How could there even be scum growing inside the tanks? Living matter isn’t generated ex nihilo: At the very least, you need some way of getting carbon (and nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and various trace elements) into the environment for anything at all to grow in it. And if you’re talking about an opaque tank, you need to go further and put that material in in a calorific form.
Actually, I don’t have a problem with this. Algal scum is incredibly resourceful and tenacious. I once worked on a project where we had recirculating heavy water (because ordinary water had absorption bands we couldn’t tolerate). Simple lifeforms like algae will thrive in heavy water. Somehow, it got into our system and grew, despite the fact that the system was closed to the air (or else we’d end up with ordinary water contamination) and there was nothing in the circulating system that the algae could eat. Furthermore, we couldn’t add anything to poison the algae, because that would introduce unwanted absorbing species. We eventually used an ultraviolet light shining into the path to kill the algae. But we never could figure out how it got into the system, or what it was eating that let it grow.
1 as pointed out it is not necessarily harmful and very well may be also growing inside your home water pipes as well
2 Coffee and tea water is heated and usually remain at a elevated temperature which should kill anything. IDK if they take the water to a rolling boil, or the effects of the lower air pressure has on boiling disinfecting, but at the very least it is heat pasteurized to some degree.
[quote=“SiAmigo, post:13, topic:684465”]
[/QUOTE]Hey guys & gals, did you-all notice the Fairchild or Kaiser-Frazer C-119 in the foreground in the first minute of that U-Tube video? You can only see the twin tail booms. It had large radial engines on it as well. Fairchild used Pratt & Whitney Twin wasps and Kaiser-Frazer used Wright engines IIRC. Way cool!
Can we get a cite for heating water to some point below boiling is sufficient to reduce disease causing organisms to a safe level?
Vacationing in the Caribbean I was puzzled by the server’s actions when she filled our water glasses. My gf explained that she put the bottle of water near my ear so that I could hear the seal break, insuring it wasn’t a bottle refilled from the tap. I saw her repeat this at other tables, often leaving her customers bewildered.
I’m feeling helpful today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization#Process
(Process is for milk, but water should be same or easier to sterliize)
http://www.princeton.edu/~oa/manual/water.shtml
“According to the Wilderness Medical Society, water temperatures above 160F (70 C) kill all pathogens within 30 minutes and above 185F (85C) within a few minutes.”
The common advice to boil water is because then people don’t have to wait for 30 minutes, or even a few minutes; by the time you’ve brought a pot of water to a rolling boil, all of the hazardous organisms therein are dead. This is handy because then nobody has to think about a clock: the time it takes to get water to a boil is the clock.
Things change a bit at very high elevations, where the boiling temp is a lot lower. If you’re at the highest camp on Everest, and you’re trying to sterilize some water, you actually will need to boil it for 30 minutes since it only boils at 160F at that altitude.
Aircraft drinking water (in the US) is regulated by the US EPA Aircraft Drinking Water Rule. They did testing prior to developing the rule. Here’s an excerpt.
Of the 12,794 routine samples, 3.6 percent (463 samples) were positive for total coliform and 3.9 percent (18 samples) of the total coliform-positive samples were E. coli/fecal coliform-positive.
Water used in food prep on both aircraft and cruise ships is regulated by the FDA.
Here’s a link to the Safe Drinking Water Act. If you look at the contaminant list you’ll see that the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal is 0% Total Coliforms, while the actual MCL is 5.0%.
That’s your take on it.
The way I see it, 1 in 8 is too difficult of a number for NBC to grasp. 
I flew in a B-17 once. I didn’t drink any water on board, but then it was only half-hour joyride.
In countries that have wet/dry seasonal cycles, there is no fresh water available in the dry season. Households have cisterns on the roof, and when there is water, the cisterns fill. All year, the household water comes from the tank. The tanks never get cleaned. People drink the water, which is as safe after months in the cistern as it was when it went in, which is from a safe public water supply.
I drank roof cistern water every day when I lived in Chile and Jordan. It is perfectly safe to consume, no matter how long it has been since the cistern has been cleaned, if ever.
By the way, I flew in a DC-3, North Central Airlines Chicago to Milwaukee in about 1960.
My building’s pipes are Victorian. If they’ve ever been cleaned, it’s less often than on a plane.
I used to drink out of open streams in Colorado many years ago.
The best water I have ever had was from a well near Sallisaw OK.
Looking in an old water line is like looking in an aircraft wing, it is scary what is or isn’t in there.
“What do you think you have an immune system for? It’s for killing germs!”
George Carlin
May he RIP.
Did you ever see* No Highway in the Sky*? The windows in the fictional Reindeer were like bus windows:
Personally I’d rather stick to an airframe that doesn’t rupture.