Water Water everywhere except in Alamosa Colorado

There has been a story floating around the news this last week about a small town in Colorado whose water supply was shut down by salmonella. The entire town's drinking supply had to be taken off-line because an unknown source salmonella was making a lot of people sick. They had to use a lot of chlorine to disinfect the water pipes and then water couldn't be used for drinking, eating, or bathing until chlorine levels dropped. Basically you could flush your toilet and that was it. What I find interesting in this story is that every news outlet basically reports it as a human interest story. Oh it is interesting that people are drinking thousands of bottles of water in order to survive, or that people haven't been able to shower in days. It is cute to watch people rough it, but it seems there has been very little appreciation for what most other people in the world do on a daily basis, which is survive without clean water. Another aspect of this I find surprising is the fact that no one is really mentioning that the town's water supply was not even chlorinated to begin with. The lack of pretreatment is the entire reason why a bacterial contamination event was even able to occur. I am not advocating everyone needlessly treat their water out of some irrational fear, but it would seem this fact would be far more integral to the story than an off-hand fact buried in a paragraph somewhere or not mentioned at all.