but he got into banking and the Manhattan Company became Chase Manhattan Bank.
I saw somewhere that that was his aim all along, that the water thing was just basically a fleece to raise money to found oh really, and that that's why the water was so shoddy and the delivery was so shoddy. But what they were selling was so bad supposedly the horses wouldn't even drink.
It, So it's a scam.
It was basically a scam. Aaron Burr was not the greatest historical American shot Alexander Hamilton.
I know that's enough right there, right.
And then also scammed a bunch of people out of their water investment. That's right, because I mean, if you want to invest in a bank, you want to invest in a bank. If you want to invest in a water outfit, you want to invest in a water outfit. You want people to be above the boards with stuff like that.
That's right above the dogs.
That's my tirade.
So you mentioned the Croton Dam and the Croton Reservoir. I want to say crow atone as well. Yeah, that became and that aqueduct became operational and things were okay, but then a tragedy struck with the Great Fire of eighteen thirty.
Five, Yes, which actually I guess that the Great Fire took place right before the reservoir was opened, which is why the greats are bad. Yeah. So in eighteen thirty five, on a night in December, a warehouse caught fire and it just leveled Lower Manhattan, like just destroyed something like seventeen city blocks, fifty acres of the most densely populated part of New York at the time, and luckily only two people died. Was too many, but considering that it was seventeen city blocks that got reduced to ash, that's not bad actually, especially considering that the way that they ended up fighting this fire was by setting buildings on the perimeter on fire because they didn't have the amount of water that they needed.
Yeah, the reason for that it was just sort of really bad luck. They were two smaller fires that drained our hour. Like I'm a New Yorker, listen to.
Me, you're an honorary New Yorker, I would guess.
It drained the cisterns, the reserve cisterns that they had, and because of those two smaller fires, they didn't have enough to fight the Great Fire. And the long and short of all this, as New York said, we got to really speed up this Croton Reservoir work.
Yep, and they did. And so the Croton Reservoir was broad online in the middle of the nineteenth century, and they had a big old parade and everything, and it delivered something like ninety million gallons of delicious pure water to New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a really big deal and it worked really well for a very long time. But there was also they built the murray Hill Reservoir so the Croton Reservoir would be where the water collected upstate. And then they built an aqueduct system which is still around in parts today, an elevated aqueduct to what's called the murray Hill Reservoir, which was a four acre above ground swimming pool.
Basically, it's pretty cool if you look at pictures.
Yeah, Yeah, it was like a real spot in the city while it was around, I think something till eighteen forty two to nineteen hu it was around, and people used to take strolls around it and make paintings of it and that kind of thing. And it is where the New York Public Library is now today, where the Ghostbusters did some of their early work. All right, right, but it worked really well for you know, the time. But then as New York grew and grew and grew, it became very painfully obvious yet again that New York had outgrown its water supply.
Yeah, they needed more water. Ninety million gallons a day wasn't enough. And then what made matters worse was in eighteen ninety eight, New York City officially made it a declaration that we are now not just Lower Manhattan. Of course, they didn't call Lower Manhattan at the time, right, that was just sort of where the city ended.
They called it Manahattan.
Yeah, Manhattan.
I saw that episode, by the way, it was one of the better ones ever, which one think of what we do in the dark. Oh, that's right, where they go to party in Manhattan Manahattan.
Yea, what we do in the shadows? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm so stupid, that's all right. The Five Burrows were included in eighteen nine to eight officially, so New York and the water needed to get to the people was officially grown to more than three million people by the time the twentieth century turned.
Right, which is just precious today. Three million New Yorkers, Oh my gosh, I really do. So they started to look upstate again because they had hit upon like a pretty good idea. The city is a cesspool. We need our water from outside of this cesspool. And they started looking up state. So this time they looked up to the cat Skills and they found two watersheds, which we did an episode on watersheds that I would love to forget, but it came up just now.
Oh I thought it was good.
