L.A. Officials Warn of Compromised Drinking Water in Fire-Ravaged Areas

by Hiroko Tabuchi

“Do not drink” orders have been issued in some areas where damaged pipes that lost pressure might pull in toxic smoke and harmful chemicals that could linger in the system for years.

As fires across Los Angeles County start to wind down, health officials are warning about risks related to water systems in the area.

Municipal water pipes damaged by fire can lose pressure, causing them to suck in smoke and harmful chemicals. Those chemicals can make their way through the water system and linger for years. Plastic piping, commonly used to carry water in quake-prone states like California, can also release chemicals into drinking water if the piping is heated, melted or burned.

One concern is benzene, which is abundant in wildfire smoke. If inhaled or ingested, benzene can lead to nausea and vomiting in the short term and may cause cancer over time.

After the wildfire that destroyed Paradise in 2018, testing found benzene concentrations in drinking water had spiked to more than 80 times levels that California health officials say are dangerous for short-term exposure.

Naphthalene and methylene chloride, present in plastic, adhesives and other household materials, can also contaminate drinking water and disperse easily into the air.

Local utilities are not taking any chances: “Do not drink” notices are in place for parts of Los Angeles County, including fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Utilities now face the daunting task of testing the safety of drinking water, as residents seek to return home.

In the meantime, officials’ directions are clear for those under “Do not drink” notices: Use only bottled water for drinking, brushing teeth and making ice or preparing food, including baby formula; limit the use of hot water, because chemicals can easily vaporize; do not try to treat the water yourself; and keep a close eye on updates.

NY Times.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

President Jimmy Carter and Water Filters

 

President Jimmy Carter died in January of 2025 at the age of 100. After he left office and up until his death he devoted his energies to many worthwhile projects. Perhaps most frequently mentioned is his untiring support for Habitat for Humanity. Less frequently mentioned is his effort to wipe out the infestation of Guinea Worm that plagued millions of the poorest of the planet’s residents.

 

One of ex-president Jimmy Carter’s great contributions to the world was providing, distributing and popularizing water filters.

The parasite Guinea worm sounds like something out of a horror movie. People become infected by drinking contaminated water or eating undercooked fish, when the worms are very small. Then the worm grows and grows. It sometimes takes a year for the infected person that he or she is infected. That’s when the creature breaks through the skin of the legs or feet, causing extremely painful blisters that can be debilitating.

Humans cannot develop resistance to the worms, according to Scientific American’s Charles Schmidt, and the traditional process of removing them is painstaking: gently winding an emerging worm around a stick and pulling it slowly out, usually just an inch or two each day, in a process that can last for weeks. Pulling too fast or too hard might cause the worm to break off in the body, leading to secondary infections. When victims suffer from multiple worms—such as a Nigerian man who had a record-setting 84 in his body at one time—the excruciating recovery work compounds.

In the mid 1980’s, there were about 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm around the world. Now, only about 11 people are known to be infected. President Carter’s goal was to see the total eradication of the guinea worm problem before his death. He got close.

The near eradication of Guinea worm is part of the legacy of Jimmy Carter, whose work with his Carter Center targeted overlooked diseases that most often affect poor people in remote areas. The effort didn’t involve drugs, but relied on public education around disease transmission, and providing safe water supplies like filters.

The filters themselves were not high-tech systems developed by massive grants and years of experimentation.  They were simple filter straws that strained out worm-producing organisms from unsafe well or river water, or simple, inexpensive cloth filters that filtered unsafe water as it was poured into a water pot.

 

Simple cloth pour-through filters are very effective at preventing guinea worm infestation. 

A typical cloth filter used in Ghana is manufactured by the Swiss company, Vestegaard and it has openings of 100-120 micron pore size.

Drinking water direct from a contaminated river through a simple and inexpensive hand-held filtering device.

Learn more about the Guinea worm campaign and Carter’s war on neglected diseases from Goats and Soda, NPR’s global health blog. 

