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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/wik

• 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.