Water Water Everywhere and not a drop to Drink ?
June 30th, 2007 categories: Buying San Diego Real Estate, San Diego Real Estate, San Diego Real Estate News, Selling San Diego Real Estate
California imports the majority of its water from a blend waters of the Colorado River and State Water Projects. In its raw imported state, it is full of contaminants. The contaminants of water from the State Water Project come mostly from pesticide and herbicides that are from agricultural runoff, wildlife and wastewater.
The Colorado River supplies are the most vulnerable to contamination from recreation and urban runoff, storm water and from the urbanization of the watershed. Several forces impact the Colorado River as it runs through the towns of farmland, mining sites and industrial use land.
Municipalities, which use various sources of blends of this water must be ever diligent to be able to treat the blend that is occurring at any particular point in time. The contaminants from inorganic and organic chemicals,microbials (viruses and bacteria),radioactive particles from radioactive contaminants,industrial wastewater, including petroleum byproducts and human wastewater all require different and specialized formulations for treatment.
The California Department of Health Services prescribes regulation,which limits the amount of certain contaminants that can remain in the water through some of the though some of the contaminants are known carcinogens. They must be reduced to levels that are not harmful.
The municipalities in their treatment plants have a variety of resources in its treatment formulation. These include differing filtration systems, and the adding of chemicals. The process is referred to as the multiple-barrier approach. The barriers that are used in the treatment of raw water supply can consist of
- primary disinfection
- coagulation,
- floculation/sedimentation
- secondary disinfection
- filtration.
These processes then yields the treated water for consumption.
The addition of chlorine and ammonia is added to kill any pathogens. The ammonia, when added to chlorine create a compound called chloramines, which is odorless and tasteless ensuring the water doesn’t have a chlorine taste. The pH of the water is then regulated with sodium hydroxide making the water non-corrosive to the water pipes and plumbing fixtures.
While these chloramines are considered safe in the levels that they are used. Special care must be noted for people who are on kidney dialysis machines and they must remove these chloramines. Like chlorine, chloramines are toxic in dialysis water. For people who have fish tanks in their homes, they also need to take precautions to remove chloramines, as these are harmful to fish in aquariums.
Allowing drinking water to stand, boiling the water, and chemicals that remove chlorine, will not remove chloramines, Iin order to do so you must have effective treatment using granular activated carbon filters or using other chemicals specifically designed to remove the chloramines.
The whole of the process though sounding simple needs constant regulation and constant monitoring to ensure that you have safe clean and potable water at your tap.
From community to community, the taste and color of water available varies. With several years in a row of drought California, it requires more and more water to be imported as the amount of water in the our of reservoirs continue to drop. We are approaching a near crisis level where more water has to be imported creating higher costs and greater stress on the water management and treatment systems.
Pollution and wasteful use of our most precious resource,water, may soon curtail available use and require extra conservation measures to maintain the needed supply.
Understanding what has gone in to the continual contaminating of our water and what is required treat it, drinking water in Southern California is still assured to be safe. We must all do a better job of protecting this most precious resource from needless and excessive contaminations and encourage the conservation to insure that there is always safe water available.
