6 ms·

The first mass chlorination of a city’s water supply

53 points by ghosh 11y ago

alricb 11y ago
And what can happen if the people responsible for a water supply screw up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/walkerton/ http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/...
- uxp 11y ago
  Leal was never responsible for the water supply, he only had a cursory interest in the water supply. His real interest was public health, unlike the Walkerton case, where they were responsible for the water supply and actively withheld information that indicated that the supply was unsafe for culinary use.
- schiffern 11y ago
  >This contamination was due to farm runoff into an adjacent water well Yet another victim of our universally awful water management in agriculture, and in general. Why is a farmer allowed to discharge polluted water onto someone else's property, whereas if a factory discharged that exact same water it would be a crime? Our land management (which in modern times mostly falls under the purview of agriculture) needs to start treating the water cycle as the life-critical biophysical process it is, not just as an inconvenience (rain is just 'weather,' and the answer to rain is always 'drainage') In reality, 'drainage' leads to drought. Drainage is straight hard pipes that shunt all rainfall to the ocean as fast as possible. This prevents aquifer recharge or soil soaking. Buildings and parking lots are 100% runoff surfaces. Even continuously mowed lawns are nearly so due to subsoil hardpan. Here's a simple math equation. When looking at a continent as a whole: water_available_per_hectare (in megalitre/ha) = net_precipitation_per_hectare (ML/day/ha) * average_time_from_fall_to_ocean (days) As you can see, minimizing the time it takes water to reach the ocean minimizes the water available on the land.[1] And under climate change more of the world is going to start looking like California. But by using "drainage" as the de facto solution, we're driving the optimization in the exact opposite direction. What we should be doing is slowing down water, sending it on circuitous routes with lots of friction. There are some designs that do exactly that,[2] but they are almost entirely ignored in discussions of water use and policy. This E. coli incident/mismanagement/market failure is tragic, but it's a symptom of a larger structural problem. We're subsidizing both water addition (huge dam projects and pipelines) and water removal (not making farmers clean up their own mess^Wrunoff), with all the predictably bad results. [1] Ok, I cheated a bit here. There actually is something clever that you can do - recycle the water. If you harvest and evaporate huge quantities of water shortly after it falls, you can cause new rain a few hundred miles downwind (and buffer floodwaters besides). This is quite absurd for an industrial system, but nevertheless this system powers our modern day rain. And that's why trees cause 80% of terrestrial rainfall: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature11983.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature1... [2] A few that come to mind: swales (i.e. contour following water soaking ditches), the various techniques of Keyline design (farm scale dams/tanks, altering the passive flow of water over land, and use of a deep ripping plow), and productive literally-cheaper-than-dirt biofiltration systems like reed bed ponds and banana circles. Google is your friend here, but a couple links: http://www.cresswater.co.uk/pages/case-studies/whitsome-hill-mains.php http://www.cresswater.co.uk/pages/case-studies/whitsome-hill... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ima_ff5xVH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ima_ff5xVH4
  - alricb 11y ago
    The way the system was setup, the well that was contaminated was treated as a "deep well" that cannot get contaminated by surface water. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case at all. They might have figured it out in time if they'd followed proper procedure, but the guy in charge was completely incompetent, being unaware of concepts they teach at the beginning of a water management course (such as "turbidity"). It was compounded by the fact that they were trying to hide their improper handling of another well; ironically, that other well was in fact a deep well and did not cause the contamination. I don't know about Ontario, but here in Quebec the rules on water management in agriculture have become much more stringent in recent years. You need to have a plan in place for all the land and all the animals you own.
    - schiffern 11y ago
      Wow, yeah that's really bad. Good to hear that sane water management is prevailing! You're right, in general the actual water authorities tend to do a pretty good job, because they know their stuff and how complex it is (that guy excepted, obviously). Most of the damage comes from outdated agricultural practices imo. Fundamentally it's wealth concentration doing most of the damage, by gradually replacing self-sufficient farmers invested in land stewardship with paycheck-to-paycheck mortgage slaves on a tractor 18h/day. This is mainly via regulatory capture leading to our [routinely] bass-ackwards farm bills.
mcherm 11y ago
Is this the historical equivalent of Uber ignoring legal constraints in hopes of later finding a work-around or a change in the law?
- seszett 11y ago