Source: OSU College of Forestry

Water Online

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

 

 

 

 

Source: NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Water Online

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

 

 

Water News for December 2024

 

Effectiveness of Antimicrobial Shower Heads Questioned

To guard against harmful waterborne pathogens, many consumers, including managers of health-care facilities, install antimicrobial silver-containing shower heads. But researchers now report that these fixtures are no “silver bullet.” In real-world showering conditions, most microbes aren’t exposed to the silver long enough to be killed. However, the composition of rare microbes in water from these shower heads varied with each type of fixture tested. Water Online  (Gazette note: Common sense should tell us that at the flow rate of shower water microbes in water aren’t going to be controlled by the tiny amount of silver in a shower filter. Silver in the shower head may slow down the growth of bacteria in other media of the filter, but it isn’t capable of eliminating microbes in contaminated water. )

 

 

 

Scientists are still not sure what the fish’s blob is used for

During an expedition in the Alto Mayo region of Peru, part of the Amazon rainforest, researchers identified 27 new species, including an amphibious mouse with webbed feet and a unique “blob-headed” fish.

 

Water Used as Weapon in Gaza

Israel’s restriction of Gaza’s water supply to levels below minimum needs amounts to an act of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, a report from Human Rights Watch has alleged. It has accused Israeli forces of deliberate actions intended to cut the availability of clean water so drastically that the population has been forced to resort to contaminated sources, leading to the outbreak of lethal diseases, especially among children.  The Guardian

World’s oldest iceberg is moving

ANTARCTICA: The world’s largest and oldest iceberg A23a is on the move. After decades of being grounded on the seafloor and more recently spinning on the spot, the mega-iceberg has broken free from its position north of the South Orkney Islands and is now drifting in the Southern Ocean. The colossus A23a, which is double the size of Greater London and weighs nearly a trillion tons, calved from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, and remained grounded on the seabed in the Weddell Sea for over 30 years before beginning its slow journey north in 2020.Full story from British Antarctic Survey.

 

Study Finds that River Flow Patterns Are Changing

UC College of Engineering and Applied Science Assistant Professor Dongmei Feng and her research partner, Colin Gleason at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, mapped the flow of water in nearly 3 million rivers, creeks and streams for the past 35 years and discovered more water flowing in upstream headwaters and decreasing flows downstream where more people live.

The study published in the journal Science identified an increase in catastrophic floods known as 100-year floods in upstream waters over the last 35 years.

Researchers found significant declines in water flow in 44% of downstream sections of rivers and significant increases in 17% of upstream sections.

These changes can have profound effects on navigability, pollution, potability and even hydroelectric power. More sedimentation can cut off water flow to dams and damage turbines.

 

EPA Issues Complete Ban on TCE

Final EPA rules ban all uses of TCE. All consumer uses and many commercial uses of PCE require worker protections.

On Dec. 9, 2024 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the latest risk management rules for trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) under the bipartisan 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) amendments, marking another major milestone for chemical safety after decades of inadequate protections and serious delays. These protections align with President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, a whole-of-government approach to end cancer as we know it.

Iowa is “in crisis” due to illegal manure discharges into waterways

Iowa regulators are failing to properly penalize Iowa factory farms for illegally contaminating state waterways with animal waste, according to an analysis just released by a public health advocacy group. Between 2013 and 2023, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) recorded 179 incidents in which livestock operators discharged manure in violation of the law, fouling creeks and rivers and killing off more than one million fish, according to Food & Water Watch, which based its report on a review of state discharge enforcement reports. The quantities of discharges ranged up to 1 million gallons, the group said.  Full story in The New Lede.

Behind the Scenes: Lithium Removal with Household Water Purification Devices

Pure Water Gazette introductory note: We’re reprinting a slightly truncated version of a very long article about removing lithium from water, a subject that has received little attention. After documenting the growing amounts of lithium being found in our water, the article describes in detail some experiments done with conventional water treatment equipment available to residential users.  To be brief, the experimenters tested a couple of home steam distillers, two standard undersink reverse osmosis units, and about a dozen popular carbon filters. The results were essentially as expected: the distillers did great and removed almost all of the lithium; the RO units both reduced lithium by about 90 percent; the carbon filters essentially were useless at lithium removal (with one popular model actually adding a bit of lithium to the product water).

 To read the full article, go here.

 

Levels in drinking water seem to have increased due to a number of related factors, including the use of drilled wells to tap deeper aquifers, higher levels of fossil fuel prospecting and pollution, and the fact that worldwide lithium extraction and use in industrial applications has increased in general, multiplying the opportunities for accidental exposure and pollution.

