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

Gulf Oil Spill: A Hole in the World

by Naomi Klein

–The Guardian published a superb comment on the Gulf oil disaster by noted researcher Naomi Klein. The article is a moving look at various dimensions of the tragedy that have been ignored by the conventional media. We’re printing only the final segment of the article, “Make the bleeding stop,” but we urge you to read the entire essay in the original Guardian version. This article appeared during the time when the well was still dumping oil into the Gulf.–Hardly Waite, Editor, Pure Water Gazette.

Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.–Naomi Klein.

Make the bleeding stop

Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP’s live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth’s guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.

John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as “rainbow sheen”, he observed what many had felt: “The Gulf seems to be bleeding.” This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an “oil spill” and instead says, “we are haemorrhaging”. Others speak of the need to “make the bleeding stop”. And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.

And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.

The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.

It’s one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: “The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined.” Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while “unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual”. And just in case we still didn’t get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don’t even mention what a hurricane would do to BP’s toxic soup.

There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.

In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)

Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.

If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the “Drill Now” frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won’t be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.

Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminum particles into the atmosphere – and of course it’s all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP’s former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP’s supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”

The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk

Primate Penis Measuring Project Defended

by Gene Franks

Editor’s Note: The following piece appeared originally in Gazette #21, Sept. 1989. Official Gazette photographer Becky Klett caught the young owl face monkey below anxiously awaiting the results of the Yerkes Primate Center’s penis measuring experiments.
The Gazette has often reported on costly animal research projects designed for no other purpose than to provide employment for researchers. Here’s another.

The International Primate Protection League issued a complaint about the cost and pointlessness of a project being conducted at public expense by two experimenters at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta. The project’s purpose is to measure the penis length of gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, and other nonhuman primates.

The experimenters retaliated with an article in the Laboratory Primate Newsletter in which they listed eleven important hypotheses they are testing with their measurements. The most important of these is reproductive biologist R. V. Short’s belief that “the difference in size and visibility of the penis in the common chimpanzee and gorilla represent an example of ‘form reflects function.'”

Another central questions they are exploring is, “Do these hypotheses accurately characterize the gibbon or, by implication, does social structure ( monogamy vs. polygamy) have a prepotent influence on the reproductive parameters?” To understand this, you must know that “the male gibbon has a relatively short, dark penis.”

The Gazette’s comment: It is hard to understand how nonhuman primates have reproduced themselves so effectively through the ages knowing so little about how penis length affects their reproductive parameters. It’s about time that we have some good, solid statistics on gorilla penis length, and for far too long we have needed answers about the relative shortness of the gibbon’

The Gazette feels that these researchers should be commended, for no matter how you go about it, measuring gorillas’ penises has to be a risky business.

Minnesota Water Park Hit Hard by Cryptosporidiosis

 In spite of the smiling face of mascot Tiki Tom, it’s been a bad season for the

Tiki Tom

Edgewood Resort and Water Park of Duluth, MN. Dozens of possible cases of cryptosporidiosis were traced to the waterpark last month. The costs in lost business and new technology could total a half-million dollars. Staff has been inundated with calls about the waterborne disease that causes flu-like symptoms. They’ve been hit with cancellations and forced to cut employee hours.

Bottom line: The resort has seen a 25 percent drop in bookings and revenues as its critical summer season approaches.

Full details from the Duluth News Tribune.

Who Really Invented the Water Softener?

by Hardly Waite

Author’s Note:  The piece below is adapted from an earlier version that appeared in the Pure Water Occasional for June, 2010.

The water softener is the flagship product of the modern water treatment industry. Traditional water treatment “dealerships” have been built around the water softener for decades.

The softener is commonly said to have been introduced in 1903, although the details of its origin are sketchy.

Here is the Culligan version of the origin of the softener, from Culligan’s website:

Emmett Joseph Culligan grew up in a farming background in the hard water areas of South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. He was well aware of the difference between hard well water and the soft rain water most families collected in cisterns. The 9th day of January, 1921, was probably the most significant day of his life. As an expectant father he was pacing the halls at St. Joseph¹s Hospital and ended up in the boiler room. He struck up a conversation with the maintenance superintendent. Next to the boilers were two large cylindrical tanks which the superintendent proudly announced softened the water to prevent scaling in the boilers and save soap in the hospital laundry.
The superintendent then explained how he could prevent diaper rash by building his own softener to use to wash his baby’s diapers.

Culligan exhibited a tremendous interest in the hospital water softener and finally prevailed upon the superintendent to give him a coffee can full of the greenish-black mineral, called Zeolite, which “magically” removed the hardness from water.

The superintendent explained how Culligan could punch some pinholes in the bottom of the coffee can, put about an inch of coarse sand in the bottom, and then fill it with the green sand Zeolite. The superintendent told him he could hold this “coffee can softener” under the faucet, let hard water trickle through the device into a wash basin and the resulting water would be softer than rain.

So fascinated was Emmett with his first encounter with ion exchange that the expectant father almost forgot why he was at the hospital. The nurses had searched, from one end of the halls to the other, before locating him in the boiler room to announce that he was the father of a healthy baby daughter.