  Maybe if Uber were convinced they were saving lives and if they did not expect to financially benefit from working around the law. I don't think that's the case though.
  - TTPrograms 11y ago
    When all you've got is a hammer everything looks like growth hacking.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    if they did not expect to financially benefit from working around the law. How so? The guy had an important position in the (private) company that supplied the water and was being sued for not cleaning it up. It's not exactly a direct incentive, but it's there. That's not to mention the fame that comes from being the first person to clean up a city's water supply.
Retric 11y ago
That's not the orginal title. How One Man Poisoned a City’s Water Supply (and Saved Millions of Children’s Lives in the Process)
- ocb 11y ago
  Presumably clickbait titles are to be avoided
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    It was the original HN title only a little while ago. Only he didn't poison anyone really. A good title rename.
tomjen3 11y ago
Today he would be treated as a terrorist, which would probably have been for the best. In this case it worked, but how many mad people are so convinced of their own brilliance that they will simply think the public will adore them when they see it works?
- icebraining 11y ago
  Agreed; this guy was dangerous, he just got lucky.
clord 11y ago
With what we know now about beneficial bacteria, I wonder if, in addition to the pathogens, we're killing probiotics? And perhaps the lack of exposure to mild bacteria mean we're more susceptible to immune diseases? Of course getting rid of the pathogens is a great thing, but perhaps chlorination plays a role in causing some modern problems that are related to the immune system and the gut biome? Anyone have links to studies done on this topic?
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases: http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergies-Autoimmune/dp/1439199396 http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergi... Velasquez-Manoff on Autoimmune Disease, Parasites, and Complexity: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.htm...
  - glaugh 11y ago
    Does "Epidemic of Absence" actually address chlorine? I thought it was a useful and interesting book, but I don't remember it discussing chlorine in specific.
  - itsybitsycoder 11y ago
    "A new way of understanding allergies"? When I was growing up, my mother and father were constantly saying that kids who didn't play in the dirt were the kids who got allergies and got sick all the time. They encouraged us to play with bugs, play in the mud, and run around the neighborhood getting into things that would cause a 'concerned neighbor' to call CPS today. My grandparents on both sides had the same philosophy, and I don't think they're alone on this... pretty sure this was once considered common sense, before the super helicopter parenting + antibacterial everything trend caught on. I get that common sense isn't science, and it's great that someone is compiling the evidence, but that title just comes off as so arrogant. Somewhere out there, there's a book called "water is wet: a new way of understanding liquids".
- Xylakant 11y ago
timr 11y ago
Note what didn't happen here: he didn't create a startup company to deliver Luxury Water to rich people. He didn't patent the idea, and attempt to collect royalties. He didn't discover the idea while attempting to get rich from some tangentially related business. Contrary to popular narrative, many of the technologies that make our lives livable came about because dedicated people devoted themselves directly to solving some important problem, not serendipitously while pursuing personal wealth.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  From an incremental improvement side, probably, but from a new product side, definitely not. You didn't get the Model T, the Macintosh, Edison power and light, etc because of some dedicated people already at their jobs, you got them via outsiders starting their own businesses and, yes perusing personal wealth, while pushing out the old guard. All the while the old guard kept most of the innovative people making TPS reports instead of doing worthwhile things. Most innovators have to flee their day jobs to do what they want to do in their field. Ford didn't make a better saddle, he made a better horse. The Model T had to come from the outside to disrupt horse and buggy and the only way to really do that is via a capitalist approach. Pursing of wealth is one of the major motivators here and there's nothing wrong with it. tldr; incentives matter
  - timr 11y ago
    "From an incremental improvement side, probably, but from a new product side, definitely not." What in the world are you talking about? Chlorination decreased adult mortality by nearly 50%, and childhood mortality by nearly 75%. These sorts of public-health innovations are what gave us the ability to start pursuing those "new products" you value so highly. If that's incremental improvement to you, you need to re-examine your assumptions. The incentive here was saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
- icebraining 11y ago
  He didn't discover the idea at all, chlorine was already used to disinfect water. What he did was pump a full city's water supply with it, in secrecy, without any wide-scale trials.

