Hurricane Joaquin-enhanced moisture combined with another storm system and delivered more than 20 inches of rain across some parts of South Carolina in early October, 2015. More than a dozen people were killed as a result and thousands were evacuated out of flooded neighborhoods. The vast majority of locations in South Carolina experienced a once-in-50-years to once-in-200-years event over a three-day period.

Soda Ash and Caustic Soda Raise the pH of Acidic Waters:  Which Should You Use?

Two water treatment chemicals are commonly dissolved in water and fed into the residential water stream to increase pH.  They can be fed by the same equipment — a standard chemical feed pump, drawing out of a solution tank.

Here are some issues that commonly come up when deciding which to use, or when switching from one to the other.

Caustic soda is stronger than soda ash.  Ten pounds of caustic soda does the work of 13.5 pounds of soda ash.  Put another way, if you’re mix a solution using 10 gallons of water, you would need to a 5 lbs. of soda ash or 3.7  lbs. of caustic soda.

Caustic soda has the advantage of mixing to a clear solution, but it costs more than soda ash and generates a considerable amount of heat when it’s mixed with water. Soda ash always leaves a residue at the bottom of the container.  In general, soda ash is more readily available from water treatment dealers, but caustic soda can be found at pool supply stores.

Has your water been tested for perfluorooctanoic acid?  Probably Not,

Below are the opening lines of an article from the Hoosick Falls, NY  Times Union:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement in November 2015 warning residents in Hoosick Falls not to drink or cook with village water because of elevated levels of a toxic chemical found in the public water system last year.

In response, the village’s mayor has reversed his position, and adopted the EPA’s recommendation.

The man-made chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, or “PFOA,” was used since the 1940s to manufacture industrial and household products such as non-stick coatings and heat-resistant wiring, including at a factory near the village water treatment plant. The chemical was discovered in the village water system last year by a private citizen, Michael Hickey, whose father, John, died of kidney cancer in 2013. PFOA has been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, as well as thyroid diseases and other serious health problems.

The EPA’s public statement was issued four days after a Times Union story reported that the state Health Department and village leaders, including Mayor David B. Borge, downplayed the health risks of PFOA in the water supply, and declined to warn people not to drink it. The story reported that many village residents, including a longtime family physician in Hoosick Falls, Dr. Marcus E. Martinez, suspected that high cancer rates and other extraordinary health problems in the village’s population may be the result of the contaminated water.

“While the EPA continues to gather information and assess the Hoosick Falls water contamination, it recommends that people not drink the water from the Hoosick Falls public water supply or use it for cooking,” the EPA’s statement said. The agency’s statement said it does not believe that showering or bathing in the water poses a risk for unsafe exposure to PFOA.

Perfluorinated Chemicals (PFCs) are a group of manufactured chemicals used in a wide range of industries and commercial products. The two most common PFCs are perfluorooctanoic acid (also known as PFOA or C8) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS). PFCs have been in use since the 1940s to make products that are water-, oil-, fire-, stain- or grease-resistant—products like Teflon®, non-stick cookware, stain-resistant carpeting and fire-extinguishing foams.

PFCs are among a group of chemicals that the EPA has labelled “emerging contaminants”—chemicals that may pose or are percieved to pose a threat to human health or the environment. PFCs are of concern because:

• They break down slowly in the environment and move about readily in air.
• They have been detected in surface water in cities throughout the U.S.
• They have been detected in the blood of as many as 98% of Americans.
• Once in the body they tend to stay there for a long period of time, about 4 years.
• They have been shown to cause developmental and other health effects in laboratory animals.

In the late 1990s it was discovered that PFOS was present in the blood of a vast majority of the American population. The  EPA met with 3M, the primary manufacturer, who agreed to phase out manufacturing of the chemical and to cease production by the year 2002. PFOA underwent a similar phase-out through an EPA “Stewardship Program” of major manufacturers that should see most emissions and use reduced significantly by the year 2015.

Human exposure may occur through diet, inhalation, or use of products containing the chemicals. The EPA reports that “fish and fishery products” appear to be a primary source.

As the Hoosick Falls article indicates, C8 and PFOA can also enter your body through drinking contaminated water.

The revelation that PFOA has long contaminated the water of Hoosick Falls clearly indicates that chemicals may be in water supplies without the knowledge of those who drink the water. PFOQ is one of literally hundreds of thousands of unregulated chemicals that are in use throughout the country.

It only makes sense to protect yourself with a point of use water filtration system whether or not there is evidence of chemical contamination.

