Thanks for the memory

Experiments have backed what was once a scientific ‘heresy’, says Lionel Milgrom

Lionel Milgrom
Guardian

Thursday March 15, 2001

About homeopathy, Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen’s University Belfast is, like most scientists, deeply sceptical. That a medicinal compound diluted out of existence should still exert a therapeutic effect is an affront to conventional biochemistry and pharmacology, based as they are on direct and palpable molecular events. The same goes for a possible explanation of how homoeopathy works: that water somehow retains a “memory” of things once dissolved in it.

This last notion, famously promoted by French biologist Dr Jacques Benveniste, cost him his laboratories, his funding, and ultimately his international scientific credibility. However, it did not deter Professor Ennis who, being a scientist, was not afraid to try to prove Benveniste wrong. So, more than a decade after Benveniste’s excommunication from the scientific mainstream, she jumped at the chance to join a large pan-European research team, hoping finally to lay the Benveniste “heresy” to rest. But she was in for a shock: for the team’s latest results controversially now suggest that Benveniste might have been right all along.

Back in 1985, Benveniste began experimenting with human white blood cells involved in allergic reactions, called basophils. These possess tiny granules containing substances such as histamine, partly responsible for the allergic response. The granules can be stained with a special dye, but they can be decolourised (degranulated) by a substance called anti-immunoglobulin E or aIgE. That much is standard science. What Benveniste claimed so controversially was that he continued to observe basophil degranulation even when the aIgE had been diluted out of existence, but only as long as each dilution step, as with the preparation of homoeopathic remedies, was accompanied by strong agitation.

After many experiments, in 1988 Benveniste managed to get an account of his work published in Nature, speculating that the water used in the experiments must have retained a “memory” of the original dissolved aIgE. Homoeopaths rejoiced, convinced that here at last was the hard evidence they needed to make homoeopathy scientifically respectable. Celebration was short-lived. Spearheaded by a Nature team that famously included a magician (who could find no fault with Benveniste’s methods – only his results), Benveniste was pilloried by the scientific establishment.

A British attempt (by scientists at London’s University College, published in Nature in 1993) to reproduce Benveniste’s findings failed. Benveniste has been striving ever since to get other independent laboratories to repeat his work, claiming that negative findings like those of the British team were the result of misunderstandings of his experimental protocols. Enter Professor Ennis and the pan-European research effort.

A consortium of four independent research laboratories in France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, led by Professor M Roberfroid at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, used a refinement of Benveniste’s original experiment that examined another aspect of basophil activation. The team knew that activation of basophil degranulation by aIgE leads to powerful mediators being released, including large amounts of histamine, which sets up a negative feedback cycle that curbs its own release. So the experiment the pan-European team planned involved comparing inhibition of basophil aIgE-induced degranulation with “ghost” dilutions of histamine against control solutions of pure water.

In order to make sure no bias was introduced into the experiment by the scientists from the four laboratories involved, they were all “blinded” to the contents of their test solutions. In other words, they did not know whether the solutions they were adding to the basophil-aIgE reaction contained ghost amounts of histamine or just pure water. But that’s not all. The ghost histamine solutions and the controls were prepared in three different laboratories that had nothing further to do with the trial.

The whole experiment was coordinated by an independent researcher who coded all the solutions and collated the data, but was not involved in any of the testing or analysis of the data from the experiment. Not much room, therefore, for fraud or wishful thinking. So the results when they came were a complete surprise.

Three of the four labs involved in the trial reported a statistically significant inhibition of the basophil degranulation reaction by the ghost histamine solutions compared with the controls. The fourth lab gave a result that was almost significant, so the total result over all four labs was positive for the ghost histamine solutions.

Still, Professor Ennis was not satisfied. “In this particular trial, we stained the basophils with a dye and then hand-counted those left coloured after the histamine- inhibition reaction. You could argue that human error might enter at this stage.” So she used a previously developed counting protocol that could be entirely automated. This involved tagging activated basophils with a monoclonal antibody that could be observed via fluorescence and measured by machine.

The result, shortly to be published in Inflammation Research, was the same: histamine solutions, both at pharmacological concentrations and diluted out of existence, lead to statistically significant inhibition of basophile activation by aIgE, confirming previous work in this area.