Lithium is not currently regulated in drinking water, and water quality reports don’t regularly include it. Most water treatment plants do not track lithium or attempt to reduce it. But the EPA and other government agencies are becoming more concerned about lithium exposure, even at the trace levels found in drinking water:

Just this January, lithium was added to the EPA’s proposed Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule. The Rule is used by the EPA to collect data for contaminants that are suspected to be present in drinking water and that do not have health-based standards set under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

…

Although useful for treating mental health disorders, pharmaceutical use of lithium at all therapeutic dosages can cause adverse health effects—primarily impaired thyroid and kidney function. Presently lithium is not regulated in drinking water in the U.S. The USGS, in collaboration with the EPA, calculated a nonregulatory Health-Based Screening Level (HBSL) for drinking water of 10 micrograms per liter (µg/L) or parts per billion to provide context for evaluating lithium concentrations in groundwater. A second “drinking-water-only” lithium benchmark of 60 µg/L can be used when it is assumed that the only source of lithium exposure is from drinking water (other sources of lithium include eggs, dairy products, and beverages such as soft drinks and beer); this higher benchmark was exceeded in 9% of samples from public-supply wells and in 6% of samples from domestic-supply wells.

Lithium is well-known to have psychoactive effects, which is why lithium salts are often prescribed as a psychiatric medication. In particular, lithium tends to make people less manic and less suicidal. Less charitably, it is sometimes described as a sedative.

But these effects may not always require psychiatric doses. A long-running literature of epidemiological research (meta-analysis, meta-analysis, meta-analysis) suggests that long-term exposure to trace levels of lithium commonly found in drinking water can also have psychiatric effects. Specifically, trace levels in drinking water are often found to be associated with decreased crime, reduced suicide rates, and/or decreased mental hospital admissions.

Finally, here at Slime Mold Time Mold we suspect that lithium exposure may contribute to the obesity epidemic. Lithium often causes weight gain at psychiatric doses, and while there’s no smoking gun yet, there’s some evidence that there might be a connection between long-term trace lithium exposure and obesity. People who are exposed to more lithium, especially at their jobs, tend to be more overweight. Cities with higher rates of obesity tend to have more exposure to lithium. And a group of Native Americans (the Pima) who had unusually high levels of lithium in their water also had unusually high levels of obesity, all the way back in the 1970s. Food levels may also be a possible vector (though it’s complicated).

 

Removing Lithium from Drinking Water

 

To answer the question of how to get lithium out of your drinking water, we set up a project with research nonprofit Whylome to test several commercially-available water filters, the kinds of things you might actually buy for your home, and see how good they are at removing lithium. It’s taken a couple of months of planning, testing, and analysis, but those results are finally ready to share with the world.

The full report is here,

The Study.  Which Treatment Devices Effectively Remove Lithium from Water?

1. Methods

The basic idea of the study is pretty simple.

You buy a bunch of normal water filtration devices (henceforth “filters”, even though they’re technically not all filters) from a store or online.

You spike large quantities of water with specific amounts of lithium, to get water containing known levels of lithium.

Then, you run the lithium-spiked water through the filters and take samples of the water that comes out the other end. 

Finally, you submit that water to chemical analysis and find out how much lithium was removed by each of the filters. 

This is basically the perfect garage experiment — except that in this case, filters were tested in the laundry room, not in a garage.

1.1 Water Filtration Devices

To get a sense of the different options available on the market, we elected to test three different types of devices: carbon filters (which are what most people think of when they think of at-home filters); reverse osmosis devices; and electric water distillation stills. 

We chose devices from brands that most people have heard of, and models that people tend to buy. If you click through the links below, you’ll see that many of these devices are best-sellers.

We settled on the following mix of carbon filters: two pitchers, the Brita UltraMax Filtered Water 18-Cup Pitcher and the PUR Ultimate Filtration Water Filter Pitcher, 7 Cup; three on-tap systems, the Brita 7540545 On Tap Faucet Water Filter, the PUR PLUS Faucet Mount PFM350V, and the Culligan Faucet Mount FM-15A; and two under-sink systems, the Waterdrop 15UA and the Brondell Coral UC300.

We settled on two reverse osmosis devices, the GE GXRQ18NBN Reverse Osmosis Filtration System and the APEC ROES-50 5-stage Reverse Osmosis System.

We also tested two distillation machines, the Megahome 580W Countertop Water Distiller and the Vevor 750W Water Distiller. 

Devices were purchased off of Amazon, from the Home Depot, or from their manufacturer, depending on availability. For each device, we also purchased as many extra filters as needed, so that each test could start with clean filters (see the report for more detail).

