Quench: The Cleaner, Greener, More Affordable Water Cooler for Boston

Boston Water Quality: Yesterday

The history of municipal water in Boston dates to 1623, when Reverend William Blackstone is the first settler to drink water from “The Great Spring”  on the Shawmut Peninsula, which ultimately developed into the city of Boston. The Great Spring served the people of Boston drinking water for 2 centuries! However, in the 1800s, the city population had ballooned and The Great Spring did not serve enough water to the rapidly growing metropolis. In the early 1800s, city planners began to pull water from the Jamaica Pond using wooden pipes. The wooden pipes offered minimal pressure and the wood eventually rotted, leaked, and split, leading to spotty drinking water availability. By the 1830s, the city’s population had grown even more and city planners needed to find more water. City planners began to look for an upland source with protected water that did not require filtration, which they would have to do repeatedly as the city’s population grew.

The 1840s found city planners impounding Long Pond to create the Lake Cochituate Reservoir. However, by the 1860s, Lake Cochituate had difficulties supplying enough water for the city during the summer months. By 1890, Boston’s water supply was deemed unsafe and inadequate. The Metropolitan Water Act of 1895, called for water from the Nashua River, which was dammed creating the Wachusett Dam. Together the Lake Cochituate Reservoir and Wachusett Dam provided enough water for Bostonians until the 1920s, when the Swift River was impounded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. At its completion in 1946, the 412 billion gallon reservoir was the largest man-made reservoir in the world that was devoted solely to water supply. Planners feel that the Quabbin Reservoir will be sufficient to the supply the Boston metropolitan area for the foreseeable future.

Boston Water Quality: Today

As the Standells sang in 1966, Boston has dirty water. Boston residents complain of medicinal, rotten egg, earthy tasting water. These water complaints can be traced to a common plumbing practice. Like many older cities, much of Boston’s original cast iron water infrastructure is still in use, like the Boylston Street Main, the Beacon Street Main, and the Wachusett Reservoir – all built before 1900!

Older cast iron pipes are prone to corrosion and biofilm contamination from chemical reactions. These reactions create clusters of pipe deterioration and bacteria along the inside of the pipe, resulting in rotten egg or decayed taste, or an earthy, grassy taste. To combat the corrosion and biofilm contamination that has become synonymous with cast iron pipes, many municipal water departments add high levels of chlorine, which gives water the medicinal taste.

Quench Water Coolers – A Better Drinking Water System For Boston

No need to worry about what your office’s drinking water might have picked up on its journey to your glass. Quench offers a full complement of filtration and purification technologies to remove sediment, reduce chemical contaminants, including lead, and get rid of off-tastes and odors. That’s how we can guarantee that Quench office water coolers produce crisp, clean, great-tasting water – and at a fraction of the price of bottled water delivery services.