“Despite my reservations against the science of homoeopathy,” says Ennis, “the results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for a rational explanation for our findings.” She is at pains to point out that the pan-European team have not reproduced Benveniste’s findings nor attempted to do so.

Jacques Benveniste is unimpressed. “They’ve arrived at precisely where we started 12 years ago!” he says. Benveniste believes he already knows what constitutes the water-memory effect and claims to be able to record and transmit the “signals” of biochemical substances around the world via the internet. These, he claims, cause changes in biological tissues as if the substance was actually present.

The consequences for science if Benveniste and Ennis are right could be earth shattering, requiring a complete re-evaluation of how we understand the workings of chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology.

One thing however seems certain. Either Benveniste will now be brought in from the cold, or Professor Ennis and the rest of the scientists involved in the pan-European experiment could be joining him there.

Gazette Fair Use Statement

Consulting Firm Ranks the Nations of the World According to “Water Security”

by Hardly Waite

A British consulting firm called Maplecroft issued a “risk assessment” in the summer of 2010 which attempted to rank the nations of the world according to the security of their water supplies.

A “water security risk index” of 165 nations found African and Asian nations had the most vulnerable supplies, judged by factors including access to drinking water, per capita demand and dependence on rivers that first flow through other nations.

Somalia, where just 30 percent of the population has clean drinking water, topped the list, and then came Mauritania, Sudan, Niger, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkmenistan and Syria.

Iceland, Norway, and New Zealand, in that order, were ranked as having the most secure water supplies.

Climate change is expected to provoke conflict for water supplies as water becomes more scarce.

Shifts in monsoon rains and melting of glaciers, for instance, could disrupt supplies with the potential to cause cross-border conflicts. Construction of hydropower dams or more irrigation, for instance, can disrupt supplies down river.

The study said irrigation accounted for 70 percent of freshwater consumption across the globe. Industry uses another 22 percent.

While “water stress” is especially a problem for poorer nations, nations like Australia, the United States, and some European countries are also at risk.

Bulgaria ranked 47 on the list, Belgium 50, Spain 68, Australia 95 and the United States 104.

More Information.

Erin Brockovich Speaks Out on Global Water Shortage

Erin Brockovich is featured in “Last Call at the Oasis,”a new documentary sounding the alarm about an impending global water shortage.

According to Erin there are 30,000 superfund sites that still haven’t been cleaned up. “The EPA is, I don’t know, poorly run, mismanaged, broke, doesn’t do their job, is an agency that in my opinion and many instances has failed us.”

In case you wonder what kind of water Erin drinks, she has a reverse osmosis unit in her home.

Erin Brockovich as you probably remember her.

Read the LA Times Story.

“Most of the time no one is watching most of the water for most of the contaminants.”

by Hardly Waite

Published originally in the  Pure Water Occasional for December, 2010

In late 2010 an environmental group revealed that deadly hexavalent chromium is present in the water of many US cities. Americans were shocked.

Actually, what’s new with the hexavalent chromium issue isn’t that Chromium-6 has suddenly been spilled into US water supplies. What’s new is that someone told us about it.

Chromium-6 is only one of countless chemical contaminants that find their way into water but don’t get much public attention. In the 1980s I read a perceptive article on the subject that said, “Most of the time no one is watching most of the water for most of the contaminants.” In 2010 there’s a lot more to watch for, since new chemicals are being created almost faster than we can give them names, yet we continue not watching.

News about water quality comes and goes in the public mind. Ralph Nader made shocking revelations about water quality in the 1980s, but people soon forgot. The public has a short attention span.

Chromium-6 didn’t just appear suddenly in the water supplies of 31 of the 35 cities examined. It has been there a long time. The news is that someone went to the trouble to look for it and report it. Actually, it had been looked at earlier by government agencies, but they were happy to keep its presence to themselves as long as no one brought the subject up. This isn’t an uncommon event. Just this month the FDA revealed (after much prodding) that US agribusiness now drugs farm animals with 29 million pounds of antibiotics per year. Most people are aware that factory farm animals are being dosed with antibiotics and that consequently antibiotics are becoming ineffective, but the 29 million pound number is somewhat sobering. (A “shitload,” Grist calls it.) Does anyone doubt that a few tons of these drugs make their way into water supplies?

