Stores selling purified water are popping up all over Southern California, capitalizing on people's perceptions that tap water isn't safe to drink.

"It's really a Southern California phenomenon," said Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, of the food and drug division of the California Department of Health Services. Her agency has licensed about 292 such stores throughout the state, largely in Los Angeles County.

Often concentrated in low-income areas, these independently owned stores tout themselves as a low-cost alternative to delivered water.

"People are scared to drink tap water" in the wake of problems in municipal water supplies, said Julie Chaves, who opened a store called Drinking Water Depot in Winnetka in the San Fernando Valley three months ago with her husband, Joe.

She points to an outbreak of cryptosporidium that sickened thousands in Milwaukee in 1993.

Such stores are a sign of the growing distrust municipal water utilities face from their customers.

Los Angeles tap water is perfectly safe to drink, said a frustrated Pankaj Parekh, regulatory compliance manager for the city Department of Water and Power. Anyone buying water from stores on safety concerns alone, he said, "is wasting their money. It's crazy."

But consumers such as Gloria Rosas of Canoga Park are dubious.

"Tap water tastes bad, and they've been saying there is a lot of lead in it," she said, as she filled a 5- gallon jug at Drinking Water Depot. "I'm concerned about it--not for me, but for my kids."

The new water stores are just another outgrowth of the surging bottled-water business, a $3.4-billion-a-year industry that is growing nationally by 9% a year and claims California as its capital, said Jennifer Levine of the International Bottled Water Assn.

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The phenomenon has made water, a single, simple molecule, into a consumer product vast in its variety. You can now buy distilled water, water from private springs, caffeinated water and even bottled tap water. You can have water delivered in big jugs, or buy it in tiny bottles at ballparks. There are so many types, in fact, that this year--concerned that the public would be confused--the government drew up new definitions to distinguish among spring water, purified water and other varieties, said Judith Foulke, spokeswoman for the federal Food and Drug Administration.