[kalos72]

While I agree its a concern, there are many ways to provide clean water for a community.

If you have a fuel source, oil, coal, wood, methane, NG, you can run a simple desalination plant or just boil fresh water to clean it. If you have any chemical production chlorine will do wonderfully.

Rain catchment is also going to be a normal thing.

Simple sand bio filters would be common place as well. Plus some simple charcoal production and your set...



Today water is "hard to get" because there are 1000 laws and regulations about the process. If you simplify it to just, safe to drink, its much easier.

All that said, it would require an organized and intelligent central group/body to guide that development as the common person wont know about those methods much less to scale.