Bottled Water

It's lunchtime at Dulaney High School. The kids are grazing on pepperoni pizza and french fries and washing it down with chilled bottled water.Savvy consumers, students talk up the benefits of hydration, including water's zit-zapping and toxin-sweeping abilities. They drink it down during basketball games and band practice, and pay 65 cents for bottles of it at hallway vending machines."It's all about perception, and it's just cool to drink bottled water," said Cathy Haymaker, product specialist for the school system's food and nutrition department.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government proposed yesterday more stringent standards for bottled-water labels, hoping to clarify for consumers the differences among mineral water, distilled water, spring water and others.Consumers are entitled to know the source of bottled water, as well as precisely what it contains, the Food and Drug Administration said in announcing the proposals, which become official Tuesday and are expected to become final in six months, following public comment. The actual changes in the labels would occur in about a year.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government proposed yesterday more stringent standards for bottled-water labels, hoping to clarify for consumers the differences among mineral water, distilled water, spring water and others.Consumers are entitled to know the source of bottled water, as well as precisely what it contains, the Food and Drug Administration said in announcing the proposals, which become official Tuesday and are expected to become final in six months, following public comment. The actual changes in the labels would occur in about a year.

Exxon Mobil resumes bottled-water delivery In the wake of complaints from residents and state officials, Exxon Mobil Corp. has agreed to continue supplying bottled water to 97 households in the Jacksonville area, where wells were found to be tainted after a 25,000-gallon gasoline leak from an Exxon service station. The oil company had mailed letters last week to the households informing them it would stop providing free bottled water. A company official wrote that tests have found very little or no gasoline constituents in those wells, and Exxon Mobil now believes that high levels of contaminants will not be detected in the future.

Should their palates tire of fizzy French waters or the stuff that springs from Maine's ancient aquifers, discriminating bottled-water drinkers have another source: Baltimore taps. The city plans to bottle municipal water, which recently won a regional award for taste against several other tap varieties. "It tastes great and it's good for you," Mayor Martin O'Malley said this week as he announced plans to have a bottling company package the water under the name Clearly Baltimore. The effort is mostly about boosterism - "Believe" in a bottle, so to speak - and is not a serious attempt to enter the bottled-water business.

To Thomas Pignataro, water never tasted so good. More than a decade after starting Brick House Farm LLC and several starts and fits with former partners, Pignataro is finally ready to see his Clarksville bottling company advance in the water market. With new partners, $700,000 worth of new equipment, plans for acquiring more land and a waiting list of customers, Brick House Farm is positioning itself for expansion. Only one other water company in the state - Green Spring - has both a bottling operation and a source in Maryland.

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS Applause signs A bumper crop of placards heralds the greening of U.S. 40, and the political season - all at taxpayer expense. Maryland baltimoresun.com/vozzella Deadline quiet Whatever noise was made around baseball's non-waiver trade deadline, none of it was coming from the Orioles. But it's not as if they had a lot they could have offered to another team. Sports baltimoresun.com/maese OTHER VOICES Kevin Cowherd on bottled water -- Today Glenn McNatt on Rodin at the BMA -- Today 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Rodin exhibit -- Rodin: Expression & Influence through April 6 at the Baltimore Museum of Art featuring about 30 works by French sculptor Auguste Rodin and his sculpting contemporaries, including Picasso, Bourdelle, Degas, Renoir, Maillol.

From an environmental point of view, the decision by Baltimore schools CEO Andres Alonso not to keep trying to get the lead out of school drinking fountains and to put bottled water in coolers in all schools may be disappointing. After all, the packaging and disposal of bottled water are taking an increasing toll on the environment. So it seems a shame to add to that burden when good tap water is available, as it is in Baltimore. But the coolers are somewhat more environmentally friendly than individual bottles, and after 15 years of fighting a losing battle, switching to coolers is more realistic and practical.

Let's raise a glass to Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco - a glass of water, that is. Of tap water, to be precise. The mayor has banned the use of bottled water by city departments, to save money and to help save the environment. It's something of a gesture, of course, since it affects only city purchases. But if it gets San Franciscans thinking about their use of water, it could have a larger impact. Other cities with good tap water (Baltimore, this means you) should consider following suit.

Like the 40 other people who attended Howard County's second informational meeting on the potential Y2K computer problem in Clarksville last night, the slim, serious woman with the short blond hair waited patiently through seemingly endless official assurances that all is well.Her question was as reasonable as the others: How can any unexpected glitch be fixed quickly if it doesn't appear until that moment when 2000 begins?She seemed satisfied with the answer -- that it likely would be an isolated failure, easily bypassed -- as did others who attended the session in the Ten Oaks Ballroom.

