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Why Portland Should Have Kept Its Water, Urine and All
Ars Technica has nothing good to say about the scientific understanding (or at least public understanding) that led Portland to drain 38 million gallons of water after a teenage prankster urinated into the city's water supply. Maybe SCADA systems shouldn't be quite as high on the list of dangers, when major utilities can be quite this brittle even without a high-skill attack.
literally.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Urine gets stronger the more you dilute it.
The uncomfortable truth is that all the water has pee in it.
Every glass of tap water in LA contains a few molecules of water that have, relatively recently, passed through my bladder.
The only people that don't have someone 'upriver', drink cattle urine instead.
One exception, well water, usually nasty tasting. Plus the joys of insufficient septic system setback.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ignorant voters will fire anyone who is a member of the water board/district if it discovered they allowed piss to enter their facets.
Unlike the corrupt state and federal governments the local ones actually listen to their constituents.
http://saveie6.com/
...all the time. It's all psychology, it's human urine - therefor it is oh so terrible. Think of all the bird-droppings, huge flocks of birds flying by...doing their thing. They carry far more diseases with them than we dare to even think of, never-mind mention in the news. But human urine? Yuck ;)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Fish crap in their drink along with frogs, birds and who knows what else. They have water treatment plants to make it drinkable, how the fuck do these morons get into such high positions?
The most important line in the article is the very last:
$35k is nothing when compared to even the lawyer fees of a single potential frivolous lawsuit over this. All it would take is one kid getting sick (likely for completely unrelated reasons). And then they'd have to start publicly defending the decision to not clean it. I'm not saying the cleaning is the practical choice. Just that the absurdity of the U.S. legal system makes it fiscally irresponsible for the city to do anything else.
Budweiser sent trucks to take some of the piss water away to make American style beer
David Shaff obviously has a thing for watersports. It takes a Republican level of personal denial to drain 38 million gallons just to avoid drinking a little bit of pee.
Funny; sounds more like a "Progressive" ...
Back in the "old days" (medieval), Beer was preserved by adding Lant, to give Lanted Ale.
Lant is stale urine, and it acted as a marvelous preservative. So, adding urine in this fashion to that volume won't be a problem. It's just one of perception..
Discussed to death on Bruce Schneier's blog. Long story short: The draining is part of a political fight between two groups who want to control and monetize the water supply. All in a city of nuts who, in this day and age, drink untreated water direct from uncovered reservoirs and streams. A lot of things to worry and wonder about there...
Oh, come on. Noone uses esoteric units of measurements like "liters"
I know you might be joking, but it's about 100 acre-feet, which is roughly the annual usage of 100 households. Portland has 250,000 households so we are talking about 4 hours' worth of water for the city of Portland.
That is part of the reason they are so willing to dump the water. If it were 10,000 acre-feet they would certainly not be dumping it.
Do you realize that in addition to urinating in water, why, there are studies underway to urinate in salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
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I live in Portland. They'd probably allow it if he was a free-range drunkard with organic piss.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
This is not the first time that Portland has emptied a reservoir. This is the only time that it has made national news. One of the times that they drained the reservoir was for when somebody was attempting to pee in it and it was unclear if the intoxicated individual had actually urinated into the reservoir.
The reservoirs in Portland are a bit of a contentious subject. We Portlanders greatly appreciate our open air reservoirs however the City Water Bureau does not. Despite a large public outcry to keep our open air reservoirs our water department despite saying that they were working to keep our reservoirs, did not file for a waiver from the department of homeland security to keep the reservoirs open air. While most Portlanders recognize the importance of controlling access to our water supply we wish that the water department listened to public comment more and acted less like a dictator.
1,505,144.03 cubic cubits. 57.575 nominal volume "Olympic size" swimming pools. 4,750,000 bushels. 25,313,380 imperial pints. 0.00000000000020300 Pacific Oceans. I hope that clarifies things. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"Easily" poison 38 million gallons of water? See, this is exactly the same problem from the original article. A typical person drinks a lot less than 1 liter of water at a time, but we'll be generous to your poisoning idea and base our required dose of poison on 1 liter of water. Probably the most deadly known poison by unit mass is Batrachotoxin. In order to poison 38 million gallons of water so that every liter contains a fatal dose, you would need about 15 tons of it. 15 tons of poison produced by a particular species of frog, and then only when they eat a particular species of beetle, is pretty hard to come by. If you went with something more generally available, such as some form of cyanide, you'd need about 228 tons.
So, your plan to poison the water supply is dastardly, evil, possibly even insidious... but not remotely practical. Sure, you could do it, but the expense would be high and the effictiveness would be relatively low since the water can be shut off centrally. You'd have a lot more luck just getting your henchmen to go on a rampage through the main street with conventional weapons.
This is a classic example of governments and problems. When some sort of problem is identified, and "the people" want action to happen, the government has two choices to deal with the problem.