Chromium is present in water as trivalent and hexavalent chromium. The problem is that trivalent chromium is not only harmless but is an essential human nutrient. Hexavalent chromium is a potent poison. The state of California, which is usually about 20 years ahead of the rest of the country in environmental regulation, is proposing a maximum allowable of 0.06 parts per billion hexavalent chromium. The EPA is currently monitoring total chromium with a maximum allowable of 100 parts per billion.

Here is the EPA’s statement on chromium, which was issued after it received criticism for dragging its feet on the regulation of chromium-6:

“EPA absolutely has a drinking water standard for total chromium, which includes chromium-6 (also known as Hexavalent Chromium), and we require water systems to test for it. This standard is based on the best available science and is enforceable by law. Ensuring safe drinking water for all Americans is a top priority for EPA. The agency regularly re-evaluates drinking water standards and, based on new science on chromium-6, had already begun a rigorous and comprehensive review of its health effects. In September, we released a draft of that scientific review for public comment. When this human health assessment is finalized in 2011, EPA will carefully review the conclusions and consider all relevant information, including the Environmental Working Group’s study, to determine if a new standard needs to be set.

Background:

Currently, the total chromium standard is 0.1 mg/L (100 parts per billion). Our latest data shows no U.S. utilities are in violation of the standard.”

Now, to give an idea of how close to agreement are the two expert views—the California standard vs. the EPA standard—notice first that the EPA is measuring “total chromium” and California is measuring only chromium-6. Note, too, in case you haven’t, that the allowable numbers are not even in the same galaxy.

To sort all this out, image that, since we know that our potato chip intake should probably be limited, you consult a nutritional expert to find out how many bags of potato chips you can safely eat each month. His answer is one. You then consult a second expert whose answer is that you can safely eat a combined total of 1667 bags of potato chips and apples. The experts then take a survey of Americans’ eating habits. Expert #1 finds that 31 in 35 are violating the one bag per month standard for potato chip consumption, but expert #2 concludes that all is well because “no Americans are violating the combined potato chip and apple standard” by eating 1667 per month. By standard 2 you can safely eat 55 bags of potato chips (and no apples) per day.

That’s no more absurd than the advice we’re getting from the combined wisdom of California regulators and the EPA. The numbers are radically different and they’re counting different things.

The official allowable for chromium-6 will, after months or years of negotiation, eventually be set most likely somewhere between the extremes of 0.06 ppb and 100 ppb. The number will not be arrived at scientifically but will result from a political negotiation that considers the interests of manufacturers and sellers of products that use chromium, city water departments, environmental advocacy groups, wastewater processors, and a host of politicians who represent the interests of a host of lobbyists who are being paid by everyone from mining companies to state governments.
Each of these non-expert entities will employ its own set of experts who will rely mainly on the mysterious “science” of animal studies to prove its point. Animal studies, a science of roughly the same exactitude as having soothsayers examine the intestines of sacrificed goats, will conveniently prove what each of the interested parties wants proved. The final magic number, the amount of chromium-6 we can safely be exposed to, will depend mainly on the number of Republicans vs. Democrats on the committee.

Sprite Shower Filters. You’ll sing better.

Probable carcinogen hexavalent chromium found in drinking water of 31 U.S. cities

By  Lyndsey Layton

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 19, 2010

The study, which will be released Monday by the Environmental Working Group, is the first nationwide analysis of hexavalent chromium in drinking water to be made public.

It comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to set a limit for hexavalent chromium in tap water. The agency is reviewing the chemical after the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, deemed it a “probable carcinogen” in 2008.

The federal government restricts the amount of “total chromium” in drinking water and requires water utilities to test for it, but that includes both trivalent chromium, a mineral that humans need to metabolize glucose, and hexavalent chromium, the metal that has caused cancer in laboratory animals.

Last year, California took the first step in limiting the amount of hexavalent chromium in drinking water by proposing a “public health goal” for safe levels of 0.06 parts per billion. If California does set a limit, it would be the first in the nation.