53 points by ghosh 11y ago

And what can happen if the people responsible for a water supply screw up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/walkerton/ http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/...

uxp 11y ago
Leal was never responsible for the water supply, he only had a cursory interest in the water supply. His real interest was public health, unlike the Walkerton case, where they were responsible for the water supply and actively withheld information that indicated that the supply was unsafe for culinary use.
schiffern 11y ago
>This contamination was due to farm runoff into an adjacent water well Yet another victim of our universally awful water management in agriculture, and in general. Why is a farmer allowed to discharge polluted water onto someone else's property, whereas if a factory discharged that exact same water it would be a crime? Our land management (which in modern times mostly falls under the purview of agriculture) needs to start treating the water cycle as the life-critical biophysical process it is, not just as an inconvenience (rain is just 'weather,' and the answer to rain is always 'drainage') In reality, 'drainage' leads to drought. Drainage is straight hard pipes that shunt all rainfall to the ocean as fast as possible. This prevents aquifer recharge or soil soaking. Buildings and parking lots are 100% runoff surfaces. Even continuously mowed lawns are nearly so due to subsoil hardpan. Here's a simple math equation. When looking at a continent as a whole: water_available_per_hectare (in megalitre/ha) = net_precipitation_per_hectare (ML/day/ha) * average_time_from_fall_to_ocean (days) As you can see, minimizing the time it takes water to reach the ocean minimizes the water available on the land.[1] And under climate change more of the world is going to start looking like California. But by using "drainage" as the de facto solution, we're driving the optimization in the exact opposite direction. What we should be doing is slowing down water, sending it on circuitous routes with lots of friction. There are some designs that do exactly that,[2] but they are almost entirely ignored in discussions of water use and policy. This E. coli incident/mismanagement/market failure is tragic, but it's a symptom of a larger structural problem. We're subsidizing both water addition (huge dam projects and pipelines) and water removal (not making farmers clean up their own mess^Wrunoff), with all the predictably bad results. [1] Ok, I cheated a bit here. There actually is something clever that you can do - recycle the water. If you harvest and evaporate huge quantities of water shortly after it falls, you can cause new rain a few hundred miles downwind (and buffer floodwaters besides). This is quite absurd for an industrial system, but nevertheless this system powers our modern day rain. And that's why trees cause 80% of terrestrial rainfall: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature11983.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature1... [2] A few that come to mind: swales (i.e. contour following water soaking ditches), the various techniques of Keyline design (farm scale dams/tanks, altering the passive flow of water over land, and use of a deep ripping plow), and productive literally-cheaper-than-dirt biofiltration systems like reed bed ponds and banana circles. Google is your friend here, but a couple links: http://www.cresswater.co.uk/pages/case-studies/whitsome-hill-mains.php http://www.cresswater.co.uk/pages/case-studies/whitsome-hill... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ima_ff5xVH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ima_ff5xVH4
- alricb 11y ago
  The way the system was setup, the well that was contaminated was treated as a "deep well" that cannot get contaminated by surface water. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case at all. They might have figured it out in time if they'd followed proper procedure, but the guy in charge was completely incompetent, being unaware of concepts they teach at the beginning of a water management course (such as "turbidity"). It was compounded by the fact that they were trying to hide their improper handling of another well; ironically, that other well was in fact a deep well and did not cause the contamination. I don't know about Ontario, but here in Quebec the rules on water management in agriculture have become much more stringent in recent years. You need to have a plan in place for all the land and all the animals you own.
  - schiffern 11y ago
    Wow, yeah that's really bad. Good to hear that sane water management is prevailing! You're right, in general the actual water authorities tend to do a pretty good job, because they know their stuff and how complex it is (that guy excepted, obviously). Most of the damage comes from outdated agricultural practices imo. Fundamentally it's wealth concentration doing most of the damage, by gradually replacing self-sufficient farmers invested in land stewardship with paycheck-to-paycheck mortgage slaves on a tractor 18h/day. This is mainly via regulatory capture leading to our [routinely] bass-ackwards farm bills.

mcherm 11y ago

Is this the historical equivalent of Uber ignoring legal constraints in hopes of later finding a work-around or a change in the law?

seszett 11y ago
Maybe if Uber were convinced they were saving lives and if they did not expect to financially benefit from working around the law. I don't think that's the case though.
- TTPrograms 11y ago
  When all you've got is a hammer everything looks like growth hacking.
- icebraining 11y ago
  if they did not expect to financially benefit from working around the law. How so? The guy had an important position in the (private) company that supplied the water and was being sued for not cleaning it up. It's not exactly a direct incentive, but it's there. That's not to mention the fame that comes from being the first person to clean up a city's water supply.