One, they can take appropriate action, if they can do that and know what to do and how to do it. Even better if doing so is relatively cheap. In this case, you do the cheap thing to make it go away.
Two, they can do everything in their power to suppress knowledge of the problem. A problem nobody knows about is one that doesn't need to be solved. This is especially important if the problem is big or serious, or affects a lot of people in a negative way, and to which the government has no solution. The only thing worse than a big problem is having "the people" aware of it and that their government is unable to act. So is is essential that the government take this route when they cannot solve the problem or don't know how, or can't afford the solution. Or there's some other reason they don't want to solve it but they can't admit that either.
So type one problems, you dump the reservoir. It's cheap to clean it out and, well, water is cheap anyway.
A good example of type two problems are the side effects from the chemical disposal mishandling at Groom Lake. To admit the problem exists would invite a huge liability mess. So by denying it, they avoid the problem. Because they can.
It has been speculated one reason the governments generally dodge the UFO issue is that if they were ever identified as a real force(s) of some kind, then the people would demand that something be done about stopping it. It's not clear anyone would have the ability to DO anything about it and when your government can't protect you, what good is the government? So a problem like this would have to be denied.
Thankfully there are no UFOs. So this is not a problem.
Sig for hire.
According to the City of Portland's Website (http://www.portlandoregon.gov/Water/article/328963), the total capacity of the Portland reservoir system is about 220 million gallons, with "distribution storage reservoirs" ranging in size from 1000 to 10 million gallons. How much urine did this kid evacuate into the reservoir? According to the National Institutes of Health (cites in Livescience- http://www.livescience.com/323...), the average healthy human bladder can hold "nearly 2 cups of urine comfortably."
Let's err on the side of caution on both sides- assume that this kid both had an insanely huge bladder capable of holding 2-1/2 cups of urine *and* that he peed into a 1000 gallon distribution storage reservoir- the worst-case scenario, in other words. 2-1/2 cups of urine is 20 ounces, which is equal to 0.156 gallons (128 oz/1 gal). 0.156 gallons/1000 gallons = 0.00015625- 0.00156% pee in the reservoir. And this is *before* the processing that happens to all water *after* it exits the reservoir and before it enters the city's pipes.
The reason this is absurd is the same reason that fear of poisoning a city's water supply via open reservoirs is stupid: you'd both need so bloody much of whatever it is to have a significant amount *and* that something would have to survive various filtration, purification, etc. processes after that.
No, scratch that... draining a reservoir b/c a kid peed into it isn't absurd, it's mind-blowingly stupid and a horrid waste of taxpayer money. Any lawyer who couldn't defend against a lawsuit the way I did above deserves to not only be disbarred, but to also have his college + HS diplomas revoked.
-Z
Lol... they're closing the resivour next year anyway:
"Those natural contaminants are a key part of the Environmental Protection Agency's justification for a rule that requires all open-air reservoirs to be covered. Portland is scheduled to disconnect the open-air reservoirs on Mt. Tabor from the drinking water system by the end of 2015.
Shaff said there isn't much the bureau can do about those natural contaminants in the meantime, and that they don't pose a serious health risk."
http://www.oregonlive.com/port...
So this is actually twice as stupid as it sounds.
Your calculation is way off, only 14kg of Batrachotoxin would be needed to render 38m gallon of water lethal, not 15 tons. One can carry that much in a backpack, not to mention that this is for doses that are lethal to everyone (if evenly distributed); much less would be sufficient to cause serious health issues for the majority who drinks from it.
(According to wikipedia sources 100 microgram of Batrachotoxin is lethal for a 68kg person. 100 microgram in every liter of 144,000,000 l (=38m gallon) of water requires 144,000,000*100microgram = 14.4 kg poison.)
This is of course not a justification for draining this amount of water from the pool every time the pool is micturated upon in the fair city of Portland.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
If I wanted to "easily poison" a water supply, I'd just form a corporation, say one that stores chemicals meant for coal mining, and build my facility near a river that supplies a small city's water supply.
That way, not only would I get limited liability if there was an "unforseen accident", my corporation could declare bankruptcy and dodge all lawsuits.
Yes it's silly to dump all that water just because of a tiny bit of pee but it's also silly for people to say "Oh, but LA is sooo thirsty."
Water is a local resource. It can't just be piped down to LA. And for the people of Portland it's not that much water. When I lived there one thing I never needed to worry about was saving water. It rains a lot there. 38M gallons is about 20 seconds flow of the Columbia river. My water bill was so low as to be negligible; I literally never had to think about it. That may be hard for people in drier parts of the country to grasp but there's no reason to Portland should feel bad. For all we know that reservoir was due for a cleaning anyway.
Are you kidding? Sure, there may be decent well water out there, but not in many areas. Much of the midwest US that uses well water has to use water softeners because of the mineral content, and some still have occasional boil orders for safety.
I remember when my Chicago suburb switched from well water to Lake Michigan water. The lake water was not only much better tasting, but usually 10 degrees colder out of the tap...