das Bodensee-Wasserversorgungswerk

Some of you may be asking, “Alex, I’ve heard that European water is nearly undrinkable, how do you cope with your coming lead poisoning or how do you afford bottled water at every meal?” My response to these people is usually that I lived in Iowa, if the agricultural run-off hasn’t fire bombed my endocrine system yet, I think I can handle anything.

In all seriousness though, many people in Europe are completely afraid of drinking tap water, and if you order it at a restaurant waiters will often tell you it’s impotable. Bottled water is even more popular here than in the US, and worse, Germans drink soda water instead of regular water. You will have to look high and low to find water that isn’t bubbly. Maybe to dispel the poison water myth or maybe to show off a local bit of pride, our Language School organized a trip to the Bodensee-Wasserversorgungswerk in Sipplingen. The word looks imposing, but it’s not difficult. When you break down a German compound word, start from the right, which is usually the stem word. In this case the stem is das Werk, which is a factory. All the words and word parts to the left are going to describe this factory. Sorgen is to worry about or care for something, Versorgung is a related noun that means supply or care. Finally Wasser is a cognate and means water. Bodensee is the location. So this place is a factory that supplies the water from the Bodensee. And it was cool as hell!

Most people are not allowed to tour the factory, and our school is only allowed to do it once a year, so they time their tour to the season when the CBYX students arrive. The plant takes water from the Bodensee at a rate of about 4000 liters per second. I figured they’d have the Lake emptied in no time, but it turns out that the Lake evaporates more than twice that amount per second. The water is very clean to begin with and doesn’t have much or any farm runoff and such that would make it toxic. It’s taken from deep in the Lake but it has a greenish color to it.

Once the water is taken out of the Lake it’s filtered to remove algae and other debris. The water is then mixed with ozone to kill any bacteria or viruses (and destroy almost any other things) that are in the water. Finally the water is filtered through a sort of sand trap to catch all of the remaining debris that was destroyed by the ozone.

The factory is at the top of a mountain. This is important because the factory supplies water to people living as far away as Stuttgart all without pumping it. Since Stuttgart, and most of Baden-Württemburg, is at a lower altitude the water flows naturally to it. The Factory supplies 4 million people with water, and I tried this water myself, so the next time some jerk waiter tries to tell me that I have to buy bottled water, I’m gonna drop some knowledge on him.

Finally, after our tour we left the plant, but the busses that took us up the mountain were nowhere to be seen. We soon realized that we’d be hiking down the mountain to get to our train. I wasn’t even mad because after the first turn, I saw this and really stopped caring about the hike.