Retric 11y ago

That's not the orginal title. How One Man Poisoned a City’s Water Supply (and Saved Millions of Children’s Lives in the Process)

ocb 11y ago
Presumably clickbait titles are to be avoided
- chris_wot 11y ago
  It was the original HN title only a little while ago. Only he didn't poison anyone really. A good title rename.

tomjen3 11y ago

Today he would be treated as a terrorist, which would probably have been for the best. In this case it worked, but how many mad people are so convinced of their own brilliance that they will simply think the public will adore them when they see it works?

icebraining 11y ago
Agreed; this guy was dangerous, he just got lucky.

clord 11y ago

With what we know now about beneficial bacteria, I wonder if, in addition to the pathogens, we're killing probiotics? And perhaps the lack of exposure to mild bacteria mean we're more susceptible to immune diseases? Of course getting rid of the pathogens is a great thing, but perhaps chlorination plays a role in causing some modern problems that are related to the immune system and the gut biome? Anyone have links to studies done on this topic?

w1ntermute 11y ago
An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases: http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergies-Autoimmune/dp/1439199396 http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergi... Velasquez-Manoff on Autoimmune Disease, Parasites, and Complexity: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.htm...
- glaugh 11y ago
  Does "Epidemic of Absence" actually address chlorine? I thought it was a useful and interesting book, but I don't remember it discussing chlorine in specific.
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  "A new way of understanding allergies"? When I was growing up, my mother and father were constantly saying that kids who didn't play in the dirt were the kids who got allergies and got sick all the time. They encouraged us to play with bugs, play in the mud, and run around the neighborhood getting into things that would cause a 'concerned neighbor' to call CPS today. My grandparents on both sides had the same philosophy, and I don't think they're alone on this... pretty sure this was once considered common sense, before the super helicopter parenting + antibacterial everything trend caught on. I get that common sense isn't science, and it's great that someone is compiling the evidence, but that title just comes off as so arrogant. Somewhere out there, there's a book called "water is wet: a new way of understanding liquids".
Xylakant 11y ago

timr 11y ago

Note what didn't happen here: he didn't create a startup company to deliver Luxury Water to rich people. He didn't patent the idea, and attempt to collect royalties. He didn't discover the idea while attempting to get rich from some tangentially related business. Contrary to popular narrative, many of the technologies that make our lives livable came about because dedicated people devoted themselves directly to solving some important problem, not serendipitously while pursuing personal wealth.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
From an incremental improvement side, probably, but from a new product side, definitely not. You didn't get the Model T, the Macintosh, Edison power and light, etc because of some dedicated people already at their jobs, you got them via outsiders starting their own businesses and, yes perusing personal wealth, while pushing out the old guard. All the while the old guard kept most of the innovative people making TPS reports instead of doing worthwhile things. Most innovators have to flee their day jobs to do what they want to do in their field. Ford didn't make a better saddle, he made a better horse. The Model T had to come from the outside to disrupt horse and buggy and the only way to really do that is via a capitalist approach. Pursing of wealth is one of the major motivators here and there's nothing wrong with it. tldr; incentives matter
- timr 11y ago
  "From an incremental improvement side, probably, but from a new product side, definitely not." What in the world are you talking about? Chlorination decreased adult mortality by nearly 50%, and childhood mortality by nearly 75%. These sorts of public-health innovations are what gave us the ability to start pursuing those "new products" you value so highly. If that's incremental improvement to you, you need to re-examine your assumptions. The incentive here was saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
icebraining 11y ago
He didn't discover the idea at all, chlorine was already used to disinfect water. What he did was pump a full city's water supply with it, in secrecy, without any wide-scale trials.