Why should city residents care about water? You turn the faucet on and out it comes, what is there to be concerned about? Worrying about water is for those with wells, those in the desert, farmers or shoreline residents maybe, but city dwellers?  They need water for taking a shower or flushing the toilet and that's it. Right?

But than there is this, this or this , all not too distant events that made the people of Baltimore think about water. Other cities have similar stories.

Water main break on Charles Street

Like when water leaks from a hot water heater in an apartment on an upper level and seeps through the floorboards and ceilings of the units below, water creeps into consciousness through failure. This occurs in the urban context on many levels: water mains that burst and inundate whole sections of a community, stormwater that can't flow off through clogged storm drains and fills basements, water bills that are getting higher and higher because the communities have to deal with federal consent decrees to fix leaking pipes, not to mention Manhattan's lesson it received from hurricane Sandy, flooded subway tunnels and all. Add to this sewage overflows from overwhelmed aging treatment plans that makes urban streams smell like treatment plants or protest of poverty stricken dwellers against water shut-offs (Water Rights) and even the most blissfully ignorant urban dweller has to admit that water is not just a matter for farmers to worry about.

Let's take these water concerns one at a time.

What about tap water? Except for Detroit where the municipality took on its own water supply with disastrous results ("House of Horrors") for water quality, city water is usually good enough that one can drink it without even putting a filter up. Or so we think, trusting the good public works that were created in the depression era. But then we read about hormones, contraceptives and pesticides ("Fertility Time Bomb in Water") being so ubiquitous that traces of the stuff will be found even in the best urban water. Should we buy those pesky little plastic water bottles after all and, in an ironic twist, for environmental reasons?

Even if the water quality may be in jeopardy, water is ubiquitous, right? We don't have to worry about running dry, do we? Isn't water the one of the world's most abundant supplies with subsurface water about ten times of all the fresh water we can see combined?