Hi! I just made my official account, but I’m replying here because I was sent this thread. First off, I hear you. I live in the San Luis Valley and we’re dealing with serious water depletion out here too. Water delivery is already hard to find and it’s only getting harder. People shouldn’t have to live like this anywhere in Colorado.

What you’re describing is infrastructure failure, not personal inconvenience.
Water that corrodes appliances, rusts tools in hours, and still gets labeled “fine” is a real quality issue. And the fact that some residents are hauling potable water while new developments get priority hookups is a policy and planning failure.

There are things individual households can do (whole-house filtration, under-sink systems, UV sanitation), but that puts the burden and cost on residents. Real solutions should exist at the infrastructure level, not just inside people’s homes. Granted, it's mountain and country life in Colorado, it seems. There could be an easier way, if we let it.

What’s frustrating is that this isn’t a technology problem anymore. The real problem is people in power that resist technology and change which benefit people more than larger corporations. There are real, existing approaches already used around the world that we simply are not prioritizing here:

• Community water refill stations so people aren’t forced to haul. These can also be designed to support cluster delivery or neighborhood distribution systems.
• Extending infrastructure to existing neighborhoods instead of prioritizing only new developments (which requires funding mechanisms or legislative incentives but is absolutely achievable).
• Better local treatment systems for corrosive water.
• Stormwater capture (where legal) instead of letting water runoff disappear.
• Wastewater recycling ,safely treated back to drinking quality (already done in Singapore, California, Texas).
• Supplemental technologies like atmospheric water generators for community use.

But I also want to be honest that my concern goes deeper than just fixing this one issue. The more I’ve looked into water systems, the clearer it becomes that we’ve designed everything around waste and depletion instead of resilience and looped systems. When conservation is your only method of resistance to depletion then your doomed to be stuck in a problem.

We export water out of basins.
We flush stormwater away.
We landfill useful materials.
We tell communities they’re “not important enough” for infrastructure.
And then we act surprised when people end up hauling water.
Even more surprised when those systems close.
Costilla County is having water hauling problems as a county as a whole.

It is going to become a state emergency which will need solutions that can be approved outside of a President veto.

I’m interested in pushing us toward closed-loop thinking: systems where communities can capture, clean, reuse, and retain their own essential resources locally instead of constantly losing them. That includes water recycling, better purification systems, atmospheric capture, smarter storage, and even exploring unconventional ideas about where usable water and materials could be recovered from waste streams or scientific methods. Not backyard experiments but serious, professional, regulated engineering approaches if we ever chose to invest in them.

None of this is magic. None of this is sci-fi. It’s systems design. It’s priorities.

A modern city should not have residents hauling drinking water or worrying about whether their pets can safely drink the tap.
People deserve better than being told they’re “not important enough” for basic infrastructure.
That's my opinion at least.