Here are my assumptions, which may of course be incorrect.
1)The reservoir holds water. It flows into the treatment plant, is treated, and pumped to the community.
2)Birds fly over and poop in the water. Airborne contaminants can settle in the water.
Other things I can’t think of. We don’t cover the lake to prevent this.
Surely a pint of urine -sterile as it leaves its discharge pipe under pressure - can’t render 38 million gallons of water undrinkable or untreatable.
No, I don’t to drink your pee, and yes there should be a fence to keep people from contaminating drinking water, but what is the real danger from this incident?
It is Portland. OTOH, the water company can probably tell its customers that “like cures like,” and the powerful concentration of urea will have amazing health benefits that will far exceed the controversial addition of other chemicals to the water.
ETA: Am I doing my math right? That now the reservoir is contaminated with roughly .003 PPM of pee?
Just don’t believe it, walking round our local water supply there are dozens of fishermen throwing handfuls of maggots in it, gulls craping in it and trout doing what comes natural…
I got the impression that this water is immediately sent out to people’s homes for drinking, yet there is no cover and it’s not a tank. Doesn’t make any sense to me.
I think some politician didn’t want to see the headline ‘Entire town drank urine tainted water and nobody told them’. It doesn’t cost much to flush the water so why take a chance at bad PR.
I think the guilty teenager should be forced to drink someone else’s urine and see how he likes it.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the same city that has repeatedly rejected fluoridation proposals might, just might, not be all that great at performing rational risk assessment when it comes to their drinking water.
It’s totally obvious if you read the story as they are only dumping 38 MG of water out of 50 MG, so in order to make that call so accurately one must assume that a controlled double blind study was made to determined that is the dilution factor needed. Once you get to that factor you don’t ever want to get to homeopathic dilution concentrations as science has been unable to explain any effects here, so that could produce weird effects.
Much better to keep the concentrations below known contamination levels and above the level where really weird things start happening.
Any possibility Portland just told people they’re flushing away 38 million gallons of water to make them feel better about kids peeing in the reservoir?
In the earlier case, the water was apparently already treated, and waiting to be pumped directly into peoples houses. I assume the same is true in this case. Its not the type of resevoir the OP is picturing, that is, a storage for water before its treated.
Does seem kind of odd that Portland doesn’t keep water in tanks or underground after treating.