Carbon Filters — We came into this pretty confident that carbon filters would perform very poorly for lithium removal, despite some nonsense to the contrary floating around the internet (for example, here and here). Carbon has a low affinity for Li+, so we didn’t expect it would pull very much out of the water. Carbon can remove some metals, like lead, by ion exchange — the same principle used in water softeners. But the metals it is good at removing are multivalent (having a charge of +2 or +3 or +4), not +1 like Li+.

Carbon is also known for having noticeable variation between individual filters, because the carbon in question is made from plant material (often coconut). There will be minor variations in the carbon properties between batches, depending on how fast the coconuts were growing that month and minutiae like that. So we went into this expecting that there might be some differences between different filters, even within the same brand and/or model. 

Since we expected that carbon filters would probably all suck based on the mechanism of action, and because we expected that there might be noticeable variation, we decided to test several different brands of carbon filters, in multiple configurations (pitcher, on-tap, and under-sink). This is why we tested so many devices and why we got a relatively wide mix of brands and configurations.

This way, if carbon filters are all equally ineffective, it should be very obvious. But if we’re wrong and they’re great, or some are much better than others, we have a good chance of noticing. Carbon filters are also the cheapest and most commonly used filters, another reason to test more of them.

 

We expected less variation in the other two kinds of devices, so we decided to test two models of each. 

Distillation — We expected that distillation machines would work well, but we didn’t know if that was 80% well, 90% well, or 99.9% well. Lithium salts have zero volatility, so when water evaporates and condenses, the lithium should be left behind. The main risk is that droplets of liquid could get caught in the condenser, which could result in some of the original liquid getting into the clean distillate. So a well-designed distillation machine should perform well, but we didn’t know how reliable or well-designed small at-home countertop models would be.

Reverse Osmosis — We were the most uncertain about reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis is very good at removing divalent metal ions (like Ca2+ and Mg2+), and pretty effective at removing monovalent metal ions from tap water (like Na+ and K+), but it wasn’t clear if this pattern would extend to lithium. In some ways Na and K are very similar to lithium — all three are present in water as single-charge positive ions, and all three are the same chemical group, the alkali metals. But lithium is much smaller and lighter than other elements. Na has an atomic number of 11, and K has an atomic number of 19, while Li has an atomic number of only 3. 

As a result, we weren’t sure if reverse osmosis would be anywhere near as effective at removing lithium as it is at removing these other contaminants. Maybe reverse osmosis would pull lithium out of the water just like any other ion. Maybe it would miss lithium entirely, because the ion is so small. Or maybe something in between. So we went into this expecting that reverse osmosis might be anywhere from 0% to 100% effective. 

 

 

1.2 Lithium Spiked Water

For realism, we worked with actual American tap water. In this case, we used tap water from the town of Golden, Colorado. Samples of the tap water were spiked with known quantities of “ultra dry” lithium chloride salt to create spiked water samples of known lithium concentration.

We ended up testing four concentrations of lithium: 40, 110, 170, and 1500 µg/L Li+. This covers a range from “starts to be concerning” to “around the highest levels reported in US drinking water”.

 

1.3 Testing

Each filter was tested at each concentration, and at two timepoints (realistically these are “volumepoints”, but that’s not really a word). The carbon filters and the RO devices were each tested after 10 liters and after 20 liters. The distillation machines were tested at 2 liters and again at 4 liters, since they take a really long time to run.

The RO testing setup looked roughly like this:

 

 

 

Analysis was performed by ICP-OES. The instrument used was a Perkin Elmer 8300 ICP-OES, and the limit of detection was 1 µg/L. All analyses were done in triplicate and were submitted in a random order.

 

2. Results

Summarized below by type.

 

2.1 Carbon Filters

Carbon filters are lousy at removing lithium, but probably not 0% effective. Most of the time, water contained slightly less lithium coming out of the filter than it did going in. But the carbon filters didn’t do much, and there wasn’t a huge amount of variation between them.

2.2 Reverse Osmosis

Reverse osmosis was shockingly good at removing lithium. Removal was reliably high for all systems, more than 80% for the GE system and consistently above 95% for the APEC system. The result is unequivocal: reverse osmosis works. Reverse osmosis does not, however, drive these concentrations close to zero. RO is good, but if you start with 100 µg/L in your tap water, you might still end up drinking 10 µg/L even after filtration.