Hexavalent chromium was a commonly used industrial chemical until the early 1990s. It is still used in some industries, such as in chrome plating and the manufacturing of plastics and dyes. The chemical can also leach into groundwater from natural ores.

The new study found hexavalent chromium in the tap water of 31 out of 35 cities sampled. Of those, 25 had levels that exceeded the goal proposed in California.

The highest levels were found in Norman, Okla., where the water contained more than 200 times the California goal. Locally, Bethesda and Washington each had levels of 0.19 parts per billion, more than three times the California goal.

The cities were selected to be a mix of big and smaller communities and included places where local water companies had already detected high levels of “total chromium.”

“This chemical has been so widely used by so many industries across the U.S. that this doesn’t surprise me,” said Erin Brockovich, whose fight on behalf of the residents of Hinkley, Calif., against Pacific Gas & Electric became the subject of a 2000 film. In that case, PG&E was accused of leaking hexavalent chromium into the town’s groundwater for more than 30 years. The company paid $333 million in damages to more than 600 townspeople and pledged to clean up the contamination.

“Our municipal water supplies are in danger all over the U.S.,” Brockovich said. “This is a chemical that should be regulated.”

Max Costa, who chairs the department of environmental medicine at New York University’s School of Medicine and is an expert in hexavalent chromium, called the new findings “disturbing.”

“At this point, we should strive to not have any hexavalent chromium in drinking water” or at least limit the amounts to the level proposed by California, Costa wrote in an e-mail.

Hexavalent chromium has long been known to cause lung cancer when inhaled, but scientists only recently found evidence that it causes cancer in laboratory animals when ingested. It has been linked in animals to liver and kidney damage as well as leukemia, stomach cancer and other cancers.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical industry, says the California goal is unrealistic because some water supplies have naturally occurring hexavalent chromium that is higher than .06 parts per billion.

In a written statement, the group’s senior director, Ann Mason, said that “even the most sophisticated analytical methods used by EPA are not able to detect the extremely low levels that California wants to establish.”

The group supports a “uniform, national standard for hexavalent chromium in drinking water, based on sound science,” Mason wrote. “Research is underway to provide EPA with critical data that will allow for a more informed risk assessment of hexavalent chromium. This data will be complete by mid-2011. Given the potential impact on drinking water supplies, EPA should incorporate this data in its assessment.”

Brendan Gilfillan, an EPA spokesman, said that the agency was aware of the new study by the Environmental Working Group and that the findings will be considered as the agency reviews total chromium in drinking water, work that is expected to be completed next year.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, said that water utilities across the country are resistant to the regulation.

“It’s not their fault. They didn’t cause the contamination. But if a limit is set, it’s going to be extraordinarily expensive for them to clean this up,” Cook said. “The problem in all of this is that we lose sight of the water drinkers, of the people at the end of the tap. There is tremendous push-back from polluters and from water utilities. The real focus has to be on public health.”

Fair Use

Lead in Drinking Water

Reprinted from the Pure Water Occasional’s November 2010 Issue.

Lead rarely occurs naturally in water. It gets there from mining operations or industrial processes, but most often it gets into drinking water through plumbing fixtures. Low pH can be a factor, because as the pH of water goes down, its ability to leach metals from pipes and fixtures goes up.

The risk of lead poisoning is highest in children and pregnant women. Children absorb 30-75 percent of the lead they ingest; while adults absorb only about 11 percent. Effects of lead poisoning include brain, kidney and red blood cell deterioration, coma and convulsions, and high blood pressure. Lead-damaged children experience slowed physical growth, hearing problems, and reduced intelligence.

Lead is powerful stuff. While most water contaminants are measured in parts per million, the EPA’s maximum contaminant figure for lead is only 15 parts per billion.

The best water treatment for lead is prevention in the form of replacing pipes with very old solder joints (the Safe Drinking Water Act imposed limits on lead in solder in 1986) and fixtures that can leach lead. Raising the pH of acidic water and amendments in total alkalinity levels can dramatically lower lead content as well. Phosphate-based corrosion inhibitors are also effective.

