But Don't Drink The Water

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But Don't Drink The Water

It used to be that when you went to Old Mexico it was standard procedure for people to tell you, "Be sure and don't drink the water because you'll get sick." It appeared that the warning was true. I usually do a lot of work raising fish. In the past I've put some mosquito fish in a small rock pond that I have built here on my property. After a while I put some goldfish in with the mosquitofish to make things a little prettier. The goldfish ate up the mosquitofish. Next I put some catfish in with the goldfish and they ate the goldfish. After that some raccoons came along and ate the catfish. I then came to the conclusion that in general big fish eat littler fish and large animals eat fish that are smaller than they are. In my experiments I found that if you put a nice goldfish in some fresh water directly out of a tap it would kill them. These small fish if you put them in bad smelling, polluted water they will live just fine. I found out that you had to let tap water stand in the open air for a day or so till the chlorine dissipates before putting the fish in it. About 9 years ago we had a friend that was very healthy come up to our home and drink the tap water and she enjoyed it very much. About a year ago she came up and told me that the water now has chlorine in it and it smelled like swimming pool water does. She wouldn't drink it. I wasn't even aware of this till she mentioned it. It even tasted different. When you get these things done to you water sometime you aren't even aware of it. I look at it this way, "If it will kill fish then what is it going to do to you." I now drink bottled water and it probably still isn't the greatest thing for you because they may be just be getting it out of a tap. It probably would be best to drink fresh spring water but that is pretty hard to find now-a-days. I'm not to pleased about them putting fluorine in the water as well. Here's some information about how some people have cleaned up the water in an area. ..........................................................................................................................................S Low-tech solutions for pasteurizing water Technology News - August 4, 2004 Approximately 2.5 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, a crisis that leads to about 1.58 million deaths every year, according to the World Health Organization. Disinfection of drinking water could slash the mortality rate from waterborne pathogens such as typhoid and cholera by 45%. Bob Metcalf, a professor of biology at California State University in Sacramento, is teaching villagers in rural Kenya how to pasteurize water with a solar radiation kit. Surprisingly, the tools he uses are cardboard, aluminum foil, and a handmade thermometer. "I've been in Tanzania and Kenya, and local water supplies are often highly contaminated with bacteria," Metcalf says. Metcalf has been studying solar pasteurization since the early nineties, and his research has found that water does not need to be boiled to kill bacteria; it just needs to be heated to 65 0C. But in many parts of the globe, there is little fuel wood, so he designed a solar reflector made of cardboard covered with aluminum foil. This reflector concentrates solar radiation onto a black, water-filled pot. After about three hours in the sun, the water should have reached the correct temperature, but Metcalf's cleverly designed thermometer insures that the water is safe. Metcalf makes the thermometers himself, and while they may appear to be simplistic, he says they took years of labor to devise. "I wanted a reusable indicator so that when you get to 65 0C, you can reuse it again and again," he says. To build a thermometer, he seals a small ball of wax into a glass tube. This tube is then attached to a piece of fishing line along with a common washer to weight the thermometer down to the pot's bottom. The wax is blended to melt at 65 0C, so once it liquefies the user knows the water is pathogen-free. The weight keeps the device at the bottom of the pot. Metcalf has found that solar heating creates a thermal cline in the water, meaning that the temperature along the bottom can sometimes be 5 0C lower than at the top. It is critical for pasteurization, he says, that all the water reach the proper temperature. In environments like western Kenya that are hot, dry, and sparsely vegetated, solar radiation is arguably the most effective means to disinfect water. "People would have to spend a quarter of their meager income on wood instead of buying food," Metcalf says. "The amount of wood needed for one day would cost about 30 [Kenyan] shillings. You could buy a pound and a half of beans or rice with that money." Over the past year, Metcalf tested his technology at 40 different water sources in Kenya's Nyanza province, where the incidence of typhoid fever and bacterial and amoebic dysentery is among the country's highest. Most of the wells, rivers, and ponds were contaminated with coliform bacteria, but heating the water to 65 0C killed off the pathogens. With the success of this demonstration project, Metcalf has now begun talks with Kenya's Ministry of Water about expanding into other regions of the country. A similar project using discarded water bottles made from PET plastic is being carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (EAWAG). This process also utilizes sunlight, but instead of heat sterilization it uses UV radiation to kill pathogens. Martin Wegelin, the Program Director at EAWAG's Department of Water and Sanitation, says they have ongoing projects in 20 different countries that provide safe drinking water to half a million people. "The science behind this technology is good," says Metcalf. "It just needs to become common knowledge worldwide. PAUL D. THACKER"………………….Responses From Water Article.Here are some e-mails I got from people about the article, "But Don't Drink The Water." .........................................................................................................................................I But Don't Drink The Water. In consumer tests here in N.Z. most bottled water is WORSE than tap water. I think that's how it is everywhere because all that matters is bucks, bucks & more bucks! For years, to avoid the fas-ist mass medication of water, I used a reverse osmosis water purifier. In more recent years, I've became lazier & buy water that has been passed through both Grander technology & a reverse osmosis system. It's far cheaper than milk & soda drinks [ which have fluoride, chlorine & etc in them]. Some folk are of the opinion that purified water removes the minerals. True - but our bodies can't assimilate inorganic minerals - so get organic ones from kelp, vegetables [organic of course]. ..............................E News But Don't Drink The Water. -------Drinking water right out of the tap, when that water comes from the "water company", is like eating a Hershey chocolate bar with the wrapper still on it. Eating the chocolate bar would be far healthier though. One has to get at least the chlorine out of one's water. A lot of the water companies take the water right out of the rivers. They chlorinate it, fluoridate it as well, and the chlorine k-lls pretty much all the bacteria, and for the most part, even the spores. But, the water still retains, intentionally, the chlorine, and the fluoride, and the mix of the chemicals that the rivers contain. Chlorine can react with those and cause other chemicals to be "formulated" as well. So, unless one is using a decent water filter, I wouldn't drink the water in America. Even the soda companies (C-ke and Pe-si) use filtered water before they po-son it with their brews. The technique you've included sounds like a good thing to do if one were in a survival type situation. Or, even if one did not want to buy the water filter (expensive), or even when camping. It would also work on evaporating the chlorine but tri-halo methanes (if memory is serving correctly), fluoride, and a host of other things would still be there. Questions as to what all specific types bacteria are killed at that temperature as well. The use of chlorine and fluoride can be directly correlated with the growth of gut can-ers in epidemiological studies. But so can the stew of other chemicals in American water.