No, oh man, it was horrendous, was it? Yes? I thought it was terrible and boring.
January twenty seventeen.
I don't remember when it came out. Like I said, I tried to forget that it ever happened.
I thought it was pretty good.
But anyway, So a watershed is basically a specific topographical air area where rain, snow, whatever precipitation falls down into this area and is delivered to a specific creek, river stream, something like that that eventually empties into like a lake or reservoir or something like that. So there's two watersheds, the Delaware and the Catskill Watershed that put together create something like two thousand square miles of water catching goodness, and it delivers it to a number of different reservoirs. And that is now today where New York gets like ninety percent of its water.
Yeah, so you know, obviously they had to dam up rivers to create these reservoirs, and this all happened to you in the early nineteen hundreds. And then finally they were like, great, We've got all these reservoirs and the Catskills, but let me remind you, we're on the lower east side of Manhattan, surrounded by horse hearin and a lot of it and poop. We need our fresh water. How do we get it here? So in nineteen seventeen, the engineers of New York City completed the ninety two mile Catskill Aqueduct YEP, which is amazing. It's basically a big concrete tunnel that sends water ninety two miles from the Catskills down to New York. It's as wide as thirty feet in some places. It is not a tunnel the entire length, as we will see here in a minute. Not a continuous tunnel. I'm not sure what that means. What is it just like open.
There's parts of it that aren't technically a tunnel in that it's a covered trench. Okay, they cut a trench and then they covered it back up, which I don't know how you do that. But it's not technically a tunnel like a circle or tube.
Interesting, and here is to me one of the facts of the show. You get this water down there in the aqueduct and you get to the Hudson River, and what are you gonna do? You gotta go under it.
Right to me, it'd just be like just pump it in the Hudson and hope it comes out the other side. But then I would have gotten fired immediately when night he's no engineer. No, he's a sham.
He's a rapscallion. So it gets to the Hudson River and then it goes way down into the ground, about eleven hundred feet below sea level, and then climbs back up the other side. And it does all this via gravity.
Yes, and they did that not just to show off, but because they decided. I read this awesome, you know how I'm always like read the contemporary articles. I read one from nineteen oh seven where they were talking about the construction of the aqueduct and they said that the reason why they were going down that far is because they wanted to hit bedrock because it would be fissure free, meaning there would be no leakage, and they could just pump the water through the hole that they bored in the bedrock. Well, they thought the bedrock was going to be about five hundred feet down, and by nineteen oh seven when they wrote the Scientific American article, they'd reached like seven hundred feet still hadn't hit it. It ended up being like eleven hundred feet below sea level where they finally hit bedrock. And that's why they had to drill so far down. And they drilled a tunnel, a vertical shaft from the from the Hudson down to that tunnel, and they built like a tube to pressurize it. So the water eleven hundred feet under the Hudson is at like fifteen tons per square foot of pressure, which also helps. But the fact that there's no pumps or anything, it's all gravity and pressure driven.
Yes, And sadly though, that story has a sad ending because it took so long that their fissure free and three T shirts were all rendered useless.
What No, I don't know that it's a great joke. I'm gonna go back and listen to it and I'll probably think it's hilarious, So compliments on it in advance.
Oh man, that was a quality joke.
Three gotcha? Okay, sure, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotcha, All right, I got you. We're all together. Now, Okay, that is a pretty good joke.
Gee. Should we take a break after that? Yeah, all right, let's take a break. We'll talk a little bit more about this so called aqueduct right after this.
Stuff you should know, Josh, and shuck stuff you should know.
Okay, Chuck. So we've got the Catskill Aqueduct delivering water. There's another one in two called the Delaware Aqueduct. And this one actually is like a genuine tunnel.
