The US is the world’s richest country. So why can’t I get a glass of clean drinking water?

theguardian.com:

M y wife is wonderful in every way, but I realised over the weekend that she is simply not built for the apocalypse. On Sunday, I was scrolling through Twitter and having a nice cup of tea when I saw a tweet from a guy called Ya Fav Trashman about a chemical spill that might affect Philadelphia drinking water. “Equipment failure” at a Trinseo chemical facility had dumped more than 8,000 gallons (about 30,000 litres) of “latex emulsion product” into the Delaware river. You can’t just boil or filter these chemicals out of your water.

I immediately spat out my Delaware River tea. (Perhaps the latex was why it was going down so smoothly?) “Yikes,” I said. “We’d better get some bottled water.” My wife volunteered to go to the nearest shop. She came back with … two bottles.

A human prune, I live in a permanently dehydrated state, but my wife chugs water like her life depends on it. “That’s going to last you half an hour,” I said. “I hope this crisis only lasts half an hour.”

Reader, it did not. At that moment, everyone in Philadelphia, about 1.5 million people, got an emergency phone alert. It told us that, starting an hour later, at 2pm, we should use bottled water for drinking and cooking, out of an “abundance of caution”.

I grabbed a bag and ran to Rite Aid, the nearest purveyor of bottled water. It was crammed and the atmosphere was very jolly. There was still plenty of water available and nobody was buying ridiculous amounts, so there was a general feeling of: “Ha ha, we’re all going through dystopia together!”

After every single bottle of water in Philadelphia had been bought and panic had escalated, the city put out an update. The gist of it was: “Whoops! Looks like you didn’t need to buy all that bottled water after all,