Actual lead removal is done fairly easily in drinking water with any good reverse osmosis unit. There are also cartridge filters with lead-removal properties built into them. KDF, special ion exchange resins, and activated alumina cartridges can all be used to reduce lead in drinking water.

For whole house lead treatment, a standard water softener can be an effective lead remover, but reduced flow rates must be observed. There are also carbon block cartridge style filters, but these restrict service flow considerably.

For more information about lead removal, see the Occasional’s Water Treatment Issues page on lead.

Is Your Faucet Making You Sick?

By Doug Linney

By now we’ve all heard the dangers of lead — at any level. The American Heart Association, the Centers for Disease Control, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the World Health Organization, and every other health-based organization that has reviewed the available studies have concluded that there is no safe level of lead in the human body. Human lead exposure has been associated with reduced cognitive function, aggressive behavior, increased criminal activity, digestive ailments, nervous system disorders, cardiovascular impairment, and bone marrow damage, just to name a few. Recent medical research has demonstrated that many of these ailments are caused by low levels of lead exposures — levels that were previously believed to be safe. Lead in our bloodstream robs us of our future, as it is particularly toxic to our children’s health. Furthermore, unlike other toxins that our bodies can remove, lead accumulates over time and can have adverse impacts throughout adulthood and can even shorten our lives.

But, after years of government programs to reduce lead exposure, maybe you feel safe, right? The gas you put in your car no longer contains lead. You were careful to repaint your house with lead free paints, and you avoid buying those brightly-painted imported toys that seem to be recalled with alarming frequency. And of course, last year when you remodeled your kitchen you installed a brand new faucet with packaging claiming to be “lead free” to replace that old leaky one. Surely that new faucet doesn’t contain lead.

However, the EPA still estimates that as much as “20 percent of human exposure to lead may come from lead in drinking water. How can that be? How can we still be accumulating substantial quantities of lead in our bloodstream from our drinking water?”

Federal Law Is not Entirely Protective

Under current federal law, the faucet that is labeled “lead free” can contain as much as four percent lead. In addition, federal law allows some small lead concentrations to leach out of your faucet and into the water you and your family drink. The typical household faucet manufactured over the last fifteen years can contain a quarter pound of lead! Older faucets manufactured before 1996 can contain double that amount. We know that a faucet containing so much lead is likely to leach lead into the drinking water used in our homes.

The existing laws rely on a standard that assumes a “small” amount of lead leaching from our faucets is safe. Since there are many ways that we can still be exposed to lead, we should be eliminating lead exposure wherever we can. Getting lead out of faucets is something we know can be done, and we cannot delay.

Dangerous Levels of Lead in Our Plumbing

Household plumbing continues to be an alarming source of lead exposure. EPA has a warning for consumers on its web page that brass faucets are the single greatest contributing source of lead in consumers’ drinking water. The EPA estimates that up to 20 percent of human lead exposure is the result of lead in our plumbing, including faucets. Public health departments in nearly every state across the nation and as well as the EPA all provide warnings on their web sites about the dangers from the lead that lurks in your plumbing.

They advise against using hot water directly from the tap for human consumption. This is because hot water causes more lead to leach out of plumbing. They also advise that you run the cold water tap for several minutes before drinking water from it. This is to help clear the water that has been collecting lead while it sits in the pipes.

No such warnings can be posted at the millions of drinking fountains located in schools across the country, where rampant violations of state and federal lead standards have been documented. In 1998 the California Department of Health Services estimated that 18 percent of California’s public elementary schools had lead levels in drinking water that exceeded the federal action level. Comprehensive sampling by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2008 found that 30 percent of their schools were dispensing water with unsafe levels of lead. Widespread lead contamination has also been found in water from school drinking fountains in Seattle, Baltimore, Roanoke, and Ontario, California.

Abundant research has demonstrated time and time again that lead is particularly lethal to children. Yet, more than a decade after the problem with lead in school plumbing was widely recognized, little progress has been made to fix it, in large part because new plumbing components still contain lead!

Waking Up to the Dangers of Lead?

In September 2008 the EPA lowered the lead standard for air emissions based on their recognition of new medical studies demonstrating the dangers of exposure to lead at levels previously thought to be safe. These new medical studies make it clear that any exposure to lead, whether through air or water, is dangerous and demonstrate how important it is for our children’s future health that we get the lead entirely out of our drinking water systems.

