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Texas Town Turns To Treated Sewage For Drinking Water
Scientific American reports that Wichita Falls, Texas has taken an unusual step, precipitated by the years-long drought that Texas has faced: it's using treated sewage for drinking water. From the article:
To launch what it calls its "Direct Potable Reuse Project," the city pipes water 12 miles from its wastewater treatment plant to this treatment facility where it goes through microfiltration. A pump pulls water through a module filled with fibers that removes most of the impurities. Then it is forced through a semi-permeable membrane that can remove dissolved salts and other contaminants. The process, called reverse osmosis, is used by the U.S. military, in ships and in the manufacture of silicon chips. The water then gets blended with lake water before going through the regular water treatment system. ... At 60 cents per 1,000 gallons, it's far cheaper than any other source of water, [Wichita Falls' public works director Russell] Schreiber said. ... He said there have been few complaints so far. A glass of the finished product, sampled at a downtown restaurant, tasted about average for West Texas.
Instead of eat shit, drink shit?
not like the wild animals and fish don't piss and shit into our water
who drinks straight from a lake or river?
This really isn't much different than what nature would have ultimately done with the water right? Just accelerated mechanically. Not much different than what we would have to do for long duration space travel or colonization either.
Since you need to treat sewage before putting it in the ground, and ground water before putting it in the water supply, what is new about connecting those two points? Do people think the sewage magically stops being sewage once it leaves the system?
Tastes great, less filling!
Some bad news: unless you live in Bemidji MN (or one of the towns on the watershed divides of the Rockies or Appalachians), you are already drinking treated sewage.
sPh
Probably still tastes better than Florida's water.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
If anything it's shocking the process isn't used more. I know in my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska, reverse-osmosis waste water filtering was used at least as early as the 1980s, perhaps even the 70s. I'm trying to find a reference for proof, but haven't come up with one in a couple of minutes of Googling.
The Wikipedia article on RO, by the way, is in pretty shabby shape if anyone gets a rise out of improving such things.
An extremely small country in Asia has been doing it for quite some already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N....
You may be surprised sir. Florida native here, Tampa / St. Pete born and raised. I had the good fortune to be able to do the beginning section of the PCT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_crest_trail). I tasted the water in San Diego, Escondido, Ramona, and many MUCH MUCH more rural spots. The water is awful and sometimes tastes like odd chemicals or minerals when it's from wells fairly consistently. Municipal water is better but not better than FL water. It's generally well known by the locals that the water out west in rural areas in terrible. Florida well water is not the best, but its great by comparison to some of the nasty water I was drinking on the trail in the desert. "Hey, its keeping me alive", I'd think as a strange tingle and off taste lingered on my palate after drinking from a concrete bowl designed for horse consumption only. Water is quite scarce in the border region I was in. I've had NYC tap through clean pipes and it was the best I've had so far. Florida's aquifers will still be kicking when it starts to *really* dry up out west too.
"The Falls" is still running.... they still water all the fucking little shrubs along the side of the road the motorcycle cops hide between....I hate it here....
We didn't see this coming. The future is here and it's not 'The Jetsons'.
Because all the fish, crustaceans, sea mammals and every damn thing else in the oceans, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs of the world climb out to take a leak or a dump.
Start thinking. You've been drinking recycled shit and piss since the day you were born.
Every glass of water anyone drinks contains at least one molecule once pee'd out by Attila the Hun.
It's a scientific fact,unless it's not. But it sure helps to think this is true if you're drinking treated waste.
So falls Wichita Falls !
It's the kind of water all nerds been waiting to drink: it's scientific, it's high-tech, it's innovative, and it will cure 90% of all nerds of their curiosity and openness to all modern things in life.
If treated waste water is good enough for astronauts, then why not eveyone?