In many cases you do end up with less than 10 µg/L after filtration, but if you start with a high concentration, you are still generally getting more lithium than was in the median American water source in 1964 (2 µg/L). The lower your starting lithium, the lower the lithium concentration you are getting out of your RO filter.

2.3 Distillation

Finally, distillation machines are nearly perfect at removing lithium. Lithium levels after distillation were undetectable (<1 µg/L) in most cases, and removal was still >99.5% for the highest concentration (1500 µg/L). Distillation reliably drives any levels you would expect to see in American tap water below the level of detection.

2.4 Long-Term Reverse Osmosis Test

We also decided to do one long-term test of a single system, to check if it kept performing well over a longer period of time, and to see if anything weird happened. We expected that systems would get slightly worse over time, but there might also be a discontinuity, where a system keeps doing well for a while and then suddenly craps out and does much worse. We wanted to see how much decline happened with more use, and check if there was any discontinuity or sudden point of failure.

Carbon filters don’t work very well even straight out of the box, so obviously we didn’t test one of those. RO doesn’t remove lithium from water quite as well as distillation, but it’s faster, cheaper, and much easier to install. Because RO sits at this sweet spot, we decided to test the GE RO device up to 100 liters.

We tested the GE RO device against a concentration of 170 µg/L, and the device continued to do a good job removing lithium even up to 100 L. Performance went down slightly over time, but not enormously. At 10 L, the device removed about 98% of the lithium in the water, and by 100 L, it removed about 89%. We don’t know how well it would perform beyond 100 L, but this finding suggests it would keep doing pretty well but progressively worse over time.

This would be a good topic for further study — run a few RO devices to 1000 L and see what happens. Alternately, you could install a RO device in the home of someone whose tap water is already high in lithium, test its effectiveness once a month, and get a sense of how these devices would perform in a real-world scenario.

3. Complications

The conclusions from this study are, fortunately, pretty straightforward. But on the way to those conclusions, there were a few complications.

3.1 PUR Pitcher

In addition to the six carbon filters mentioned above, we also tested the “PUR Ultimate Filtration 7-Cup Pitcher”. When we ran it through the same procedure as the other filters, we found there was more lithium in the filtered water than in the original water, at all concentrations. Basically it seemed like the PUR pitcher was adding lithium to the water instead of taking it away.

This was confusing and seemed like it might be wrong, so we tried the same pitcher again with a different set of filters. This time we didn’t get the weird result — lithium levels went down when we ran water through the filter, just like normal.

We’re not totally sure why this happened. One possibility is that some of the water evaporated during testing, but letting the water sit for a few days didn’t make a substantial difference compared to filtering rapidly, so this appears unlikely. Another possibility is that there’s meaningful batch-to-batch variation in the lithium content of the filter cartridges. Activated carbon comes from plants (usually coconuts), so conceivably there could be more lithium in some coconuts than in others. If you got unlucky, the carbon might contain a lot of lithium and you would end up adding lithium to the water instead of taking it away.

In any case, this was strange and inconclusive enough that we ended up removing it from the main analysis, but we’re reporting it here just in case. Good cautionary tale about how even a simple measurement is never simple.

Pure Water Gazette note: It actually isn’t that uncommon for water filters to add contaminants to water, especially when they are brand new. That’s why filter makers always recommend rinsing new filters well before drinking the water.

3.2 Concentration Complication

Pure Water Gazette Note: The original plan was to test water spiked with lithium in several concentrations between 10 and 1000 ug/L. However, several unforeseen circumstances made this impractical. Conclusions, therefore, were based on the basic initial testing described above.

4. Conclusions

If you have the time and money, distillation is the best way to get lithium out of your water. The catch is that distillation is slow: distillation machines usually run at less than 1 liter per hour, a small fraction of the speed of other devices, and consume a lot of energy to get there. Distilling all of your cooking and drinking water with one of these machines would be very slow or very expensive or both.

You should not expect a filtration system without the reverse osmosis membrane to remove lithium.

For the average consumer, reverse osmosis is a much better choice. It’s cheaper and faster, and it works nearly as well as distillation does. For the average American, a RO system will ensure that you end up with less than 10 µg/L in your water, probably much less.

Original Article from the Slime Mold Time Mold website.

