Slashdot Mirror
Legionnaires' Bacteria Reemerges In Previously Disinfected Cooling Towers
schwit1 writes with the New York Times' unsettling report that 15 water-cooling towers in the Bronx that this week tested positive for Legionnaires' disease had been disinfected less than two months ago.
From the NYT: After an outbreak of the disease killed 12 people in July and August in the South Bronx, the city required every building with cooling towers, a common source of the Legionella bacteria that cause the disease, to be cleaned within two weeks. ... [The] city found this week that bacteria had regrown in at least 15 towers that had been cleaned recently in the Morris Park section of the Bronx. The testing occurred after a fresh outbreak in that area that has killed one person and sickened at least 12, and spurred an order from health officials for the towers to be disinfected again.
is the only thing that will work every time!
So any disinfection must be followed with a permanent antisepsis program, say a little copper in the water?
What exactly do these cool? Do they cool water or act like an AC?
I work in legionella management in the UK, cooling towers must be disinfected every 6 months, no shit the legionella came back, it's present everywhere in the environment. The US has very lax laws for public water safety, see also New York's hideous water towers/roof tanks
Aren't there numerous strategies for preventing this, including adding more chlorine to cooling water in-house?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the cleaning requirement was just corporate welfare to one of the few authorized cleaning companies in NYC. They're getting paid back for their political donations. In the end, the people are forced at gunpoint to give money to corporations for nothing in return. This is so typical of the Republicans.
1. To execute an antivirus program.
2. To disinfect the suspected viruses.
3. To put them to the quarantine.
4. To mail it to an agency of disinfection.
5. To call a technician to empty the quarantine.
6. To call a doctor for a threatment of health.
7. To take medicines, by example, the antibiotics.
8. ???
9. To profit!!!
Speaking at a hastily-called press conference only a few hundred miles from the buildings in question, Tower-cleaning specialist and former Volkswagen Vice President Gesundheit Krappstadtz stated unequivocally that all cleaning and disinfection operations had been performed with full attention to the requirements of New Jersey's famously strict environmental regulations.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
He's obviously mentally ill. Just mod him down and ignore him and all his replies to his own posts.
... do they use, if any ? Nalco, Betz, Evoqua are big national brands. What changed? cost cutting, the organics into the water, management/technical experience
because it provides a good environment for them. It is not at all surprising that the bacteria would be found in a recently disinfected cooling tower. The only way to stop that from happening is to somehow make the cooling tower environment a less friendly one for the bugs.
Who knows what pathogens are brewing, pretty much everywhere in that shithole.
The only effective sterilisation regimes include mechanical abrasion. Good old fashioned scrub brush and soap, plain and simple. I have personally observed bacterial colonies survive under a 95% ethanol solution for over a week under their own biofilm protection. It takes elbow grease, you have to scrub all surfaces to be sterilised with mechanical abrasion and soap, only then can sterilisation chemicals or antibiotic agents have any useful effect.
You are correct that cost cutting, incompetence, profit motive and laziness are all driving factors of the human condition. We actually understood this in the US for a long time, and we passed laws that punish fraud and other misbehavior that stem from this inherent human trait. The prime case in point, when steam boilers were the prime source of energy for trains/ships/factories etc. they started having problems with explosions due to design flaws that would kill tens to hundreds of people at a time (the USS Maine explosion off the coast of Cuba was one such example and resulted in great loss of life and a war). The root problem was non-engineers or incompetent engineers designing the boilers. The solution was two fold. A licensure process for engineers to ensure they knew what they were doing (this fixed the competency problem) and the requirement for an engineer to sign off on all boiler plans and oversee the fabrication process. Further, engineers of record (the one's who signed off on the design and fab) in the US were made inseparably liable for their designs. The boiler regulations were later extended to all aspects of engineering design. Even today, if a design is faulty and causes injury or death, the engineer can be criminally prosecuted and/or sued for damages in a civil court, though it is rare (they GM lock cylinder engineer may wind up facing criminal prosecution unless he has records that he was forced by management).
What we need here is simple: a new law that charges jointly the building manager and owner (if a corp owns the building, then the executive officers and board collectively) with manslaughter if a resident dies of legionella and it is found in the cooling towers and a mandatory 4 years in prison. I guarantee that those towers would be updated/maintained properly and damn the cost or effort required.
In your example, nuclear power plants, the same solution applies. We need a new law that extends from the engineers to the entire management of nuclear sites. If the entire management team from top to bottom face criminal prosecution and life in prison if they don't follow the recommendations of their engineers, they will listen to them.
The issue is not that the engineers on this site don't understand human nature, its that we don't understand how the rest of society can be so clueless of a clear solution path to our energy needs. With an IQ of 144, I just have to remind myself that 100 is the average, with half the population below and half above...
Maybe they should try disinfectant this time
WTF do you get something as utterly ridiculous as that from? If you made it up - why? The difference is several orders of magnitude. The drinking water in my city has a concentration of chlorine several times higher than this bacteria can stand, and domestic bleach is far more concentrated again yet still unlikely to "damage the equipment".
True, but that's life when you are squirting a deadly bacteria laden aerosol into areas where people are breathing. Some expense to avoid doing that is considered tolerable.
Because chlorine is corrosive. In the concentrations one should be maintaining, it's not so bad. But prolonged exposure, even at the "correct" levels will cause corrosion. If you doubt this, take your finest stainless steel butter knife and drop it in the bottle of chlorine bleach; over time, it will rust. Just like a swimsuit will slowly fade (and degenerate) over a summer of being dunked in pool water every day.
With respect, I was teaching engineering students about corrosion before this site even started so unlike you I am not making shit up. The tiny amounts of chlorine required (wikipedia says 0.5 ppm to 2 ppm you utterly lazy creature), as there is in the drinking water in some places, fail to do measurable damage to stainless steel fittings that they come in contact with when used as drinking water. It's nothing remotely close to the amount of chlorine that is in seawater which attacks many different types of stainless steel. It's nothing remotely close to the concentration in a swimming pool. Look it up instead of making it up - that's what I did but I looked it up first in 1990 and have read a bit since. Now it only takes seconds to look it up - wikipedia has it FFS.
So why do you wish to spread such misinformation? Does it give you some sense of power over the kiddies to make them believe something you just made up? They should look for themselves instead of falling for shit from you or taking my word for granted.