You may be surprised sir. Florida native here, Tampa / St. Pete born and raised. I had the good fortune to be able to do the beginning section of the PCT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_crest_trail). I tasted the water in San Diego, Escondido, Ramona, and many MUCH MUCH more rural spots. The water is awful and sometimes tastes like odd chemicals or minerals when it's from wells fairly consistently. Municipal water is better but not better than FL water. It's generally well known by the locals that the water out west in rural areas in terrible. Florida well water is not the best, but its great by comparison to some of the nasty water I was drinking on the trail in the desert. "Hey, its keeping me alive", I'd think as a strange tingle and off taste lingered on my palate after drinking from a concrete bowl designed for horse consumption only. Water is quite scarce in the border region I was in. I've had NYC tap through clean pipes and it was the best I've had so far. Florida's aquifers will still be kicking when it starts to *really* dry up out west too.
Yep, a lot of Florida well water is full of sulfur, iron, and golf course/orange grove fertilizer.
But Tampa gets water from the Hillsborough River, where upstream at Zephyrhills there's a Perrier plant bottling it.
A glass of the finished product, sampled at a downtown restaurant, tasted about average for West Texas.
So the water tastes like shit. Good to know.
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FTFA :- "The process, called reverse osmosis, is used by the U.S. military, in ships and in the manufacture of silicon chips.
I was an engineer on a [war]ship and we made fresh water from sea water, seeing that there was plenty of it around. Darned sight easier than making it from shit and piss I should imagine, but admit we never tried it. Of course, recycling being in fashion, maybe someone is doing some posturing here.
Jesus titie fucking christ, move. Life is short. Don't spend anymore of it, then you have to, living in a shithole. I'm sure there are people who like the place, let them have it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Moving can be difficult if you are in the service and have the misfortune to get stationed at Sheppard AFB (Wichita Fall's biggest employer, IIRC). Trust me, there are a lot of airmen there just dying to GTFO of Wichita Falls.
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When traveling in the vicinity of wichita falls, tx -- probably never -- remember to bring copious amounts of bottled water.
I think the worry with these systems is that as the economy gets worse there's a temptation to stop running them correctly to save money. In the1800s kids drank booze because it was a good way to get safe water...
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My wife has multiple certifications in water and wastewater treatment, and she claims that it is only impractical from a P.R. standpoint; in most places, people would raise bloody hell if you told them that they were drinking water straight from the wastewater treatment facility, but it really is no different than drinking water from a municipal watershed. As she puts it, we are all drinking dinosaur pee anyway :)
I've had NYC tap through clean pipes and it was the best I've had so far. Florida's aquifers will still be kicking when it starts to *really* dry up out west too.
Side note - NYC's water system is amazing. Piped in from upstate New York through huge underground tunnels, ending up deep under the city and piped back up. It is very clean, and is very tasty. I was going to post a link from youtube, but it turns out there are a lot of them on the NYC water system at the site.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm a resident of WF (and had to dig up a years-old account to login although I do read frequently but never comment much, so apologies for the cheap-shot url username).. The new water is supposedly on, but I can't tell a difference.
It's strange to me that there is all that much of a fuss with the locals, considering the fact that the process prior to this required treatment of said wastewater and greywater that was eventually let back out into the ordinary water table, became grimy with exposed air and otherwise ground contaminants, and was just filtered back to the city again through the lakes all over again anyway.
When suggested that there was no telling how many people had drowned in the lakes, how many cars had been run off the road into them and rusted over and still leaking gasoline and oil, and not to mention how many dead animals and super-toxic algae were present in the lake in the first place that we were "drinking" before this new filtered idea came about, they tend to clam up (perhaps from being grossed out by my description).
The city put out a lovely and sciencey YouTube video (which is now a year old), interviewing local chemists and otherwise credible local water experts who examined the setup and offered their input on it, here, for those interested in some of the more technical aspects. I've tried to link to it in most discussions I find online, but even still there are only 2790 views currently, out of a city of 100k+ pop, which is perhaps indicative of how terrible of a PR team our city does genuinely have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MKrU1yi5Yc
Possibly the biggest local water controversy aside from the "poo-water" issue is how our city operates a water park, of all things. Supposedly it creates more profit that investment and is using outside, trucked-in water that is filtered and recirculated within its own closed system, but that doesn't stop torrents of naysayers leaping at every opportunity to inject it as shitstorm material, instantly derailing any city-admin discussion.
Joining the service is you giving up your say about where you live. It's their own choice.