 

 

 

Group Concludes that Water Fluoridation Has Reached It’s “Tipping Point”

 

The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) issued the following statement in December of 2024:

 

We’ve reached the tipping point. Here’s what happened in 2024:

• The largest study ever conducted on the effectiveness of fluoridation found essentially no reduction in tooth decay, no reductions in social inequalities, no reductions in missing teeth, and a net economic loss from the practice.
• The first government-funded study looking at pregnant women living in a U.S. fluoridated community was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It found a doubling of neurobehavioral problems for children born to mothers exposed to higher fluoride levels in optimally fluoridated Los Angeles, CA
• The National Toxicology Program (NTP) published their systematic review after 8-years, finding a “large body” of evidence that fluoride exposure is “consistently associated with lower IQ in children.”
• After our 7-year-long legal battle in federal court against the EPA over the neurotoxicity of fluoridation, the court ruled that there is “substantial and scientifically credible evidence” establishing that water fluoridation “poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children.” The ruling requires the EPA to take regulatory action to eliminate this risk.
• The legal victory brought unprecedented media attention to FAN and to the dangers of water fluoridation. It made ending fluoridation a nationally discussed issue, gaining attention from decision makers at all levels of government, including the incoming presidential administration, and generated a wave of communities suspending or ending fluoridation that continues to grow with each day.
• The Cochrane Collaboration published an updated assessment on the efficacy of water fluoridation. It found that effectiveness has declined to almost nothing over the past 50 years.
• The Surgeon General of Florida–joined by other scientific and medical professionals–became the first state health official to hold a press conference calling for all communities to end fluoridation due to the health risks.

The Pure Water Gazette agrees that the tipping point has been reached with water fluoridation.  How much proof do you need?

 

Source: Fluoride Action Network.

Water News for November 2024

 

Water Projects from the EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced a new round of funding for American ports to help in electrification and pollution reduction. The $3 billion Clean Ports Program will upgrade infrastructure at 55 port projects across 27 states, according to The Guardian. Once complete, this funding should reduce 3 million metric tons (3.3 million tons) of carbon pollution, which is the equivalent of over 391,000 homes’ energy use for one year.

 

On November 20, 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched a new, no-cost technical assistance effort focused on reducing exposure to perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other emerging contaminants in small or disadvantaged communities. This initiative is part of EPA’s Water Technical Assistance (WaterTA) program. The Tackling Emerging Contaminants initiative will help eligible public drinking-water systems evaluate emerging contaminant issues, conduct initial water quality testing, and identify next steps in 200 small or disadvantaged communities over the next three years. EPA will also share best practices and amplify successes through case studies, fact sheets, webinars, and other resources regarding addressing emerging contaminants, including PFAS.

President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has provided an unprecedented $50B to improve water infrastructure across the nation. Of this funding, $5B is dedicated to the Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities (EC-SDC) grant program, which supports this latest technical-assistance initiative.

“The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is providing a focused opportunity to help small and disadvantaged communities address PFAS and emerging contaminants to ensure that drinking water is clean and safe for residents,” said EPA Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water Bruno Pigott. “By working hand-in-hand with local partners, the Tackling Emerging Contaminants initiative will help ensure that historically underserved areas have access to safer drinking water that is essential for healthy and vibrant communities.”

The More Plastics They Make, the More Gets in the Water

It should not take a team of experts to determine that the amount of microplastics found in water is directly related to the amount of plastic that is produced. What was surprising in a recent study, however, is that contrary to the research team’s expectations, no correlation was found between population density or land use and high levels of microplastics. It is suspected that recycling has something to do with it. Water Online. 

High levels of hazardous heavy metals found in products used to fight wildfires

A new study shows that sprays and retardants used to fight wildfires contain surprisingly high levels of toxic heavy metals, a “disturbing” finding at a time when wildfires are generally getting worse.

The paper, published Oct. 30 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, found that each of 14 fire suppression products examined contained at least eight of the ten heavy metals tested for, including chromium, cadmium, lead, and arsenic. Most of these metals or their derivatives are highly toxic, and known to cause a long list of diseases, including cancer. The New Lede

Millions of Americans Are Drinking PFAS-contaminated Water

More than 20% of the country’s population may rely on groundwater that contains detectable concentrations of PFAS for their drinking water supplies, according to a study published by the U.S. Geological Survey. Full article from Water Online. 

 

Devastating Flooding in Valencia

 

Spain’s worst flooding in almost 30 years caused the Magro River to overflow its banks, trapping some residents in their homes and sending cars and rubbish bins surging. The death toll in Valencia and the neighboring regions of Castilla, La Mancha and Andalucía stood at 95.  Valecia received a whole year’s worth of rain in a single day.

