The Cleaner, Greener, More Affordable Water Cooler for Seattle

Early settlers of Seattle built the first water distribution system using open wooden flumes, which pulled water from Lake Washington. By the 1880s, private companies began developing more extensive systems to pump water from Lake Washington and Lake Union to small reservoirs and tanks in the growing city.

The Great Fire of 1889 proved that these early sources couldn’t provide enough water for homes, businesses, and firefighting. Residents voted overwhelmingly to build a system connected with the Cedar River. After more than a decade of legal wrangling, 2 new reservoirs were built to store water: The Volunteer and Lincoln (now Cal Anderson).

Seattle grew rapidly as tens of thousands of visitors and residents came to Seattle from the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. In response, city engineers constructed a larger pipeline from the Cedar River to triple the system’s delivery capacity. In the 1010s, the Masonry Dam was built to store Seattle’s new water surplus.

Engineers continued to construct pipelines and storage reservoirs, including the Bow Lake Reservoir, South Fork Dam, and Lake Forest Park Reservoir, to store water from the Cascades. In the late 1970s, city planners began to cover the open reservoirs to enhance water quality, reduce water loss from evaporation, and improve security.

Today, the Seattle water system supplies about 140 million gallons of water per day to 1.5 million people in the region. Seattle drinking water comes from the Cedar River and South Fork Tolt River, both of which begin in the Cascade Mountains.

According to a recent Seattle Water Quality report, potential contamination sources include microbial contaminants from wildlife, naturally occurring salts and metals, and organic contaminants which result from chlorine combining with organic matter. Residents complain of earthy or musty taste or odor with their water, attributed to algae blooms caused by fertilizer runoff.