I don't believe many recruiters tout the "joys" of Wichita Falls and drinking somebody else's piss on recruiting posters.
People serve *in spite of* Wichita Falls, not because of it.
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In most of the country, treated sewage is simply piped into the nearest creek/river/lake, and then at least some of it gets pulled in by the intake for the next municipality down the line... the only real interesting bit here is the fact that it's getting piped directly into the freshwater plant instead of floating downstream first.
After tasting the water in Biloxi, New Orleans, Opelousas, Houston, etc, I am sure that the described process is an improvement. They should just leave out the lake water.
I don't remember the taste of Wichita Falls water, but west TX water in general is horrible. It probably is better than the water they are mixing it with.
...seeing Wichita Falls in your rearview mirror with an ice cold bottle of tap water from somewhere else...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
If its purified to normal drinking water standards its fine.
drink purified waste water on the ISS.
I was in the army and every major base I was stationed had their own power generation and water treatment plants. Sheppard doesn't?
Whoever came up with this osmosis thing must have been...
*puts on sunglasses*
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Syracuse NY gets drinking water from Skaneateles Lake. Only basic filtering. We've been drinking that since the 1800s.
Where you can drink the same water over and over again, like in a spaceship.
I am just trying to figure out how Wichita Falls got to West Texas. I don't think any real Texan would use that label for Wichita Falls. It's North Central.
I've been swimming in raw sewage. I love it.
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There's an old survivalist trick where you can use a pit with water, waste, urine, etc and you put a collection can/bucket in the middle, stretch plastic over the top and put a rock in the middle. The water evaporates and condenses on the plastic and gravity pulls it down to where the rock is in the center and it drips into the collection can. It is essentially distilled and clean to drink as long as nothing else is evaporating and condensing.
Wichita Falls resident here who knows what's going on...... The effluent is being treated thru a multi-million dollar Reverse Osmosis and Microfiltration plant. It comes out of that plant basically the same as the bottled water you buy from the supermarket in gallon jugs. The synthetic chemicals that end up in the sewer, as well as all the drugs and drug metabolites that pass thru everyone's bodies and ultimately end up into the sewer are indeed being effectively removed from this treated water. The RO'ed/microfiltered water is in fact so pure that they're having to blend it with conventionally treated lakewater because otherwise it will leach too much metals and minerals out of the pipes and cause problems. The normally-treated lakewater is much, much nastier than the RO'ed effluent water.
We all used to complain quite a bit about the conventionally treated lakewater here. It was safe to consume, but smelled and tasted like pondscum. I would not drink it or cook food with it. I didn't even like to bathe in it, but didn't really have any other choice. The first day that I took a shower with the new blended water, I could tell a huge difference. It no longer smelled like pondscum. The new blended water is also much softer, it made the shampoo and soap make lots more suds and felt almost like the water I bathed in recently at a hotel up in the Rocky Mountains... well it wasn't quite that pure, but was orders of magnitudes better than what we've had for the past few years as our lakes are drying up.
Now having said that.... I still won't drink it or prepare food with it (now where's that smiley face with the black eye and half-toothless grin to use as the emoticon to punctuate this sentence ;-) )
Nope, Sheppard AFB pulls water from the Wichita Falls system, though it is trying to cut usage. They truck in water for non-potable uses such as pools. http://www.sheppard.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123412872
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In Tucson 10%ish of the drinking water comes from reclaimed water (aka filtered sewage). Makes sense in an area with not a lot of fresh water resources. Also in those areas you can have different kinds. You can purchase a non-potable (not for consumption) water source for irrigation. Again, reclaimed water, but it undergoes less filtering and thus is cheaper. Plenty of larger places get a hookup to keep their watering costs down.
It is a very sensible way of doing things and you actually have more control of purity than water that comes out of the ground.
Lakes in the Dallas Fort Worth area have more trees growing in them than all the parks combined. Do like they do with White Rock or Bachman lakes.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The little town where I grew up in East Tennessee pumped raw sewage into the river. A larger town about 30 miles down stream used the same river water for drinking. In fact, I remember the restroom the the county courthouse had a sign over the urinal ..please flush Gxxxx needs the water.
