Verm Water: An Investigation and Interpretation
A strong, clear, toxic liquid flows through the town of Vermillion, SD… and it’s not vodka.
Around 1860, almost 30 years before South Dakota earned statehood, displaced Mormons and European immigrants roaming west formed the town of Vermillion on the banks of the Missouri River. Over the next 20 years, homesteaders found refuge in the small river village and constructed a thriving community of businesses, churches, hotels, a post office, and even a saloon.
The winter of 1881 brought blizzards that barraged the state from October to March, leaving snow as high as 11 feet in some areas near the river. The following spring, unusually early warm temperatures melted the snow along the Missouri River Basin and sent runoff downstream, flooding towns like Pierre, Yankton, and then Vermillion.
Ingeniously named “The Great Flood of 1881”, these floodwaters wiped away 60% of Vermillion, and after waters subsided, the first citizens of Vermillion were forced to rebuild their town a few miles north, above the Vermillion River.
Now inhabited by 10,700 citizens and dozens of stray cats, the heart of Vermillion is a tranquil replica of any small Midwestern town: A single coordinated grid of old houses connected to a central business district paved as straight and as long as a runway. Sitting atop a bluff, the township is safe from being swept away by any raging Missouri River currents. However, Vermillion, though in a subtler way, still battles its waters today.
Vermillion’s drinking water is welled from an aquifer 100-feet deep within the Missouri River. Tasting like the contents of a fishbowl, the term “Verm Water” was coined by the residents who now compare it to drinking glass, washing dishes with pond water, or brushing your teeth with what spews from Old Main’s gutters on a wet day.
The water supply is shared with the University of South Dakota, which occupies the north sector of town, and its 10,000 students, who’d rather grace the effects of hard liquor and pass out in lawns all around the school’s southern residential borough than drink what comes from the town’s corroding water pipes. It’s become a local tradition, and both students and residents celebrate Vermillion’s history of binge drinking with more binge drinking during a week called Dakota Days.
I’ve been part of this tradition at USD for less than two years, long enough to feel the effects of Verm Water (and casual binge drinking) on my body, but short enough to remember what I felt like before I moved eastward. Back home, my hair was a fluid field of silk and my skin didn’t feel like the barren lands of post World War I Germany. In Vermillion, I exit the shower with water spots and my head possesses an electric charge.
I’ve also heard numerous tales of the water’s toxicity from fellow students.
One student, we’ll call him Kris, remembers a Friday night from his freshman year. Following a drunken trek from a house party to his dorm room, Kris was met with a troubling sign to anyone intoxicated: dehydration. He said his stomach felt fine and inferred he could get through the morning with a minor headache. Upon entering his hall, Kris stumbled down the hallway and entered his floor’s bathroom. Next, Kris made three deadly mistakes.
First, he stepped to the sink and turned on its faucet. Second, he bent over and filled his mouth with the water cascading from the spout. Third, he swallowed it, something a sober mind wouldn’t dare do.
Five minutes later, Kris vomited into a trash can back inside of his dorm room. No, Verm Water alone didn’t make him vomit, but it triggered his gag reflex, he hypothesizes. Kris then retrieved a bottle of Ron Diaz to get the taste of Verm Water out of his mouth and passed out on the floor within the hour.
Another student told me she bought a goldfish and housed it in a fishbowl filled with tap water.
Two days later, she found the goldfish dead, floating atop his glass abode. Unable to conduct an autopsy, she never did determine the cause of death. However, she knew she didn’t forget to feed it. “I don’t for sure know if it was the water, but…” she said, eyebrows raised and shrugging.
Lastly, my roommate, Alec, told me his chemistry professor ran an experiment involving Verm Water and a lightbulb. Water is a great conductor of electric currents, but only because it contains ions and dissolved salts and metals that electricity runs through. So it’s not the water that conducts electricity, it’s the impurities inside of the water, which is why distilled and purified water don’t conduct electricity. When Professor Vitt flipped a switch and sent an electric current through two wires placed (but not touching) in a glass of Verm Water, the lightbulb conjoining the two wires lit up.
No water source is completely cleansed of contaminants and could probably bridge a current as well, but according to my roommate, w/r/t the light bulb lit by Verm Water, “that bitch was bright.”
So, what makes Verm Water the way it is? Are its particles really toxic? Are we overreacting? Did the goldfish have a heart condition?
According to the first page of the City of Vermillion’s 2017 Drinking Water Report, the results of water tests conducted yearly, the city declares the water safe to drink and earned the “Secretary’s Award” for “Drinking Water Excellence” by the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The next two pages, however, raise some concern. Things such as microbial and radioactive contaminants, herbicides and pesticides from farming and agricultural operations, accompanying leakage from storm runoff, septic systems, and gas stations, “may be present in source water,” it reads.
“May” suggests the possibility that pollutants aren’t present, but “may” also means the pollutants are present, which explains the deterioration of my immune system.
Scroll down one more page to the table labeled “Detected Contaminants for Vermillion”, and a range of numbers that only water engineers can decipher tells the truth about our water. Luckily, I can get a water engineer’s education on a search engine.
Verm Water’s fluoride levels range from .90 to 1.49 parts per million. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lowered the “optimal fluoride level in drinking water” to 0.7 ppm, the first time it’s been done since 1962, where it stood at 0.7–1.2 ppm. Vermillion’s highest detected level of fluoride is over double the government’s recommended limit.
For reference, Sioux Falls, 60 miles north, reported fluoride levels of .56-.90 ppm in their drinking water, while Rapid City recorded fluoride levels of .59-.87 ppm in their Water Quality report. So even these two cities’ highest reported levels of fluoride are equal to or lower than Vermillion’s lowest fluoride levels.
Fluoride? Water? Governmental departments? It’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream. But it’s not a myth, and it’s certainly not hidden.
Each water report says the “major source” of fluoride comes from “erosion of natural deposits, discharge from fertilizer and aluminum factories,” and the best one: “water additive which promotes strong teeth.”
Despite multiple studies that conclude high levels of fluoride can result in fluorosis, tissue issues, and can even ruin tooth enamel, like one from the World Health Organization in 2004, 75% of city governments in America still add fluoride to their drinking water because they care about our dental health. This became U.S. public policy in 1952, when people still thought cigarettes were healthy and the government was cool. Unfortunately, Vermillion is no different, but at least a pretty smile is a proper reparation for crippling skeletal fluorosis.
Is Vermillion’s water perfect? No. Is it close? Still no. But that’s why more bars (9) than stoplights (8) line Vermillion’s streets. From the beginning, Vermillionaires have known struggle, whether it’s watching their town wash downstream, majoring in biomedical engineering, or stepping outside from November to March.
But the greatest thing about the people of Vermillion, young or old, is that they overcome these truculent happenings as a community, with warmth, work, and kegs. As long as the bars are open and Speedee Mart doesn’t ID minors, this town perseveres with relentless optimism, knowing whatever they do during the week is cause for celebration at its end. So, whatever you’re drinking from Vermillion’s taps, enjoy it. It’ll kill you anyway.
