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The Boom Review
Watch the Water

Watch the Water

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The Boom Review
Jul 14, 2025
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Watch the Water
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The earth holds an estimated 333 million cubic miles of water in the oceans, rivers, springs and underground aquifers. Each human consumes 3000 to 7000 litres of water each year, through drink, food preparation, and purchasing items that either contain water or use water in production. 43 trillion gallons of fresh water is used by industry each year.

Water or H2O, is one of the two most precious resources on the planet. Air is the other. We can last without food for weeks, but without water we can perish in a matter of days. Without clean water we can become sick. From industrial 'accidents' which heavily contaminate water, to purposeful poisoning of water sources, it is relatively easy to make water pretty undrinkable if the water network and infrastructure is not secure.

The Rome Statue of 1998 stipulates that deliberate harm to the environment, including water sources and water treatment facilities with the intention to harm civilians, is illegal under the International Criminal Court. The ENMOD Convention or 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, also prohibits the use of environmental modification with the intention of harming the environment to cause harm to civilian populations.

Clean water?

During the first lock down in 2020 people in the UK began to notice their tap water smelling strongly of chlorine. Naturally many started to wonder if there was a connection between the water coming out of the tap and illness. Water company testing records of treated water didn't show anything alarming.

This does not mean that toxins or bacteria do not get into the treated water supply however.

The results for Rotherhithe in South East London for 2024 show that 8 tests were run for arsenic over the whole year, with the highest reading reaching 1.2 µg/l. This means that a test was taken every 6 and a half weeks and that none of these tests breached the limit of 10 µg/l. If there was a spike in arsenic in the period between the tests, the company would not know about it, because they were not testing for it.

Let’s illustrate why this might be a problem. In May 2024 the first sign that bacteria had got into the water supply in south east London was a number of residents being struck down by stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea. The culprit was cryptosporidium, a bacteria that is routinely tested for in both untreated and treated water. Yet the water company did not pick it up until people started to become unwell. The company, Thames Water, despite having an entire action plan to deal with the threat of cryptosporidium, did not identify the bacteria until it was already in people’s households.

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