New York City Travel Forum

I am interested to know, as a traveller, if the tap water from general hotels or hostels in New York City and Boston is drinkable safely, which means one can drink it directly without boiling it.
Any suggestion if the hotel/hostel does not have tea/coffee maker to boil the water. Is it safe to drink the tap water?

In a word - Yes. I have drunk it in hotels and private homes in Boston and in hotels in NY. No problem at all.

Although there's no glaring sign in NY saying not to drink the tap water, we still just use bottled water. But apparently the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP) rigorously tests the city's tap water and gives annual reports - DEP's water quality page at http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/index.shtml

Major things you have to worry about with water:
1. lead - NY water found to be generally lead-free
2. bacteria - think Giardia and Cryptosporidium (Giardia has been problem in some places - I think I saw warning at Egypt about it. Also had a friend who got it while in Africa)
3. disinfectants or disinfectant byproducts. All NYC drinking water is treated with chlorine, fluoride (to help prevent tooth decay) and orthophosphate (to help prevent metals, including lead, from being released from plumbing). Chlorine reported to possibly cause cancer...


So, there you go. Try to see the report and see what the latest is (2008 report has several pages)

Hope this helps, Norman :)

There's a big push in most of the States now to ease off bottled water, since tap water in the country is pretty heavily regulated and most bottled water is actually just bottled tap water. NYC has been voted to the top of many "best tap water" lists...

Just for anyone who may visit Killeen, Texas, during the rainy-er parts of the year, you definitely do NOT want to drink the tap water then! The dirt from the nearby lake tends to get in the water supply and makes it just taste horrible... it effects soda fountains, most iced tea in restaurants.

One of my children worked in NYC for over two years, another lived,studied and worked in Boston for four years. Neither ever suffered any ill effects from drinking tap water.

NYC water is piped in from lakes in upper New York State. It has been entered in blind 'taste tests' with other fancy bottled waters and has won prizes for the best tasting!
There is no need to worry!

All across the United States, public tap water is safe and drinkable. If a local problem occurs due to some incident, public warnings are issued prominently. Don't worry about that!

While Allison has a point that sometimes the tap water may taste funny, such as due to algae blooms in the local reservoir, Rex is correct that your default assumption in the US should be that the water will be safe to drink out of the tap in any city of more than a few thousand people - and in most places smaller than that as well!

The authorities in the US take clean drinking water very seriously, and as Rex said, if the municipal water supply is harmful someplace, it will make front page headlines and be fixed pretty quickly...

Bill

I drink tap water just about everywhere except Mexico, and I fill bottles with tap water to take with me. About the only place in the US that I can think of that one shouldn't drink the water might be on the train.

There are some places in the US that have deposits of magnesium or other minerals in the water which might do things to your digestive system, but it wouldn't be because of bacteria or anything like that.

Although I sometimes hesitate to drink out of public water fountains (just due to hygienic concerns rather than water quality concerns)I can't think of anywhere in the U.S. where I have hesitated to drink tap water or use it to brush my teeth.
The water may taste different from area to area, due mostly to sources and filtering processes, but all pulic water sources have to be tested and approved. If they do not pass approval, the public is warned, and the sources closed down until the problem is fixed.
I would not hesitate to drink tap water in either NYC or Boston.

To follow up on Allison's point about how good the tap water tastes, see http://www.health.state.ny.us/press/releases/2008/2008-08-25_water_contest_on_aug26.htm for info on last year's state-wide contest on best tasting tap water, with NYC as one of the finalists.

And you won't have to look around much on the Internet to find true news stories about bottled water companies using tap water in NYC and other municipal water systems to fill their bottles. We have one here in the Dallas area in a suburb called Grand Prairie, which - if you lived here - would astonish you to hear that there are clean running springs giving you nature's bountiful water...no, the water comes from the tap ;-)

Bill

I can't speak for these other posters, but I live in NYC, and I have lived here all of my life. I have NEVER gotten sick from the tap water. NYC tap water is thee best and purest in the USA. NYC has several upstate reservoirs. It pays the surrounding communities to not use the adjoining lands (farm animals, industrial plants, etc), so that no polluted rain runoff will taint the reservoir water. I have also visited Boston in April 2009, and I found the tap water to be safe to drink. Now, as far as buying food from NYC street vendors, buy only Grilled kebabs and hot dogs. NEVER eat a "dirty water dog," which is a hot dog allegedly fully cooked in boiling water!

New Yorkers are proud of their clean drinking water. However, your body is used to your own drinking water, so I would still recommend that you stick to bottled water. I remember getting very sick in Egypt, and the doctor who tended to me explained that he had gotten ill when traveling in the U.S. because our water was foreign to his body. He had no immunity to the microbes in our water that are so harmless to us.

Since the bottled water IS tapwater in many cases, I would not take that advice.

There are so many chemicals in the water that it is damn near impossible to get sick.

I've NEVER heard of anyone getting sick off of it..

If they've caught some Cryptosporidiums then it's the container or glass they were drinking out of and not the water itself..

Cross contamination of fresh water supply and human waste is virtually non-existent in this metropolitain area..

Not only because of our superior standards of waste management,
but also because we don't have the climate to support mass bateria growth in our fast moving supplies.

Top that off with massive filtration and treatment, and you will have NO short term troubles from drinking the water here...

However, if you drink flouride and chlorine by the litre everyday, for 80 years, you might have a problem..
but boiling can't really protect you much in that field anyway.. You have to learn to distill your own water.

You're not traveling to India or Laos.. This is the west.

Jlpt69 started a second thread on this one
http://forum.virtualtourist.com/discussion-479966-1-1-Travel-0-841252-New_York_City-discussion.html

I think it is time to pull the plug!

Agreed, I need a diuretic :)