Yes, it's eighty five miles, completed in forty four. I'm not gonna make a T shirt joke about that. And it is still the longest continuous tunnel in the world at eighty five miles. And they did this all, you know, just this digging process is amazing in and of itself, digging these tunnels and these trenches with steam shovels and pouring the concrete tunnel, which I was like, how do you do that? Even, Yeah, you do the bottom half let it set, and then you do the top half and let that set. So they were like Charles Bronson in The Great Escape. They were digging tunnels.
Yeah, I mean we're talking like dynamite and stuff like that. Like they really did it the old school way to build these aqueducts, and they're still in use today, so much so that there's three tunnels. Tunnel number one and tunnel number two have been in operation since nineteen seventeen and nineteen thirty six. They've never stopped operating. They've never been stopped up and drained and inspected in over one hundred years. For tunnel number one.
Yeah, I think the current memo going around is I'm sure it's fine.
Well, so they're building tunnel number three, and they decided to start building tunnel number three nineteen fifty four. They actually started in nineteen seventy. They are still not done with tunnel number three.
It's amazing.
Parts of it are online. And when it does fully come online, tunnel number three will have a capacity enough so that they can individually stop and drain and inspect and repair tunnel number one and then eventually tunnel number two. So the tunnel number three, Yeah, tunnel number three will save the other two. And it's good that they're doing it now. But I saw that it's going to be fully operational in twenty twenty one.
They think, oh wow, so we're almost there.
Almost man.
Yeah, it's the New York's longest running municipal project, five billion dollar price tag so far and count I guess. And then those three tunnels or two, and however many parts of three are working deliver one point three gallons of water a day through a network of mainz and then individual pipes leading to apartments and homes and businesses and skyscrapers, and all of those pipes, if you total them up, would lay out about seven thousand miles.
That's pretty impressive. I would also like to point out that I think you meant one point three billion gallons? Would I say one point three gallons? Yeah? Really, which would be hilarious that they went to all this trouble, spend all this money, and they're like, we can crank out one three gallons a day, New York. Gather around and get your water.
I was still thinking about my t shirt joke.
It's a good joke.
And here's the kicker too. Another great fact of the show. Only five percent of all of the city's water lies on pumps to get to its final destination, which it means your tap.
It's pretty awesome. Yeah, So that means that it can't break down or if something does happen. They still have things like gravity to help things along. It's great. So the reason why the EPA gave New York a waiver and said you don't have to filter the water coming from the Catskill and the Delaware watersheds is because.
Because Giuliani greased the palms of the EPA.
Right exactly, it started well, it started out as so pure, in pristine and just great water to begin with. But they have taken steps along the way to ensure that it stayed that way. Because one of the things that happened with the Croton Reservoir is development was allowed to grow up around it, Agriculture was allowed to pollute it. It just got it turned. And after that, the EPA, I think in the nineties the late nineties, said, yep, you guys have to are't filtering that water. It's no longer unfilterable. It's it's not drinkable as is, So they had to start filtering. It used to be one hundred percent of New York's water was unfiltered that Croton Reservoir. Now is ten percent that is filtered. But so they learned a valuable lesson from that, and now they're very proactive and keeping the Delaware and Catskill reservoir or watershed water from becoming corrupted by things like development and agriculture.
Yeah, and by you know, the lesson they learned is money, because you might be thinking, like, what's the big deal, why don't they just filter all of it. It's a lot cheaper to take care of the land and make sure you never have to filter it than to install a filtering plant.
Yeah, because they estimate that a filtering plant would cost something like ten billion dollars up front and then one hundred million dollars a year to operate. New York is spending something like one billion dollars every several years to protect the Delaware the Catskill water sheds. So it is an enormous investment. But also it's great because it's natural water that's unfiltered.
Yeah. And you know, they do this in a number of ways, aside from buying up forty percent of the land, which was a good move and making sure nothing happens to it.