The rest is history.

At Pure Water Products we have a different version. It’s about how part of man’s punishment for the apple eating incident was being deprived of the naturally soft water in the garden. To spare humans the anguish of spotty glassware and excessive soap consumption, Pure Water Annie (Pure Water Products’ technical wizard) invented the water softener just a few days after the great flood.

That’s a lot more likely than the coffee can myth.  And what was Emmett Culligan doing in the hospital’s boiler room anyway?

Water Should Cost More: An Unpopular View

Editor’s Note: The Pure Water Gazette has long supported the maintenance of excellent, well-funded public water supplies and opposed the privatization of water. We must protect our water from ownership by for-profit agencies, and we’re going to have to get beyond the silly notion that water is free. It isn’t, and we must greatly increase the price we pay for water so that superb public water systems can be maintained.

The piece below is excerpted from an informative article about the state of the current water treatment industry, A Flood of Challenges – A Sea of Opportunities by Steve Maxwell. –Hardly Waite, Editor, The Pure Water Gazette.

There is no substance more critical to life than water – we cannot live without it for more than a few days.

Modern water treatment techniques and extensive distribution infrastructure have allowed the development of our advanced industrial economies, and have enabled dramatically increasing standards of living for many of the world’s people. Modern irrigation techniques have made it possible to feed a rapidly growing world population, and to turn deserts into productive farmland and sprawling metropolises. Yet we continue to deplete and pollute our limited water resources at an alarming rate – and we steadfastly look the other way while our water treatment and distribution infrastructure begins to crumble.

We are rapidly reaching the point at which we will no longer have sufficient clean water to support our current lifestyles. Half of the world’s population is expected to suffer from severe water shortages by the year 2050. Yet, much of our population still seems to simplistically believe that water falls out of the sky and that it should be basically free, forgetting that it costs money – billions and billions of dollars a year – to collect, clean, store and distribute water.

Many of our treatment plants, reservoirs, and distribution pipelines were built fifty to a hundred years ago and are rapidly decaying, with leakage rates as high as 50% in some older cities. More ominously, many of our underground underground aquifers and surface water sources are irreversibly contaminated, or are drying up from decades of overuse.
Nonetheless, political leaders are typically rewarded for minimizing public spending rather than insuring that their communities will have access to vital water resources in the future.
City councils are loath to raise water rates, even though big percentage increases would only amount to a few dollars a month for most Americans.
At a fundamental level, the main reason for this nonchalance and lack of attention is that water remains truly – actually absurdly – cheap relative to its real value. Americans today pay an average of a quarter of a penny per gallon for the clean drinking water that seems to magically flow out of our taps – about $25 a month for the typical family. One simply cannot find another product whose real value so far exceeds its price – or for that matter, one whose price is often so unrelated to its true cost of delivery.

Eventually, we will all bear the costs of correcting the water pollution problems that we have created, and rebuilding the infrastructure that we have allowed to fall into decay – huge costs that current water prices do not properly reflect.

Hollywood starlets pitch all manner of natural spring waters, vitamin waters, energy waters, smart waters, holy waters and various other so-called specialty beverages right up to “Bling H2O” – which proudly calls itself the most expensive bottled water – all now available at a cost of only a hundred to a thousand times the price of the tap water from which they are virtually indistinguishable. Also this year came breaking news that Madonna spends $10,000 a month on specially blessed water, with cartons of it shipped to wherever she is staying at the moment.

There seems to be no end to the appetite of the American public to pay ridiculously high prices for essentially the same thing that comes out of their taps, while simultaneously a $10 or $15 increase per month in tap water fees can generate a political firestorm.

But the fad may be moderating – some upscale restaurants are now promoting the virtues of tap water, and no less a water authority than the National Association of Evangelicals has said, “Spending $15 billion a year on bottled water is a testimony to our conspicuous consumption, our culture of indulgence…. drinking bottled water may not be a sin, but it sure is a choice.”

 Gazette’s Fair Use Statement

B. Bea Sharper on Lawn Care

Pure Water Gazette columnist B. Bee Shaper writes only in the challenging numerical style of Harper’s Index.  While her unique style makes her fiction tedious at times, it lends itself well to hard-hitting factual pieces like the following expose of the follies of the American lawn.  B. B. writes frequently about water and is a regular contributor to our E-Zine edition, the Pure Water Occasional.

Percentage of the total water consumed on the East Coast that goes to water lawns: 30%.

Percentage of the total water consumed on the West Coast that goes to water lawns: 60%.

Pounds of pesticides used on the average suburban lawn for each pound of pesticides used on an equal area of farmland: 10.

Tons of fertilizers and pesticides applied annually to residential lawns and gardens: 70,000,000,

Amount of hydrocarbons emitted by a power lawn mower as compared to those emitted by the typical automobile: 10 to 12 times.

Amount of hydrocarbons emitted by a weed eater as compared to those emitted by the typical automobile: 21 times.

Amount of hydrocarbons emitted by a leaf blower as compared to those emitted by the typical automobile: 34 times.

Percentage of earthworms, vital to the health of the soil, that are killed where pesticides are used on lawns: 60% to 90%.