Penn State students, are you constantly buying cases of water bottles because you refuse to drink from the water fountain? I don’t blame you! The water is cloudy and comes out of a disgusting worn down spicket. I contacted a worker at the Penn State Housing Services Office and she informed me that these water fountains have not been replaced since they were installed in the 1950s when the residence halls were built. Since students are not drinking out of the 64-year-old water fountains, they have come up with their own solutions: buying plastic water bottles or just not drinking at all. Dehydration is a serious problem amongst college students as they are constantly surrounded with high sodium foods and alcohol both of which dehydrate our bodies.
In a study done by Robert B. Kauffman (Ph.D) at Frostburg University, it was found that when giving alcohol to a dehydrated person they had a 75% increase in their BAC over a hydrated student. That is a significant difference and could be extremely dangerous if the dehydrated and intoxicated person continued to drink more. The side effects of dehydration are endless. The most common symptoms are fatigue, dizziness, dry mouth, headache, hunger, constipation, dry skin, and nausea. How can Penn State now ranked 49th in the world as of 2013-2014, keep up such a honorary title if their students suffer from dehydration?
According to StudentAdvisor.com, the average college student spends about 14 hours total in their room per day: 8 hours sleeping and roughly 5-6 studying or doing other activities. Thats 5-6 hours, the students who don’t purchase plastic water bottles aren’t drinking. You may think that the water is unhealthy or dangerous but I talked to a Water Specialist on campus, Brian, and he told me that the water is pumped from wells then sent through a water treatment plant. So although the water may look bad, it is water and it is healthy to drink, so start drinking!
Works Cited
Fox, Catherine. “Drinking Water: Bottles or Filtered from the Tap.” National Geographic. National Geographic Society, n.d. Web. 3 Aug. 2014. <http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/spacescience/water-bottle-pollution/>.
“How much time do you actually spend in your dorm room?” StudentAdvisor. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Aug. 2014. <http://www.studentadvisor.com/questions/how-much-time-do-you-actually-spend-in-your>.
Kauffman, Robert B., ed. Frostburg University. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Oct. 2014. <http://faculty.frostburg.edu/rpm/rkauffman/pdf_files/Alcohol%20and%20Dehydration.pdf>.
I found this post interesting. I did a blog post just recently on Brita water filters, and found that in my research of the Penn State water supply, the water, even though it may look cloudy and gross, is most likely harmless. However, if the water fountains have not been replaced in a long time as you stated, this could still cause a potential risk factor as the water could be infected with harmful bacteria when it comes out of the fountains themselves. I personally am one of the people who buy cases of water bottle; even though the water is safe to drink, it is a personal preference as it could be contaminated coming out of the fountains and Brita filters are just proven to add more bacteria into the water in most cases, as I learned when studying them. I would agree though that most people do not drink enough water throughout their days here, myself included.
Max, that is awesome that you are going to drink from the water fountain now because you are now going to save money and the environment! For every six water bottles used, only 1 makes it into the recycling bin. The rest are sent to landfills or end up as trash on land, rivers, oceans and lakes. The National Geographic Society says, “Plastic bottles use a lot of fossil fuels and pollute the environment. In fact, Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles a year to the problem. In order to make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months.”
Since I’ve been at school, I’ve found that I am not drinking nearly as much water as I would at home. I found that I have a lot of the symptoms described as wel! In your post I had no idea that the water fountains hadn’t been replaced once, yet I am not surprised. I began to question whether or not the water was safe so I did some additionalresearch and found that some public water fountains contain lead and even coliform. Coliform is a bacteria found in fecal matter. Personally, I would rather be dehydrated than drink that.
Thank you for this post. Honestly the water on campus tastes like Chlorine to me so i pretty much just use it to brush my teeth. It’s so annoying to have to buy water bottles everyday because of the bad tasting water. Now that i know it is healthy I can stop wasting my money and use the water provided by our school. Very eye-opening, well done.