The EPA, by the way, recommends carbon filtration or reverse osmosis as the best home treatments for PFOA.

Read the full Hoosick Falls report in the  Times Union.

More about PFCs on the Pure Water Products contaminants page.

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The Essel World Water Kingdom in Mumbai.  India’s Largest Water Amusement Park.

Water Kingdom is Asia’s biggest water theme park and was established in 1998. Located in Gorai, Mumbai, the water park is an extension of Essel World. The water park’s incredible slides are a great attraction to tourists.Apart from the slides, rides and other fun activities, the water park also has a number of  celebrated restaurants.

Water Kingdom covers 22 acres and occupies an island.

According to a promotional brochure, “Water Kingdom has several features that attract tourists from all over the world. ‘Aquadrome’ is a unique feature at the Water Kingdom, where a dance zone of 7000 square feet is set with numerous water sprinklers. Tourists can enjoy dancing to the music while being occasionally sprayed with water from the sprinklers. The ‘Misphisly Hill’ has 12 terrifying high-adrenaline rides that are extremely popular at the water park. The ‘Drifting River’ is a loop of gently flowing water that promises a ton of excitement with slow currents, where people can relax while they float. The ‘Adventure Amazonia’ is a water ride that is truly breathtaking! Some of the other enthralling attractions here include the ‘Juicy Jammer’, ‘Turbo Terminator’, ‘Black Demon’ and ‘Lemon Drops’.”

The Mayor of Flint, Michigan Declared a State of Emergency Because of Lead in the City’s Water Supply

Each glass of tap water contains 10mn ‘good bacteria’ from water pipes

Every glass of tap water has a host of cheerful microbes that promote your well-being. 

When you drink a glass of tap water, you’re ingesting around 10 million bacteria found in water pipes and purification plants. But don’t worry – while it may seem utterly disgusting, the bacteria are actually good for you, according to a new study.

Dams may cause huge losses of freshwater

LONDON: Dams and irrigation significantly increase evapotranspiration, an effect that increases the loss of freshwater to the atmosphere, thereby reducing the water available for humans, societies and ecosystems on land, a new study has found.

The study shows that dams and irrigation considerably raise the global human consumption of freshwater by increasing evapotranspiration – evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth’s land and ocean surface to the atmosphere.
“Previously, the global effects of local human activities such as dams had been underestimated. This study shows that, so far, the effects are even greater than those from atmospheric climate change,” said Fernando Jaramillo, postdoc at Stockholm University in Sweden.

The researchers have compiled and analyzed data from 1901 to 2008 for climate, hydrology and water use in one hundred large hydrological basins spread over the world.

Their results raise the previous estimate of the global human freshwater footprint by almost 20 per cent.

The increase in total freshwater loss from the landscape to the atmosphere from human activities is calculated to be around 4,370 cubic kilometres per year, researchers said.

This corresponds to two thirds of the annual flow of the Amazon River, the world’s largest river by discharge, they said.

“The human-caused increase in this loss is like a huge river of freshwater from the landscape to the atmosphere. We have changed so much of the freshwater system without knowing it,” said Gia Destouni, Professor at Stockholm University.

“Our study shows that we have already passed a proposed planetary boundary for freshwater consumption. This is serious, regardless of whether we have crossed a real boundary or if the boundary has been underestimated,” Destouni said.

Alarming research finds humans are using up far more of Earth’s water than previously thought

By Chelsea Harvey

Because of over-management of water resources through such strategies as dams and irrigation projects, humans are wasting vast amounts of water that may be beyond recovery.

Freshwater is one of the planet’s most precious resources — and as the global population grows and our demand for water rises, so does the need to carefully monitor its use and availability. Numerous studies have attempted to calculate the amount of freshwater humans consume globally from year to year. But in a worrying new study in the journal Science, scientists argue that we’ve been significantly underestimating our water footprint — in fact, their research raises the estimate of our global water consumption by nearly 20 percent and suggests that we may have crossed an unsustainable threshold in our water use.

Authors Fernando Jaramillo and Georgia Destouni of Stockholm University focused their research on the effects of flow regulation and irrigation — essentially, building dams and reservoirs for human use — on the water cycle, and found that previous studies have significantly underestimated their influence. Notably, they found a significant increase in water consumption — thousands of cubic kilometers worth — in the latter half of the twentieth century due to human water management.

These practices can have an important influence on what scientists call “evapotranspiration,” which is water that is lost to the atmosphere by either evaporating from the Earth’s surface or being taken up by plants and later released into the air through their leaves. Such factors can add up to a very significant percentage of global water consumption.

