How New York City gets its water, from reservoir to tap: NYCurious

Finally, the water arrives in your home. If your building is less than six stories high, gravity does all the work. If not, then pumps in your building will help to move the water to the top floors. To maintain quality, testing is done at nearly 1,000 sampling stations around the city.

How good is the water that comes out of your faucet? Here’s one way to look at it: The city is only one of five big municipalities that is allowed by the federal government to supply unfiltered water. If that’s not enough, the DEP releases a yearly Water Quality Report offering information on the water supply. You can read the full 2017 report at nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf.

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Photo Credit: iStock

This is part of our series NYCurious, where we answer your burning questions about the city. Ask yours here.

Most New Yorkers go about their days using water to bathe, make coffee, wash their hands or flush the toilet without much thought to where it originates.

But behind each drop of water is a journey that can begin up to 125 miles away in upstate New York.

Along the way, it gets disinfected by ultraviolet light, treated with chlorine, fluoridated and tested for purity. It travels through mountains and deep valleys and, once in the city, flows underground in tunnels and into distribution chambers. A billion gallons of water are delivered each day, with gravity alone being sufficient to push it into buildings at least six stories high.

To learn more about how the city gets its drinking water, amNewYork turned to the folks at the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency that regulates the vast water supply.