In 2006 California started a revolution to finally make our faucets safe by adopting a law that essentially eliminates lead from drinking water plumbing. Vermont and Maryland have already followed California’s lead by passing similar laws. U.S. Representative Anna Eshoo has now introduced H.R. 5289 to get the lead out of all drinking water faucets and plumbing sold in the United States. Of course, the battle isn’t won. The plumbing industry continues to resist, seeking amendments that would allow industry to bypass federal governmental regulation and continue manufacturing and selling unsafe faucets.

Doug Linney is President of East Bay Municipal Utility District.

Fair Use

A Simmering Water War

by Jim Hightower

Here in my home state of Texas, we’re suffering from withdrawal pains.

This is not caused by our addiction to alcohol or drugs – but to plain water. And to make our pain worse, it’s not the people of Texas who are hooked on a destructive water habit – it’s the boneheaded executives and greedheaded investors in coal-fired and nuclear-powered plants that generate electricity.

And don’t laugh at Texas, for the same corporate addiction might be draining the fresh water supplies where you live. Question: which uses more water – your washing machine chugging out one load of laundry, or the power plant that provides the few kilowatts of electricity to heat the water for that one load? No contest. The power plant uses as much as 10 times more water to make the electricity than you use to fill your machine.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Solar and wind alternatives use almost no water to produce electricity – an advantage that today’s “clean-coal” hucksters and nuclear speculators don’t want you or your congress critters to realize. Indeed, their lobbyists are pushing hard at both national and state levels to get regulatory breaks and taxpayer subsidies to let these voracious giants keep mainlining our nation’s water.

Private interests now want to build four new, water-sucking power plants in our state – even though Texas already produces far more electricity than it needs. Where would they get the billions of gallons of water they’d use each year? From the Colorado River, draining it and the region’s Highland Lakes of the essential and scarce H2O that supplies millions of people in the Austin area and downstream.

Wherever you live, it’s time for a citizen’s intervention to break this costly habit. For information and action tips, contact Public Citizen Texas at www.texasvox.org.

Gazette Fair Use Statement

Air and Carbon

by Gene Franks

This article appeared originally in the Pure Water Occasional for October, 2010.

A little understood fact about granular carbon—any carbon used in filters, as a matter of fact—is that it contains a lot of air. What appears to be a pile of dry granules is actually the hiding place for countless tiny pockets of air. According to an article in Water Quality Products Magazine: “In a typical bed of dry activated carbon, the carbon skeleton only occupies 20 percent of the bed. The remainder is air.”

About half the trapped air is in the voids between the granules of the carbon. The other half is in the pores of the granules. Carbon granules are shot full of acres of many tiny crevices. These nooks and crannies are the very thing that gives carbon so much surface area and makes it such an effective adsorbent. A carbon particle only around 0.1 mm wide has a surface area of several square metres. In more dramatic terms, an EPA document states that GAC has an adsorption surface area from around 73 to 112 acres per pound!

Owners of even small carbon filters know that when water encounters carbon for the first time a lot of hissing and spluttering occurs. This is the sound of trapped air that is escaping from within the carbon.

Enlargement of granular carbon shows countless pores that adsorb contaminants. The surface area of the pores is exceptional. A single pound of activated carbon has more surface area in its pores than 100 football fields. When the carbon is new, these pores are filled with air that must eventually work its way out.

In larger carbon beds used in tank-style filters it is often advantageous to allow a long soak—from overnight to several days, depending on the bed size and water temperature. This is because large air pockets can make the filter perform poorly. The filter, in fact, will not perform normally until all the air is gone. In some very large systems technicians resort to introducing heated water to speed the process up. This isn’t recommended for homeowners.In small filters, trapped air is often just an an aesthetic inconvenience, but it can sometimes cause “vapor locks” in undersink filters and reverse osmosis units. This condition can be relieved by simply opening a filter canister to allow the trapped air to escape. In RO units, most prefilter air escapes through the drain line of the membrane housing (that’s the hissing you hear when you start a new or a newly-serviced unit), and most postfilter air is expelled through the faucet. Rinsing the unit well usually gets rid of excess air quickly.

