Travel Berkeley Springs, the local tourism bureau, decided in 1991 that they needed some kind of annual water festival in order to capitalize on the town’s namesake natural fountains. What started as a whim then grew, almost inadvertently, into one of the most prestigious annual events of the $360 billion water industry. And that means Berkeley Springs, all 0.34 square miles of it, became one of that industry’s most important locations, even though its claim to notoriety was created out of whole cloth, by local boosters with no connection to the business whatsoever.



For a long time the arrangement has been mutually beneficial: A fancy awards ceremony brings visitors to a tourism-dependent town and lends stature to an industry built on lifestyle enhancement. But lately water has undergone an enormous shift in the popular imagination: As a natural resource and as a product, it’s now central to the biggest debates and concerns in the modern world, affecting and reflecting everything from climate change and public health to agriculture, pollution, income inequality, and infrastructure. At the same time, people like Arthur von Wiesenberger are advocating for its status as a luxury health food.

West Virginia itself may be better known for environmental catastrophe than hydrogeological purity. Only two months before the tasting, prosecutors had finally indicted the former executives of chemical company Freedom Industries, who, in January 2014, spilled untold gallons of coal cleaner into the Elk River and left 300,000 people — one-sixth of the state population — with literal poison in their taps. Downstream Strategies, an environmental consulting firm, partnered with the nonprofit West Virginia Rivers Coalition to release “The Freedom Industries Spill: Lessons Learned and Needed Reforms,” which chastised "big coal" as well as shortsighted, regulation-averse politicians. “Elected officials, agency heads, and members of the Legislature have made it clear,” the report stated bluntly, “that protecting human health and the environment will take a back seat to supporting lax regulation of industry.”

In response, the state legislature passed a stunningly comprehensive environmental reform package headlined by strict new regulations on 50,000 aboveground chemical storage containers, though by early March 2015, that purview had been limited to 12,000 tanks. (That’s of a piece with the current administration’s eye-poppingly antienvironmental stand; in early February, West Virginia became the first state to repeal its own existing renewable energy standard.)

On Feb. 16, a Virginia-bound CSX train carrying 109 cars of crude oil derailed outside Beckley, about four and a half hours southwest of Berkeley Springs, right on the other side of Monongahela National Forest. At least one car went into the Kanawha River. Around 10 others exploded at half-hour intervals. Mushroom plumes filled the sky, and at least one house caught fire. Two hundred people were evacuated, and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared another state of emergency, this time affecting two counties.

This grim local reality wasn’t completely ignored all weekend. If Saturday, the tasting itself, is the Oscars of water, then Friday, the annual industry mastermind salon, is its low-tech TEDx event. The five speakers included this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Jack C. West, an earnest and humorless late-middle-aged man with gleaming white hair. He currently chairs the Drinking Water Research Foundation, though he is probably best known for developing the bible of water industry standards, the IBWA Model Code, named for the International Bottled Water Association, which he previously chaired.

West had come to proclaim the glories of bottled water and the perils of tap, revealing, for example, that municipal water supplies are responsible for “between 16 and 19 million cases of acute gastrointestinal illness yearly,” a range that, if anything, is conservative according to the NIH. Yet while it’s true that a sterilized, FDA-approved bottle is more pristine than the decades-old pipes and faucet that carry your local water supply, the health toll of bottled water, while slim, isn’t quite zero, as West claimed. As for the prospect of a planet covered in empty Aquafina plastic, West assured us that a vast majority of these bottles are recycled, an even more tenuous assertion.

The whole Friday seminar, which lasted four hours in front of about 20 audience members, matched West’s monotone advocacy and only modulated his tone of precious-bodily-fluids terror. He was joined by the executive director of the Lloyd Magothy Water Trust, a nonprofit steward of Long Island’s aquifers, who warned that 250 million pounds of unused prescription medications are flushed down American toilets every year, filling the water supply with pharmaceutical dangers.

And then came Bob Hidell, 2013’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, who now serves as the event’s grand poo-bah. Hidell is chair and CEO of Hidell International, a consulting firm for beverage and nutritional companies, and before the tasting I’d heard tell of his legend: He could divine an underwater spring without any tools at all; his blessing on a new bottling company was a harbinger of future success. He moved through the crowd like a zeppelin and took his place at the podium.

Like West, Hidell was an older white man with the stiff composure and polar-white hair of an early-bird dinner attendee, but with his gray blazer, black turtleneck, and penchant for grand philosophical doomsaying, he more resembled a benevolent Bond villain. He delivered his marathon Friday address in front of a single slide depicting a map of the movement of human populations over millennia. He began by announcing that global warming was causing water scarcity, which in turn was causing “the beginnings of a transit of 2.4 billion people.” Referencing the recent riots and extremist attacks in England and France, Hidell said they were only the beginning. The rest of Europe is “about the see a turmoil that they will never understand.” At one point, one audience member sarcastically asked if we had any reason for optimism.

“Let me take a look at my notes,” Hidell mumbled, flipping through a legal pad that he’d barely acknowledged so far. “No. No, I’m afraid we don’t.”

The recent news would seem to prove him right. More than 800,000 people die from water-related illness every year, while 750 million people worldwide still lack access to clean water altogether. Boston survived a record snowfall that taxed their wastewater engineering, and California is suffering a record drought that threatens the entire nation’s food supply. Last year, Portland, Oregon, issued a boil-water alert after three of the city’s open-air reservoirs tested positive for E. coli. As summer begins, there’s equal cause for despair: Detroit’s water bureau continues to shut off service to the city’s poorest. Texas and Oklahoma have gone from record droughts to record floods, prompting Anheuser-Busch to temporarily halt beer production at one of its plants in order to supply the region with drinking water. In that same week, the EPA, under President Obama, announced a new Clean Water Rule that extends the agency’s regulatory powers.