For all practical purposes and time scales it doesn't.
Just let it flow.
OK, first question is - how horrible is the the tast of water in West Texas before we start using it as the standard of comparison?
Secret - upstate New York residents have parties where they pee direcly into your water intakes. Sometimes they eat asparagus first, just to mess with you folks.
I have never in my life lived someplace that DIDN'T do this. In fact, I thought it was standard pretty much everywhere. I'm actually more surprised to hear that they've been drinking straight out of a damn lake this whole time instead.
Why is this news? Just because Podunk in Nowhere now also does it?
Even though it's not a big deal or deserving of 'news' (as many others point out, it's very normal) it does sound bad, and I'm expecting lots of these, mostly from Republican Texans: Now I'm drinking piss and shit water, THANKS OBAMA!
Agreed. It's sort of like saying "The water in NYC tatested about average for West Virginia"
...Wichita Falls drinking water is the shit!
"If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I'll spin on a fucking dime
I'll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it's memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it!"
A brilliant number, start to finish. See (e.g.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., at about 6'45"
Whereas it is true that for a very very short time water can retain the form of a cage of a molecule it had in this is not in any way what water memory as pushed by homeoscammer is
1) life time of those is negligible on our level, on the order of magnitude of microsecond or lower, needless to say 1 second after dilution it is long gone.
2) most homeopathetic (pun intended) stuff is sold on [u]lactose or alcohol[/u] for which such a things is not even demonstrated to exists
3) even if it stayed longer than 1 second, one would have to demonstrate that the negative cage form has any effect near the normal molecule (remember the molecule was removed so all you have is an empty hole the very ROUGH form of the molecule) which elad me to
4) the effect of molecule is not the frigging form but their component. H2S and H2O will have the rough same form (angle ~105 degree instead of ~95 degreee , bond length 130 pm and 110 pm) but i hope everybody will accept they have far different effect on your body.
5) well any way homepathy as a whole when properly tested has practically no difference to the placebo comparison. Well done double blind at least. Because there is a lot of crapola passing of as "research" with bad protocoles in homeopathetic journals.
Hoemopathy is worthless. But it looks like magic to people and people like magic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Because all fish, sea mammals etc all shit into the same small part of the ocean, instead of having it spread out over a vast area. Where would you rather fall flat on your face: out in the forest where wild hogs roam, or at hog factory where you have the shit from 10,000 of the little piggies in one place?
I've had NYC tap through clean pipes and it was the best I've had so far. Florida's aquifers will still be kicking when it starts to *really* dry up out west too.
Florida has has water restrictions for years. Orlando and Cocoa have been playing tug-of-war over water, and Orlando has also been trying to plunder the St. Johns River. Tampa Bay has a lot of water piped in, and the Sarasota is about the driest in the state.
It (apparently) is not a myth that by the time the Thames has got to London, the water extracted from, to turn into drinking water, it has already been through an average of seven other people. And, whilst there is a reverse osmosis plant on the Thames Estuary, it is only used during times of drought and then to turn brackish (salty) estuary water into drinking water. Normal water treatment plants use traditional methods such as sand and/or trickle beds + UV purification. Reverse Osmosis is otherwise waaaaaaay too expensive.
"Much more rural" than San Diego... You don't say?! Yeah, San Diego's water has tasted awful for many decades. That's hardly a good test. But they're the worst, not an example of the good stuff.
California water always wins top-honors in water-tasting competitions:
http://www.nationaldriller.com...
If you can't find good water out west, I suppose you've just become acclimated to the taste of Florida water, and always favor the familiar...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... to some extent, "treated sewage". It's called "water cycle".
drink up me hardies
I did not start this homeopathic thread, it was my parent :)
Unfortunately half of your claims or elaborations are either wrong or show quite some ignorance.
Alcohols (2), especially the longer ones, do form chains of molecules. The scientific term is: "hydrogen bridge binding", loosely translated from german. I guess you can figure the 'correct english term'. Likely you find it in the wikipedia article about alcohol, at the discussion about the boiling point e.g.
