> You have a feel for safe but odd water
(Big Grin!!) Yeah, I was a Boy Scout once, and then later in life I trained people in Crisis Management / Civil Defense / Emergency Management, where we discussed emergency water sources. That was a great job!
> so here’s my question... What about swimming pool water? I put chemicals in the pool weekly - chlorine, acid, “blue stuff” etc. The water sparkles - but in an emergency, what would it take to make it drinkable?
An excellent question without a particularly simple answer beyond “it depends”.
If it is an outdoor pool chances are good that it will contain rain water — not in itself a bad thing. Here in New Zealand plenty of people — some of my neighbors, even — are not on city water and collect instead rain water off their roofs and store it in large tanks. The water settles so that any solids (like bird poop washed off the roof, body fluids from the dead possum rotting in the gutter, &tc) drop to the bottom, and perfectly potable water is then taken off UNTREATED ie no Chlorine or anything.
So the lesson from that is that potable water does not have to be pure or treated in order for it to be safe to drink. All it needs is for the greeblies to be sufficiently dilute for your kidneys and liver to kill them off and clean them out. That is what your kidneys and liver are for.
What you do have to watch out for are faecal coliforms, like e.coli (”faecal” meaning “arising from dung in its various forms”, and “coli” as in “originating in the colon”). E.coli is extremely common and very unpleasant to have: it can kill you stone dead. Also giardia (lots of gas and bad breath) and Legionella and Cryptosporidium (diarrhoea) and a few others. That is what your pool chemicals try to kill off and they generally succeed.
Swimming pool water was never really intended to be drinking water: kids pee in it, for one thing. I tend to think of it as “grey water”, sort of like bath water but with lots of chemicals in it. And, when you think about it, that’s exactly what it is, without the soap.
So, not my first choice of drinking water. But, in an emergency with no other water source, I would not hesitate to drink from a swimming pool.
NOTE: it isn’t always a good idea to boil water to purify it, either. It depends entirely on the nature of the likely contamination. If the contaminant isn’t something that will be killed by boiling — like, say, a poison — boiling water will actually concentrate the contamination and make it worse.
ANOTHER NOTE: Good ol’ chlorine bleach (not the fancy lemon-scented stuff: the scent is poison. Just the regular stuff) is a great way to kill most greeblies in the water. Won’t do anything for water-borne poisons, but for most greeblies it will do an admirable job. Follow the directions on the label.