Harvesting Rain Water?

Our first actual blog entry here pertains to the recently posted topic of "Water 'Quality' - a Misleading Misnomer" (posted on our WisBits website, not this blog), where we mentioned the concept of capturing rain water for drinking water, but we were as yet uncertain of the safety of doing so, and this is our followup to that post.

Our sources almost unanimously agreed that in regions where the air is not terribly polluted (think "acid rain") is that rainwater, initially upon raindrop formation, is almost entirely free of any impurities, that some minimal impurities may be captured by the rain droplets if they descend through any "impure" air, and that most contamination of rainwater occurs in the harvesting process -- usually with a poorly designed catchment system that is a continuously exposed open-air receptacle where the rainwater is stored for a period of time before offloading without filtering (think bird poop). The latter issue is of course negated by a properly designed catchment system. The bottom line opinion was that if done right in an area of relatively unpolluted air, that harvested rainwater was generally not only entirely safe, but "exponentially" safer than the chemically processed (and even more contaminated after "processing") municipal city water that exudes from most of our "taps". Still, you might want to first catch some rain water in a bucket and test it for impurities before proceeding to install a catchment system. One of our sources made the amusing comment to the effect that "you know what rhymes with 'city water' don't ya"? I quickly responded that the answer to her question might well be the same as what rainwater containing bird poop would be called?