"Poop," said the residents of San Diego, "is glue. It's a special kind of glue that sticks to water and creates a bond that, no matter what science says, no man can tear asunder."
San Diego has three million people living in a city with enough water for three hundred thousand of them. Nevertheless, forced to make a stupid decision by a superstitious constituency that believes poo love is strong enough to defy physics, San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders took to his desk last November and vetoed the city's toilet-to-tap water recycling program. The city council overturned his veto [2], but the fight continues.
But while San Diego bickers over the nature of romance and feces, reason and logic have triumphed in Orange County. This January, officials opened the world's largest water purification project [3]. Wired News has a cool pictures [4] of the systems that will provide clean water to 100,000 Orange County residents at rates lower than most other municipal sources. The plant cleanses and purifies the water and then flows it into nearby lakes, where it slowly trickles down into the aquifer and then, months later, back into the taps of the residents.