Clean Water

Clean Water

Water, cool clean refreshing water, what wonderful stuff.

This wonderful stuff is the second most necessary substance to life, exceeded only by oxygen. Without clean drinking water a human being can survive for only a few days if that. Water is also enormously useful in all sorts of other ways.. We use it for cooking, cleaning, sewage disposal, chemical processing, fire fighting, and many others.

Water is also extremely fascinating stuff. Pour a glass of water, drop in an ice cube, it floats. It floats because water in its solid state is less dense than water in its liquid state. There are some other substances that share this property, but none that you are likely to encounter unless you are a research chemist. They are all either rare substances or ones where the liquid state exists at high temperatures.

Imagine that God or somebody decreed that water did not have this property, that it act like almost every other substance in existence. You drop an ice cube into your glass of water, and it sinks to the bottom. It’s January on Lake Superior; the water freezes at the top and the ice sinks to the bottom. How many winters until Lake Superior is Ice Superior with a thin sheet of liquid on top during the summer? How long until the same happens to the oceans? Life as we know it would not exist on planet Earth for very long.

Most of us, especially in developed countries like the United States, get our water from a municipal water system. Most of these systems are operated by local governments or by closely regulated private utilities. These systems are one of the great human triumphs of the 20^th century. Enormous amounts of physical labor eliminated; many infectious diseases like cholera largely eliminated; former luxuries like hot showers now commonplace – the list of positives is virtually endless.

Unfortunately not all is well. There are contaminants in the municipal water supply. This is not necessarily the fault of the providers – they do what they can with the resources they have. Technologies do exist to improve the water supply further, indeed to very high levels. But on the scale of municipal water supplies, these technologies would be very expensive. We will investigate both the contaminates and the technologies as we go along.