Does anyone know what we're supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We're coming up on the last year of it, and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the "oughts," as in, "Back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting." But perhaps the best reason to call it the oughts is that one is left with the sense that this decade ought to have been about something, and yet it really doesn't feel that way. As flawed as the American habit of dividing our history into decades may be, it's always made at least some intuitive sense.

You can easily spend $4 or more for a gallon. Yet you feel you can't live without the stuff. But it may be time to explore alternative sources. We're referring, of course, to that great lubricant of modern life: bottled water. (What, you had some other expensive liquid in mind?) Maybe oil and water don't mix, but that's not to say they don't affect each other. The economy is sagging, and high gasoline prices are taking much of the blame. When filling up the minivan sets you back $75, there's an inclination to cut back on frills - for instance, things you can get almost for free.

For more than a decade, Carl and Patricia Morgan rented out their two-story house in Fallston, but it has been vacant for nearly four years now. The Morgans can't rent the well-kept house with the manicured lawn and they won't let their daughter live there either. After a toxic gasoline chemical leaked into their well, the Morgans are afraid of their water. Since 2004, residents like the Morgans have worried about their health, quality of life and diminished property values. Some residents have shouldered the expense of bottled water and maintenance costs on a filtration system, all while waiting to see what happens with the lawsuits against their former neighbor, a major oil company.

GARMSIR, Afghanistan -- For the Marines fighting in southern Afghanistan, a shortage of drinking water turned out to be nearly as big a concern as Taliban insurgents. When Marines of Alpha and Bravo Companies, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, pushed into Garmsir, a Taliban stronghold, before dawn Tuesday, each toted 18 half-liter bottles of water plus two liters in his pack. Their staggering 100- to 150-pound loads - including weapons, ammunition, mortar base plates, radios, flak vests and helmets and other gear - had troop commanders worried even before the operation began.

Faced with an additional 10 years of filtering an elementary school's water supply, parents are renewing efforts to hook the building into the public system. It could be a decade or longer before the wells at Forest Hill Elementary are free of contamination and providing safe drinking water, officials at Maryland Department of the Environment said last week in meetings with parents and with the Harford County Council. The wells at the school, which opened in 2000 and has an enrollment of about 600, must be filtered to prevent contamination from a gasoline additive that has been detected in the ground.

An Anne Arundel County family has filed a lawsuit against Maryland's largest power company, contending that a leaky coal-ash waste dump contaminated their neighborhood's drinking water. At a news conference yesterday in Gambrills, Gayle K. Queen, an education counselor, said her husband, David, died of kidney failure last year after drinking water laced with lead, arsenic and other pollutants. Five or six other people in the neighborhood also died of suspicious causes, she said. "The people in this neighborhood are anxious every day if the water they drink every day is safe or toxic," said one of her attorneys, Wayne K. Curry, the former Prince George's County executive, now with William H. Murphy Jr.'s law firm in Baltimore.

Education officials, staff and parents at a northern Harford elementary school coping with contaminated wells are asking for a connection to nearby public water lines. Trace amounts of MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), a gasoline additive, were detected in the two private wells at Forest Hill Elementary School in 2005. By the spring of last year, tests showed the levels had risen to 13.6 parts per billion, a level still considered safe by federal standards, but one that prompted the school to use bottled water.

Mission accomplished The victory of Navy's football team over Notre Dame earned midshipmen at the Naval Academy a day off from class. Spirituality center Elwood "Bunky" Barlett, the Mega Millions winner and Wiccan high priest, plans to build a center in Baltimore County where spirituality, religions and nature meet. Verdict in dragging death A Baltimore County judge found the driver of a truck guilty of manslaughter in the death of a toddler whose stroller was dragged nearly a mile.

The Howard County school system expanded its cleaning efforts to the weight rooms at 13 middle schools after two middle school students were diagnosed two weeks ago with a form of staph infection that is resistant to antibiotics. Initially, school system maintenance workers sprayed disinfectants each night in the locker rooms and bathrooms at each of the 12 county high schools. The effort was extended to the middle schools after cases of the infection were discovered involving a student at Glenwood Middle School and another at Oakland Mills Middle.

From an environmental point of view, the decision by Baltimore schools CEO Andres Alonso not to keep trying to get the lead out of school drinking fountains and to put bottled water in coolers in all schools may be disappointing. After all, the packaging and disposal of bottled water are taking an increasing toll on the environment. So it seems a shame to add to that burden when good tap water is available, as it is in Baltimore. But the coolers are somewhat more environmentally friendly than individual bottles, and after 15 years of fighting a losing battle, switching to coolers is more realistic and practical.