Yep. So New York City owns a lot of land upstate. Oh yeah to stef Yi, Yeah, forty percent. Yeah, it's a lot of land, not forty percent of New York State but forty percent of the property around the Catskill and Delaware water sheds. They also did things like, hey, let's look at all the wastewater treatment facilities upstream, and let's invest a lot of money in upgrading those. Hey all, you people that have septic tanks that are falling apart, that matter, So we're going to reimburse you fifty two hundred homeowners. Yeah that's impressive.
Yeah, install a new septic tank, and we're going to pay for it.
Yep.
They remove dead trees, they replace those with little sapling trees who apparently have roots that are young and can abs or a lot of harmful nutrients from that rain water. And here's another good fact of the show. Some of the water from those reservoirs or from that watershed can take up to a full year to make its way down to the tap that you're drinking out of.
That's a good one. I like that one. It's almost like the how long it takes sunlight to reach us?
And you were gonna say that it's the same thing. It's the same thing.
They also did you talk about farmers.
The only difference between those stats is you don't have to explain what a photon is you can just say water.
It's a tiny packet of light. It's the carrier of electromagnetic and it's right.
What did you ask right before that?
Did you talk about the farmers how they train farmers upstate too? I did not, So they say, hey, you hicks, you're gonna learn these techniques, man to I'm just kidding. I love farmers. I would actually, as a matter of fact, Chuck, when I retire, I really really want like a small working farm. Oh yeah, very small, Like what do you want, like a tenth of an acre? Small?
No? No, what kind of stuff do you want to farm? What do you want on it?
Oh? I don't care? Yeah, oh yeah, some animals, but just you know, having pigs around, not to eat or milk, but to like basically but to like to churen up like a field so that I can plan it the next year and move the pigs to the next part of the land. That kind of stuff. For chickens to just walk around and eat their eggs and things like that.
You want some chickens, some pigs, you want some probably a couple of goats. A couple of goats. You want some planting you want to farm, some plants and vegetables.
Sure, yeah, but mainly just to have something to do, like with the earth. So I was one hundred million percent teasing when when I said that New York was calling the farmers hecks. New York probably did call the farmer's hicks. But I wasn't condoning that. I was just making a joke.
Right, you're the guy who wants a tenth of an acre one day to do something on that. You're not sure.
Those pigs are gonna be Like, this is some pretty tight quarters around here. Oh you know what else? I would do what? And I would need more of a tenth more than a tenth of an acre for this? Raise bees. That is where I will eventually raise bees. It's on Josh's farm.
Well, brother, you better get some land soon because it's leaving. At a land is leaving, Yeah, I mean it's people are buying land. There's I remember my parents looking at land when I was like ten years old, and they didn't buy it.
They say it's leaving, and it's.
A different deal. Now. It's a lot harder to find the land that you want. You know, people bought it all up.
I know you can still get it, but you got to pay through the nose for.
It, yeah, or it's up to them if they want to sell it or not. You know, sure we're getting second rate, we're getting sloppy seconds.
Oh god, oh man, that's gonna be one of those things that, like our younger listeners is going to be in college smoking pot in a dorm room and it'll just hit them what you just said, like fifteen years on.
Oh goodness. So you mentioned the croat and watershed needs the filtering and they're trying to avoid that at all costs with the other watersheds. But the croat and water supply when they built this filtering system. It costs three point two billion dollars and it's under a golf course in New Jersey.
Which is so appropriate. That's where the tainted water is under a golf course in Jersey and Bedminster perhaps sure, I don't know what that is, but it sounds right.
Oh, some people will get that one.
New York's like, hey, you Hicks, build a golf course over this. New York just calls everybody else Hicks. And that's right. They do.
When we can fly in, do they welcome Hicks?
So have we taken our second break yet.
No, we probably should though. This is a good time.
Okay, We're going to take another break, and we're going to come back and explain what New York does do to its water and whether or not it is a secret ingredient in bagels and pizza.
Stuff. You should know, Josh and shuck stuff. You should know, all.