You ever heard about 'protein folding at home'? Your (4). Sorry, simply wrong. A huge amount of chemical effects in your body happen due to the form of the molecules involved. Yes, an amino acid is nothing but a relatively huge molecule. So picking H2S and H2O as a 'counter example' is a bit missleading, imho. Hm, btw, are there circumstances where CH2 can exist? Another thing to google ...
Regarding to (5) there are plenty experiments with plants and animals that show that certain classes of homeopathic treatments work quite fine. E.g. in Germany most medicals for animals are homeopathic based. On the other hand I'm not Steve Jobs ... if I get cancer I don't take some homeopathic 'remedy' :)
Oh, and btw, related to an answer to someone else, but fitting to your (1) and (4) claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
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Google results are biased based on your old search history and based on the data Google has collected about you. What Google displays for to you is different than what it displays to the parent. You can type in the same terms but Google will order the results based on your history. Parent gets a bunch homeopathy pages. You get a more mainstream result. Google is not a safe way to research an idea. Sometimes your bias is just going to be reinforced.
Or at least, English lagers..
After observing Texas politics and legal system it occurs to me that their waste water has rushed to their heads and lodged there permanently. Rick Perry might be explainable in this light. Dat boy been sniffing his own poop for so long his brain has cracked. It might also explain baby Bush's mental status.
I wonder if they filter out the synthetic estrogens from contraceptives. It's affecting fish and amphibians in some places.
These folks are just closing the loop before it goes on down stream.
Anyone that only wants 'fresh' water, better stop using anything but rain water. Rain water has also been 'recycled' but it has gone to steam separating 'impurities' from the water, just like a distilled water still does by leaving it's impurities in the bottom of the boiler.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
"At 60 cents per 1,000 gallons, it's far cheaper than any other source of water..."
I believe Israel is desalinating ocean water for 0.50 USD per cubic meter, which would be 60 cents per 316 gallons.
227-3517
My state of Oregon is fully in drought. California is in extreme drought. Pretty much all the west has been in drought in a more general way for over a century.
Now in California if you have 100 year water rights then you might own water you can sell privately. Since the public sources are no longer there for many uses then buying on the spot market might make sense. The spot hit $2200 acre foot recently. You can play with this and see that this might be 250 1000 gallon units untreated. So i guess this Texas town is maybe paying $200 for an acre foot and this treated. These numbers are pretty much just in my head approximations and you can recalculate as needed.
California if this this goes on will be in a humanitarian crisis in 18 months. If so, you may be affected. You might want to support what this Texas city did after making the scat jokes. Or maybe shut down high water use export industries. When we ship a pound of beef out of country, how much water is effectively being shipped with it?
All along the Mississippi River towns filter and purify water from the river for drinking, then treat their sewage and put it back into the river. If you drink the water near the delta then part of what you're drinking has been through dozens or hundreds of people.
Connecting the output to the input eliminates some of the waste of wastewater. It's good enough for NASA, so it's good enough for you.
Recycling, and re-using are great but that assumes the water is there to be used and re-used in the first place. The Colorado river doesn't even reach the gulf anymore without artificial aid.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
1) This is not about hydrogen bonding but whether the cage have been demonstrated to exists and form a cage of similar form than the replcaed molecule. There is no such demonstration for ethanol. The point was never about hydrogen bond , which as a chemist I am aware of, but about cage formation. Due to the nature of alcohol I would expect such cage to even be quickly gone, and the cage to even even a much rougher form than H2O.
2) protein folding is not the same phenomenon at all. The key zone where protein interract are identical, which is why some protein might be slightly different but still interrract. Protein which are utterly different do not itnerract the same way. There is no parallel at all with a *negative* form of a H2O cage having the same effect than the positive molecule. In fact protein shows quite clearly by their often key-key hole reaction that such cage CANNOT have the same effect as the molecules
3) look if you want to debate homeopathy and animal let's us gop to JREF.ORG and register on their forum and let us debate there. There is a wealth of information that most if (baring all) those study were bunk. And frankly if homeopathy WAS working, it would be pretty damn easy to demonstrate with a tight protocol. And yet it never is.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org