New research adds to evidence that several types of agrochemicals — including the widely used herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate — may raise the risk of prostate cancer.

 

Programming the NWS 1″ AIO Filter

Little programming is needed as the default settings work in most cases.

Enter programming by pressing NEXT/DOWN simultaneously and holding for five seconds. The NEXT button is second from the left.) Choose or accept:

TYPE= AIR CYCLE FILTER

AIR RELEASE TIME = 4.0 MINUTES.

BACKWASH = 14 MINUTES.  Can be shortened for treatment of odor only in clean water.

AIR CHARGE TIME = 40.  In most cases it’s best to leave it at default.

RINSE TIME = OFF. Must stay at OFF.

GALLONS CAPACITY=1,000 Gal.

REGEN = DELAYED.  This delays regeneration until the REGENERATION TIME you select.

RELAY 1, RELAY 2, SERVICE ALARM = OFF

Next go to final programming cycle by pressing NEXT/UP simultaneously and holding until the screen changes.

DAY OVERRIDE = Best set to 1 or 2.  You can use 3 if water is very clean and water usage is low.

REGENERATION TIME: Set time for regeneration.  If you have a water softener or another backwashing filter, be sure their regeneration times don’t overlap.

LIGHT NORMALLY= OFF

 

Programming 1″ NWS Water Softeners

 

 

Default Settings when you receive the unit are

First Backwash = 8 minutes

Regenerant Draw (aka Slow Rinse or Brine Draw) = 60 minutes

Second Backwash = 8 minutes

Rapid Rinse = 8 minutes

Regenerant Refill (Brine Fill) = Varies according to the situation. The softener will figure this one out when it gets the necessary information.

The unit has five buttons.  They are, from the left, Time, Next, Up, Down, and Regen.

The Time button is used to set the time of day to real time.

INSTALLER PROGRAMMING

To enter Installer Programming, press NEXT and DOWN simultaneously and hold for 5 seconds. (Sometimes you have to do it twice.)

You will know you’re in programming mode when the screen shows TYPE.  Scroll with up or down buttons to view options, then select by pushing Next.

Here are the items in this menu:

TYPE — Set to SOFTENING DN POST

BACKWASH TIME — Set to 8 or any preferred backwash duration.

DRAW DN TIME – Leave it at 60 minutes.

BACKWASH TIME — This is the second backwash. Set at 8 or any other preferred duration.

RINSE TIME — Duration of Rapid Rinse.  8 minutes recommended.

FILL — Here you enter the total pounds of salt the unit will use for the regeneration. You determine this by multiplying the cubic feet of resin in the softener by 15. For example, if you have a 12″ diameter softener it has 2 cubic feet of resin, so you would put 30 lbs. in FILL.  The programming suggested here is for full salt usage. You can program the unit to use less salt, but other changes will need to be made. Get advice if needed.

GRAINS OF CAPACITY.  Use these numbers for residential tank sizes.

8″ Tank = 22,500

9″ Tank = 30,000

10″ Tank = 45,000

12″ Tank = 60,000

These numbers are for “full salt” settings. For larger units or for reduced salt, get advice.

GALLONS CAPACITY = AUTO.  Auto means that the softener will figure it out based on the information you have given it.

REGEN = DELAYED.  This means that the softener will regenerate at the regeneration time you have selected.

RELAY 1, RELAY 2, SERVICE ALARM= OFF.

Next enter the USER PROGRAMMING MENU by pressing simultaneously and holding NEXT and DOWN for five seconds.

WATER HARDNESS– Enter the hardness of your water, in GRAINS PER GALLON.

DAY OVERRIDE — This is the number of days between regenerations in the event that the metered amount is not reached.  In most cases, the default is a good selection.

REGENERATION TIME= This is the time of day or night when the regeneration will occur. If you have more than one treatment device, like a backwashing filter, make sure they don’t conflict. First set the hour, then NEXT will let you set the minutes.

LIGHT NORMALLY: OFF.  (The light will come on if you touch a button.)

When the unit returns to the time-of-day screen, scroll through the settings from the time-of-day screen by using the NEXT key. You’ll see CAPACITY REMAINING in gallons, the total gallons it will count down before regeneration, REGENERATION IN= based on the value that you selected as DAY Override, and FLOW RATE = 0.