Right, Chuck. So one thing that you're gonna want to say. If you're a New Yorker and you're boasting about your tap water, there are some things you should know. Number one, it's chlorinated. Number two, it's been run through a UV filter. Even if it hasn't been filtered, filtered, there's still things that are done to it. It's not like it's coming straight out of the cat skills into your tap.
Yeah, they take it very seriously. Obviously. Here's a good stat In one year, there are more than fifteen thousand water samples taken an analy at the source. So this is upstream. They have AI, well not AI or is it AI?
There's AI involved somehow? There always is.
I always ask if it's AI. Want to I always ask you? Because you know, sure, I know. Thanks to the end of the World with Josh Clark.
Oh thanks for the plug.
Still available on iTunes, the iHeart podcast app or wherever you find your podcast.
Wow, that wasn't just a plug, that was an AD.
So they have these robotic buoys that monitor the Kensico Reservoir, one of the reservoirs that feeds down into New York. And these things take one point nine million measurements a year and wirelessly transmit that back to the Department of Environmental Protection in New York.
Yeah, which is pretty awesome. And they had a booy before, but they had to remove it in winter because ice would mess with it, and this new one apparently is ice loving.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. They also if you walk down the street, there's something like thirteen hundred, no sixty five, nine hundred and sixty five little gray boxes that if you could open up you would find a little sink and a faucet. It's adorable, maybe a little sample size of loxatain soap. And that's a water sampling station, it says nydep Department of Environmental Protection, and scientists walk up to these things, unlock them and take samples and test for all sorts of different things to make sure that the water getting to New York is good.
Yeah, it says more than that. It says New York City Drinking Water Sampling Station on the front of it.
Oh wow, they really they really spell it out. Yeah, I said Fisher free and O three stamped on.
There, so that you know they're testing. They take thirteen hundred water samples a month. I'm not sure if you said that, but they were a from these particular stations and they do all kinds of tests. Are testing obviously for turbidity, which is cloudiness, pH chlorine, bacteria, does it stink like all kinds of tests that they're.
Doing, right, And usually the New York City water is going to pass all these tests like it's there's not going to be a problem. This is just a extra little quality assurance that they're doing because by the time it reaches these testing stations, that's where it's going to the taps anyway, it's tapping into the tap water basically, right, so that ten percent of water goes through a couple extra steps that is that that the other ninety percent doesn't go through. One of the first things it does in a treatment plan is it's mixed with alum which is a component of aluminum, right, and alum attracts organic compounds and basically says, rise to the surface with me, and it creates flock, which is a white, frothy sludge, and all that is just skimmed off the top.
Yeah, this sounds so gross and it is, but like in the end, you get your good water. The next thing that happens is it flows through these giant water filters. Day've put it as like these giant Brita filters. It's essentially sort of the same thing. And this is just going to further purify the water, passing through layers and layers of stuff like sand and anthracite. And then comes the ultra violet light that you referenced earlier, right.
Yes, and one hundred percent of New York's water is sent through a UV filter because UV filters are really good at disrupting reproduction of bacteria, and so all water is apped. But that ninety percent of water that's not filtered that goes through a separate UV filtering plant that's built just for those, that's right, And that's where like a billion gallons of water a day are z apped with UV lights. But so all of that gets combined together eventually and comes out your tap. And New Yorkers drink it straight from the tap. Literally. It is very bizarre because I don't know if it's a placebo effect or what, but I feel like it does taste pretty good for tap water. It does, but at the same time, I typically don't drink just straight tapwater, so my frame of reference isn't necessarily right there.
You want to hear something funny, Yeah, you know what my brother's favorite water is and what it's probably just a bit, but he claims it's true. What hose water?
Oh, I know what he's talking about.
Yeah, like when you're watering the car or watering the car. When you're washing the car, here's right, grow car when you're watering your mini, so it grows into an suv, right.
So I think the reason why Scott is onto something is because when you're drinking from a hose, it's summertime and it's hot.
