Bottled water to the rescue

Children in Asheville, North Carolina, finally returned to school on Monday, more than a month after Hurricane Helene beat their hometown into submission. Teachers are itching to get back, and students with COVID-19 isolation flashbacks want life to feel normal again. The biggest obstacle? You can’t hold classes in buildings with no running water.

It took the city three weeks to restore the water flow to operate toilets in every school. Many homeowners in Asheville could not flush until neighbors started hauling tanks of pumped river water into neighborhoods. Five-gallon water cooler bottles and upper body strength are must-haves now, even for water that's unsafe to drink.

This happens when a major storm stirs the silt-laden bottom of a city reservoir, turning clear water into something that looks like chocolate milk. Helene killed at least 42 people in Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County alone — nearly 1 in 5 deaths linked to the storm. While that number continues to grow, getting safe drinking water to flow from school faucets and fountains doesn’t seem like a reachable short-term goal. But children need to hydrate, and so do their parents.

One thing that has kept the death toll from spiraling into quadruple digits across the Southeast is bottled water delivered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private disaster relief groups. These little bottles cost about 15 cents each when you buy them by the case at the supermarket. Drink two of them, and you’ve had a liter. These bottles have become fashionable targets for professional handwringers and low-information journalists searching for environmental villains.

We're told plastic water bottles clog our oceans and have a high carbon footprint. Media ignorance of the greater environmental impact of glass and aluminum containers is in evidence. The latest panic about “microplastics” sounds frightening until when these bottles can prevent mass casualties.

The microplastic hysteria is particularly wrongheaded. Never mind that every day, we all inhale or ingest millions of micro dust or floating particles of potent toxins such as silica, arsenic and aluminum. Never mind that microplastic particles in drinking water seem to max out at one-tenth of 1 part per billion. That’s the equivalent of traveling 1 more inch in a car after 160,000 miles.

Let’s also pretend not to notice that the World Health Organization sifted through nearly 20 years of research in 2021 and found little evidence that microplastics are compromising anyone’s health.

Boil it down to this: Hypothetical worries about plastic are news until bottled water can make the difference between life and death. That’s when reality sets in.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the side of the angels. After Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, FEMA distributed more than 72 million liters of bottled water without apologizing to anyone. FEMA and the Red Cross say every home in the path of deadly storms should have three days’ worth of bottled water on hand before anyone needs it.

The demand for bottled water spiked this month as Helene’s energy scattered and Hurricane Milton approached Florida’s Gulf coast. Hours before Milton landed on Oct. 9, FEMA signed a $31 million contract with an Atlanta-area company for “53 million liters of bottled drinking water.” That’s 106 million bottles.

The federal government also buys millions of gallons of water for long-term storage, but there’s no substitute for plastic bottles when time is short, and a sense of urgency can save lives. Fortunately, bottling plants are everywhere. Plastic bottles are also getting lighter — now just one-third the weight of thicker soda bottles — which means they’re less expensive to transport to disaster areas.

Aluminum cans, though trendy, are heavier — about 4 grams of extra weight each. That doesn’t sound like much, but for 53 million liters of water, it would add more than 550 tons of packaging. Whether you’re moving it by air, rail or truck, less weight means more water gets where it needs to be.

Somehow, journalists made it through nearly four weeks without sparking a new plastic panic. Meanwhile, Asheville residents continue to dig out of the mud while they try to make sense of it all. Plastic is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

• Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies.