# Fight for clean water



## bill ace 350 (May 5, 2019)

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-...t-behind-in-the-global-flight-for-clean-water

I found the statistics shocking.

Had no idea it was that bad.


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## sigmo (May 5, 2019)

I'm going to heavily edit my post here because the more I think about it, I don't want to add even more political discussion to this forum.  This is a nice place where we can all come together to relax and enjoy our love of smoking, cooking, etc.

Suffice it to say that I am annoyed by the unneeded and misleading political content in that editorial.

Drinking water safety is an important topic.  There's a lot to all of this, and as someone who works in the drinking water field, I have been, and continue to be aggravated by the extreme lack of even basic understanding of water treatment and distribution system practices shown by politicians and the press.

As the Flint Michigan water system woes became public, I didn't see ONE single news report that asked the right questions, or took even minimal time and effort to ask any expert how these systems work and how this disaster happened.   Not ONE reporter took the time to ask even a level 1 treatment plant operator how the treatment system works and what could have caused the problems.

This is not extremely complex, and is not beyond the understanding level of even grade school kids.  Yet early-on, I did not see any news report that made even a small effort to learn about the technical aspects of this and then explain it to the public.

And this also goes for the bureaucrats who immediately scurried to talk to the press and public about the matter.  If any of them took even a slight interest in learning how the system worked and what actually lead to the problems with this system, they could have informed the public in a knowledgeable way, investigated the events leading to the problems, and made rational decisions about how to deal with it and help prevent similar situations from arising in the future.

This is a subject that people are interested in, and deserve to learn about.  But people are lazy.  Reporters are lazy.  Politicians and bureaucrats are lazy (and sneaky).

So the public was left for a very long time with little or no understanding of what went wrong, why it went wrong, how to correct the problem quickly, and how it could have been prevented in the first place.

How can bureaucrats and legislators make the best decisions about technical matters if they won't take the time to learn even the slightest amount about these things?  It's scary.

Sorry to those who read my previous rant here.  What happened to me and many others who worked where I used to work, at the hands of unrestrained and corrupt government agents is a real sore spot for me many years after the fact.  But I shouldn't bring everyone down with that here in our fun-loving, beer drinking, food enjoying forum!

I apologize.


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## sigmo (May 5, 2019)

Post deleted so as not to bum everyone out.  :)


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## sigmo (May 5, 2019)

As long as I'm ranting on here (and I do apologize for having seemingly run everyone off of this important thread).:

I'm going to rant about those ads I keep seeing for a particular home water filter system.

These filters likely contain some mixed-bed ion-exchange resin so that the filter demineralizes (deionizes) the water.  Thus, when, in their advertisement, they read the water with their cheesy conductivity meter, it reads zero conductivity (high resistance), indicating low dissolved solids in the water.

But the thing is:  Drinking deionized water may actually be bad for you!  It turns out that the body may need some mineral content in drinking water for best health.

A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) showed some potential issues.

Since RO, distillation, and other microfiltration methods are often employed when dealing with catastrophic events or in underprivileged areas to get safe water to those affected, and desalination is becoming more common to supply drinking water for areas with no access to fresh water, the question naturally needed to be studied.

https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientschap12.pdf

Normal minerals found in drinking water are not harmful, and in fact are good for you or even required in reasonable concentrations.

It annoys me when I see these smug commercials selling a product whose results are not only unnecessary, but potentially unhealthy.

We had deionized water on tap at all of our laboratories because it was necessary for preparation of samples and reagents for various analyses.  And despite this water being "ultrapure" from the standpoint of ionic content, it always smelled of algae and tested to be microbiologically unsafe.  The Bacteriological departments of the labs could *not* use this "ultrapure" water directly for any of _their_ testing.  They had to filter it through 0.45 micron filters at the point of use or boil it, etc.  And NOBODY drank it!

Of course your tap water should already be disinfected.  And passing it through the deionizing filters hawked in these advertisements would not necessarily contaminate it.

But the zero conductivity reading does not tell you much about the chemical or microbiological safety of the water.  It's an almost _useless test_ for drinking water safety.

You could still have lead, mercury, thallium, radionuclides, bacteria, protozoans, viruses, pesticides, etc., in concentrations above their MCLs (maximum contaminant levels) and still see relatively low conductivity.

If a three dollar Chinese conductivity meter could detect dangerous contaminants at their MCLs, people wouldn't pay laboratories to use their ICP Mass Specs, gold trap mercury fluorescence machines, bacteria incubation tests, GC Mass Specs, liquid chromatographs, etc., to give them court-defensible analytical results!

I really hate to see bogus science used to dupe uninformed consumers.  It's snake oil of the worst kind because the product is not only unnecessary, but potentially harmful.


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## bill ace 350 (May 6, 2019)

interesting. I was floored though, by the number of Americans with no indoor plumbing,  assuming the numbers were correct


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## sigmo (May 6, 2019)

Those numbers may well be accurate.  

My wife grew up without indoor plumbing, but didn't lack for the important things in life. She and her siblings all grew up to be highly educated overachievers, and have fond memories of growing up in an abandoned railroad station in the mountains of Colorado with their father providing much of their food by hunting, trapping, and fishing, and their mother, a British "war bride" cooking bread and meals every day from scratch in a wood-fired stove.

But clearly, there are situations in the US where people are not so lucky, and don't have access to safe water or nutritious food.


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