Out, yeah, and you're probably working hard.
Maybe it definitely it definitely does taste different, for sure.
So when it comes to New York water, everyone says it's the best in the country. There are rankings, actually, and it is thirteen out of one hundred metro areas in the US.
So it's not the best literally by definition, not the best water in the cut.
You've got to move to Arlington, Texas if you want. And this this was from ten years ago, but I'm not sure what the current status is. Imagine Arlington's still up there though.
Sure, but you're going to have to have a lot more reasons than that to move to Arlington, Texas. Ouch that one, I'm not taking that.
What are some of the problems though with New York water.
Well, there's two big problems. Turbidity, which you mentioned earlier, which is sediment suspension in the water, which gives it kind of a cloudy or darker, gritty kind of look, which is it's not just that it looks bad, its pathogens can cling to that sediment, so it's not something you want suspended. Plus it also makes it much more difficult to filter that stuff out. It's like extra work that has to be done to get rid of that sediment. And if you're not filtering your water to begin with, that's kind of a problem. And then secondly, the other one is nutrients. It's over nutrient meaning it's just packed with ribal flavor.
Well, what it actually is is fertilizer runoff. You know, those farmers are doing their best, but there is fertilizer that goes downstream and runs into the watersheds, and phosphorus is one of the biggest problems because farmers do fertilize with phosphorus and if it runs off. The phosphorus alone is not great because it can cause algae blooms and stuff like that, and it can taste bad and stink.
Yeah, because when the algae dies, it decays and it does not smell good.
No, it does not smell good. But a bigger problem, though, is when you combine that with the chlorine. Because, like we said, New York water is chlorinated and fluoridated. We have the T shirts to prove.
It, right. I don't think we said it was fluoridated, but yeah, everybody knows.
Yeah it's fluoridated. And when you combine that chlorine with a phosphorus, it can create byproducts called disinfection byproducts, and that is no good at all.
No, those are nasty. They're called d bps and they are basically like chemicals that are accidentally made from sanitizing water. And not just with chlorine, but chlorine chlorine. There's a bunch of different stuff that they use to disinfect water, and all of them can combine with organic compounds to create really just nasty stuff like carcinages or carcinogens. Some can produce miscarriages. It's just really really bad stuff that can be produced in the drinking water.
Chloroform is one of those byproducts.
Yeah, which is why New Yorkers frequently faint when they're drinking tapwater.
But this all sounds super scary New York City. They are. They have I think there are eight to known contaminants, but they are still apparently well under the legal limit, depending on what you think about how the legal limits are set.
Up for it, right, exactly, it's a good caveat.
But New York City drinking water is thirty point nine parts per billion chloroform and the national average is eleven. So they're way higher on chloroform. But as far as all of those DBPs total, they're far below the legal limit and just a little bit above average nationally.
Right, And then the total number of DBPs that they have is actually less than those in Arlington.
So interesting.
Chew on that Arlington.
That's right, Chew on that bad pizza.
Speaking of chewing, Chuck and pizza. Let's just answer this question. Is New York City's water the key ingredient to New York City bagels and pizza? H?
I think, I mean, you can't definitively say, but I think it does have something to do with it. For sure.
It's got to because science is involved. So here's the thing. The water from the Catskills and from the Delaware is naturally soft, meaning that it's lowing calcium and magnesium. Where do you fall on loving softer hard water? I'm a hard water guy, same here man.
When I lived in Arizona, they had soft water where I lived in my sister's house that I lived in, and most of the houses had water softening or I guess hardening units or whatever in the house.
Yeah, because you can't feel clean, like you never feel like you got the shampoo or the soap off. It's awful. It's just awful.
Does anyone like soft water?
I don't know, weirdo's probably.
I mean hard water. Sorry, no, I had it all backwards.
Okay, So so you like soft water.