While most people think about “water consumption” as referring to the amount of water humans drink or use for industry, water that evaporates into the atmosphere is actually a major component too, said Jaramillo. This handy blog from the World Resources Institute helps explain the concept: Essentially, water consumption refers to any water that is withdrawn and not immediately returned to its original source.

So when water vaporizes and goes into the atmosphere as a result of human actions, such as irrigation or dam-building, it counts as being consumed by humans — even if it comes back down to the Earth at a later point as rain. It’s important to think about consumption in this way: Water that goes into the atmosphere in one place doesn’t necessarily come back down in the same location or in the same amount . And by engaging in practices that cause more water to be lost into the atmosphere than naturally would, humans are interfering with the natural ratio of evapotranspiration to precipitation — in other words, water out versus water in — and that could lead to increases in water shortages down the road.

“A  scientific motivation for this [study] is that we want to understand what is it that drives changes in the freshwater system on land,” said Destouni, the senior author and a professor of hydrology and water resources at Stockholm University. And as the research was conducted, she said, “we started to see that the landscape drivers of change [including human water management] were actually important nearly everywhere.”

There are a variety of ways that human water management techniques can affect how much water is lost to the atmosphere as water vapor, not all of them well understood. Creating reservoirs means there’s a larger surface area of standing water, which can increase evaporation rates. Additionally, irrigation can increase the number of plants in an area, which then draw in more water and release it into the air through their leaves, the process known as transpiration.

The authors decided to determine the global impact of flow regulation and irrigation on the water cycle in order to figure out how much water is being consumed, or lost to the atmosphere, just as a result of these practices. They selected 100 large water basins from around the world to use as a sample, choosing basins “that were more representative and had long-term consistent data on climate and water change and long-term data on water use and land use,” Jaramillo said.

They then used these data to figure out the ratio of evapotranspiration to precipitation — essentially, water out versus water in — between 1901 and 2008. In the past, studies examining the influence of flow regulation and irrigation on the water footprint have used global-scale models, which the authors argue have underestimated the effects on the water cycle. Their study is the first to take a global look at these practices using observed historical data.

“What is really novel and exciting about what Dr. Jaramillo and Destouni did was they took observational data, so measured flow data, on major watersheds, and they were able to detect a signal of a specific human impact,” said Shannon Sterling, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Dalhousie University, who was not involved with this paper. “And that’s remarkable.”

After conducting their analysis, the researchers found that between the period from 1901 to 1954 and the period from 1955 to 2008, there was an increase in the average loss of freshwater to the atmosphere of more than 3,500 cubic kilometers, or about 850 cubic miles, of water. Altogether, they estimate that the current level of human freshwater consumption is about 4,370 cubic kilometers, or close to 1,050 cubic miles, per year.

These calculations raise the estimated total human water footprint — that’s all water consumed, freshwater or otherwise — by a whopping 18 percent, bringing it up to about 10,688 cubic kilometers per year.

The authors note that previous papers have proposed a “planetary boundary” of 4,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater consumption per year. Beyond that point, some scientists say that water consumption becomes unsustainable for the Earth’s growing population. Notably, this new study brings the total estimated freshwater consumption above the proposed planetary boundary.

“Whether this actually is a real boundary, of course there’s huge uncertainty related to that,” Destouni said, but added that the study’s results are concerning either way.

“It’s very serious that with such a relatively straightforward thing as water, freshwater — all of us use it all the time — we don’t keep track of what changes we have made and how these changes actually relate to what the planet can withstand,” she said.

Sterling also pointed out that the paper suggests human activities have a particular influence in already water-stressed regions.

“Another important implication of what they found [is that] the biggest reductions in available water from these human activities of dam building and irrigation are in areas that are already arid,” she said. “In these areas, they probably built dams and irrigation to address an existing water stress in the first place.”

The study highlights a critical need for better monitoring of our freshwater use and the ways our management techniques can affect the water cycle, as Jaramillo noted that the current effects of human water management “are even larger and more recognizable than the effects of atmospheric climate change.”

As climate change is predicted to become an increasing threat to water security worldwide, the persistent impacts of human activity on the water cycle will only be compounded by the effects of global warming in the future — making the need for better management techniques an even higher priority.

“That’s another future direction our society needs to take — to go towards greater resource efficiency,” Destouni said. “And if we don’t keep track of how we use water, we cannot reach that efficiency, or even understand what that efficiency means for the future.”

Source: The Washington Post.

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