0tterbot wrote:

i feel confident that the massive majority of water in australia is fit to
drink (including the crunchy water from my dam,

As someone who bicycle toured through great areas of this country, I
felt that way in the 70's, but now I am much more caustious.

That wonderful little brown pill you could take to cure delhi bellie is
no longer around and the knowledge of an increasing range of long term
diabilitating 9sp?) diseases is worrying.

To be blunt, we have a hell of a lot more "arseholes" spreading diseases
around as our population has almost doubled(?) over that time and we now
have agricultural wonders such as feed lots that despite all they are
suppossed tyo not do, can do a very good job of concentrating certain
pathogens that overwhelm a normal watercourse's cleaning methods.

I've taken to filtering everything these days.

Waterhsed information for me was that polar bears in the artic are
contaminated with the old style cooling oil used in power transformers.
Problem was there are no power transformers scattered throughout the
artic. turned out this nice, lethal chemical was going through
successive evaporation, deposition cycles to wind up on artic tundra
vegetation to be eaten by browsers to be eaten and acculmulated by polar
bears, erk. Modern chemicals are wonderful.



. it irks me that incompetent bureaucracies
(e.g. most local councils) get to make these decisions from a completely
irrational base (the nsw govt 360 degree turnaround on rainwater tanks being
one minute banned outright in cities, & the next encouraged, is the sort of
thing i mean).

Absolutely no argument there.