Yeah, that's why I actually, that's why I misspoke. They had water softeners in Arizona because the water was hard New York water is soft.
I like soft, Okay, I like hard water typically because I feel like I'm clean afterward. But water like just the New York water is fine with me. But a softened like a chemically softened water, I can't stand.
Oh really, yes, interesting.
But New York's is naturally soft, so it doesn't have calcium, magnesium, or it's very low in those things comparatively, and that actually has an effect on taste, like calcium and magnesium can provide like a bitter taste to water. So there's one thing that they're saying, like, Okay, the dough isn't going to taste naturally bitter because of the calcium magnesium.
That's something that is something, and it also interacts with the flour. If you're going to make a bagel or a biali or pizza crust, sure you can be or you know a lot of things when you're baking, but those are the big three. In New York. You're going to be using flour and water as your base for your dough and hard water. The minerals in those tapwater are going to fortify the gluten and they're going to make it tough and less flexible. You don't want it too soft, though, because it'll have the opposite effect. It will be gooey and you won't be able to work it as well. Right, And apparently the American Chemical Society says New York City tap water is the Goldilocks of bagel water.
It is just right yep, not too hard, not too soft, just perfect for a begel and for a pizza. And that that American Chemical Society quote came from a Smithsonian article and they went on to say, probably though, it's actually the techniques that New Yorkers use to make bagels. Like they poach the bagel dough first, like they boil it.
That's the only way to do a bagel. Sure it's boiled, it's not a bagel.
No it's not.
It's like a bake donut. It's not a donut basically.
And then they also will they'll let the yeast sit for a little while to make it for mint, which creates volatile flavor compounds, so it just tastes better. They're saying, probably those are the reasons why New Yorkers make better bagels or pizza. And it's not really the water. The water just contributes a very small amount.
I think it's all those things.
Why not? No one can say for certain, so let's just say yes, it is exactly things. Well, if you want to know more about New York City's tap water, go on to New York City and try their tap water. And since I said that it's time for listener mail everybody.
I'm gonna call this house rolling. And we talked about tepeing houses. Yep, love the podcast. Guys, just finish up trick or treating, and you were talking about rolling houses. I grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, where we used to roll houses all the time. In Franklin, Tennessee, for people don't know, is where a lot of big shot Nashville big wigs live because you can buy a huge house with lots of land. That was Chuck speaking right. Funny thing though, guys, I'm back to being Brandon. Okay, funny thing though, guys. My neighbor was Brad Paisley. There was a couple of years before his first Grammy award. And once we found this out, we knew that we had to get them. So my sister and I gathered all of our friends dressed in black and snow out to roll this country. Music Stars house. We were halfway through the job when his freaking tour bus rolled up on us. At first, we all ran away frightened, but we were pretty much caught in the act. Nowhere to go. He got off the bus and was super nice about the whole thing. Actually, he gave us a quick tour of the tour bus, chatted us up for a little while. We even cleaned up the little bit of mess we had made, and left starstruck. I highly doubt he remembers that night at all, but my friends and I will certainly never forget anyway. That's all I got. Guys, have a spooky Halloween. That is from Brandon Saunders.
That is very nice. Brandon, thanks a lot for that email, and hats off to Brad Paisley for being so cool.
He doesn't take his hat off, but.
All right, exactly, but also how about just a hat tip then?
Yeah? Or actually I was thinking Kenny Chesney because he's bald.
None of those guys take their hats off, dude. So but also he hangs out with Peyton Manning, which means that he must be a good guy. Right, Oh yeah, isn't Peyton a good dude?
Sure? I'm just tired of seeing him on my TV.
Oh that's not gonna app anytime soon. Pretty soon you'll see them in augmented reality, and you're going to say everywhere you go, like it or not, Charles. Okay, Well, if you want to get in touch with this, like Brad Paisley did, you can go on to stuff youshould Know dot com and check out our social links, and you can also send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, with it some good old country goodness, and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
