First some background :there has been a major water crisis in the town of North Battleford, Sask. Three people have died so far and 100 have been taken ill with the parasite Criptosporidium. What happened was a filter was removed and reinstalled improperly, and that combined with high water caused release of raw sewage into the river. Not a problem…right.
Well the sewage system was designed and built in the 1950’s upstream from the water treatment plants. So the overflowing raw sewage was taken into the water intake. they said this was an acceptable practice back then. My question is this true, and why on God’s green earth would anyone put a sewage plant upstream from a water treatment plant???
Keith
P.S. They are building a new sewage treatment plant downstream from the water treatment plant.
Well, geez, Odie, you live there, you tell us. 
Seriously, though, my WAG would be that back in the 50s they had a lot more faith in Better Living Through Science, “ain’t been a microbug invented that our new sewage treatment technology can’t handle”, etc. Also, they might not have known about beasties like cryptosporidium (dunno when exactly those were “discovered”). They would have been patrolling just for the biggies, like cholera and typhoid bacilli.
I believe the practice up until the 1920’s was to dump all of your waste downstream of your town or city which basically makes it someone else’s problem. Out of sight, out of mind, but not a very community friendly way to deal with this stuff. Effluent from a waste treatment plant is suppose to be… well, treated but since all kinds of nasty bugs can live in a stream or river (don’t every drink untreated water from a clear stream in the moutains) a city’s water collection and distribution systems is suppose to take that into account before they release the “treated” water onto the public. The lesson here is that our precious drinking water supply is only a “reversed filter” away from being contaminated but microbs that could make us extremely sick… or worse. Someone was alseep at the wheel!
“Why on God’s green earth would anyone put a sewage plant upstream from a water treatment plant???”
I don’t know why a town would put its sewage plant upstream from its own water treatment plant, but unless a river is only going to have one town on it or every community on the river but one gets their water from some source other than the river, every water treatment plant but one on a river is going to be downstream of someone’s sewage plant.
That said, it seems like outbreaks like this case are rare. There are hundreds of communities downstream on the Illinois River from where the Sanitary and Ship Canal empties Chicago’s (VERY treated) sewage, and I’ve never heard anything about people becoming sick from it. And a rash of sick people in some small Rockwellian town due to nasty big Chicago’s crap would be every newshound’s dream story if it were true – think “Erin Brockovich”.
I haven’t heard anything about this situation, but what sounds like happened is that the sewage treatment plant overflowed. Not good for the river, but not an uncommon occurence in (unfortunately, far too many) places, and something that a functioning drinking water purification plant should be able to deal with. After all, like dolphinboy said, there could be all kinds of nasty stuff in the river anyway (otter poop, or whatever). But then someone made a mistake at the drinking water plant and put a filter in wrong, and you’ve got a problem.
So the bottom line is that if the drinking water plant malfunctions, you could have problems, whether or not there’s a sewage outfall upstream. And if the drinking water plant is working correctly, the sewage outfall shouldn’t matter.
Like dolphinboy says, it’s a reminder of how much we take drinking water for granted.
Odieman - update on the news tonight was that they’ve now ruled out the bug as the cause of death in two of the cases - it may have been a contributing factor in the third.
A few years ago in Wisconsin some town’s water supply was contaminated by a mantaince guy, I believe it waas Milwaukee. He opened an access hatch on a water tower and let bird droppings fall into the water tower supply. Some people got sick and I don’t remember if a few died or not. There were plenty of lawsuits though.
In your case a properly maintained water supply treatment plant would have killed the stuff.
In Wisconsin sewage treated water is being pumped miles back into the aquifer systems that are drying up to keep the marshes and streams at the right levels. This is in the Madison area which is actually draining the water from its large lakes filtration beds, and draining them. The lakes used to get water though springs in the bottom, but the flow is in reverse now.
A special note for any state or providence that is in the Great Lakes Aquifier. Any source that removes water from the lakes natural aquifier area, must replace the used amount with water at some point in the year. Only a few grants have occured that allow some places to take water from the Great Lakes in the summer and replace it in the spring. This is an agreement with all the bordering states in the U.S. and providences in Canada.
This reminds me of a lesson I received in High School biology, I had a very eccentric teacher, a PhD biochemist and former employee of the Iowa Dept of Natural Resources (what the hell was he doing teaching HS anyway?)
I live in Iowa, and we draw our water supply from the Iowa River. The teacher did a mathematical analysis of farm runoff and it’s impact on the water in the river. We had previously done our own water analyses of farm feedlot runoff, since there was a feedlot right next to our school, which ran into a stream that crossed the campus. The teacher had been doing these analyses for years, and along with his DNR data, he knew just how many cows there were, how many feedlots, how many ran into the river, etc.
The teacher, to our horror, demonstrated on the blackboard in front of the class, with mathematical precision, that 3/4 of the water in the Iowa River, at the point it passed our city, had originated as cattle feedlot runoff. To put it more bluntly, 3/4 of our city’s water supply was originally cow urine and feces.