A vigorous backwash of up to 30 or 40 minutes can serve three purposes in new backwashing filters: it rids the carbon of fines (carbon dust), it resettles the bed so that smaller granules work their way to the top, and it clears out air pockets.

The best policy for starting non-backwashing In/Out-type filters is probably a very long soak before the unit goes into service. It could take up to 48 hours to get all the air out at ambient temperature, but the longer soak you can give the carbon before putting the filter in service the less air you’ll get into your home’s water pipes. Always open a downstream faucet to allow air to escape.

FYI: in industrial applications, air-release time can be cut to 3 to 4 hours by using 212 degree F. water. At 1800 degrees, air expulsion is instantaneous.

Getting A Perspective on Water Use

by Gene Franks

This article appeared originally in the Pure Water Occasional for September, 2010.

The Sept. 23, 2010 issue of our local newspaper, the Denton Record Chronicle, reported on a local meeting held to promote regulation of groundwater use in our county. One participant, a Mr. Klement, who witnessed water wells going dry in his area because of excessive drawdown of groundwater by gas drillers making “horizontal fractures” in the Barnett Shale to expedite the harvest of natural gas, spoke with considerable knowledge of the subject:

“Guys like me don’t have a city to assist us trying to be a spokesman for individual landowners,” Klement told the crowd, explaining the need for the district.

He said the area needs a conservation district to get a handle on the usage by Barnett Shale drillers.

The average horizontal fracture can use anywhere from 1 million to 7 million gallons of freshwater. There are currently about 14,000 wells in the 24-county Barnett Shale, with another 3,300 permits to drill granted by the Texas Railroad Commission.

Those 3,300 permits mean shale drillers must find as much as another 23 billion gallons of water in the coming months.

“The longer we wait, the longer we don’t have the tools,” Klement told the crowd.

“Out where I am, they [gas drillers] build 15-acre lakes fed by wells 24 hours a day. When they’re fracking, they have four to eight wells going at a time. You can’t believe what’s going on out there. We’re already six months too late — this is the reason for trying to get this set.”

I would like you to think about the wells pumping around the clock to fill the 15-acre lakes that will supply the 1 to 7 million gallons of freshwater used to frack each of the wells that Mr. Klement described the next time you read in a “Seven Ways to Save the Planet” article that you’re a bad person if you fail to turn off the water while you’re brushing your teeth.

As important as it is to avoid waste, the way we brush our teeth really isn’t the decisive factor when it comes to saving the planet. The low-water tooth brushing campaign is one of the many feel-good practices that divert our attention from the real issues. We’re led to believe that if we’ll just fix our drippy faucet, get some low-water appliances, recycle our aluminum cans, and not over-water our lawn everything will be alright.

The real issue with water is that we are allowing industrial and agricultural megacorporations to obtain for a pittance what is really a public treasure. We’re fretting about shorter showers and more water-frugal ways to wash our hands while golf courses and the lawns and the gas wells of the wealthy are being flooded with cheap water.

Americans are easily managed by distraction.

We have also been taught to be very concerned about our choice of bags at the grocery store. However, whether you choose plastic or paper or bring in your own special reusable bag with rain forest pictures and slogans printed on it, your choice of grocery bags amounts to only a tiny sliver of the environmental impact of the grocery purchasing process. Corporate food producers love for you to focus on the grocery bag because it keeps your mind off of the massive environmental devastation that results from our current system of producing and delivering food. It is a system designed to make money–not to provide good food or to protect natural resources. The benefit of a year’s worth of virtuous plastic bag refusals is tiny compared to the impact of the food you choose.

Not long ago when I was helping a customer plan a water treatment system for his lawn watering well I came to the realization that each day he uses more water by 11:00 AM to keep his spacious lawn green than I use in my entire home for a whole month. And I don’t even try to save water. I selfishly shower as long as I want.

It should come as no surprise that we are taking water out of the ground much faster than natural methods can replace it. Here is a UPI release that appeared this month.

Groundwater depletion rate said doubled

Published: Sept. 23, 2010