DGS49
Diamond Member
It is occasionally good to consider human history when hearing "alarming" reports about the harms of various kinds of pollution.
For example, one of the greatest anti-pollution campaigns of our lifetime is the campaign to eliminate CSO.
CSO, which stands for Combined Sewer Overflow, is a phenomenon that occurs when storm sewers are combined with "sanitary" sewers - usually because people used to run their house gutter drains into the sanitary sewer system. When there is a rainstorm, the wastewater treatment plant is overwhelmed with the flow, and in many cases the "raw sewage" routs around the WWTP and into the local river. The money is spent to build holding tanks for temporary storage of the overflow, and to reroute storm sewers around the WWTP's.
But when there is a CSO, our shit flows into the same river where people fish, waterski, and swim. Yuk.
Federal, state, and local governments are spending mountains of money, and people are being mandated to modify the drainage systems of their houses at great cost, to eliminate the problem of CSO, because these overflows are TERRIBLE.
Or so it would seem.
But for countless millennia, both humans and animals have been depositing their "waste" onto the ground, into the ground, or into a local estuary. Wastewater treatment is a relatively new innovation, historically speaking. Why haven't we all died from this omnipresent water "pollution"?
Well, Mother Nature "treats" the waste products by dilution (with rainwater), filtration (through the earth), and biological degrading (by bacteria and insects that reside in the soil and in the water). Has it occurred to you that even today, people build an outhouse on one side of their property, then sink a water well on the other side of the property, assuming those two bodies of water will never meet? And the well water is generally safe for human consumption.
One could say that a wastewater treatment plant replicates the natural processes that have taken place in the ground and in the water throughout history. It is diluting it, settling out the solids, allowing engineered bacteria to treat it, and filtering it, before dumping it into The River.
Further, people and animals have drunk river and lake water for eons, without significant treatment. Mark Twain, in his book, "Life on the Mississippi," describes the table water served in restaurants on steamboats on the Mississippi in the mid-1800's. The finicky diners would allow the sediment in the water to float down to the bottom of the glass, so that the water they drank was relatively clear, while the "tough guys" would mix it up and drink it "brown."
And presumably they didn't get sick or die. Can you imagine what was in that water? In wastewater science terms, they were consuming water loaded with (a) dissolved solids, (b) suspended solids, and (3) biologicals. Yuk.
This is not to say that disease did not spread through tainted drinking water. This was a constant problem in cities where population density did not allow Mother Nature to do her work efficiently enough for human requirements. But we have evolved to tolerate - and even thrive on - certain "impurities" in our water, and even in our food. So there is really no need to adhere to informal rules about not eating food that has fallen on the floor, and so on. And you don't need to drink bottled water - which is a colossal scam. You won't die.
And people who work in commercial nuclear power plants, and who have served in the "nuclear Navy" have a lower cancer incidence than the general population, despite much higher than average exposure to nuclear radiation. But that's a subject for a different thread.
For example, one of the greatest anti-pollution campaigns of our lifetime is the campaign to eliminate CSO.
CSO, which stands for Combined Sewer Overflow, is a phenomenon that occurs when storm sewers are combined with "sanitary" sewers - usually because people used to run their house gutter drains into the sanitary sewer system. When there is a rainstorm, the wastewater treatment plant is overwhelmed with the flow, and in many cases the "raw sewage" routs around the WWTP and into the local river. The money is spent to build holding tanks for temporary storage of the overflow, and to reroute storm sewers around the WWTP's.
But when there is a CSO, our shit flows into the same river where people fish, waterski, and swim. Yuk.
Federal, state, and local governments are spending mountains of money, and people are being mandated to modify the drainage systems of their houses at great cost, to eliminate the problem of CSO, because these overflows are TERRIBLE.
Or so it would seem.
But for countless millennia, both humans and animals have been depositing their "waste" onto the ground, into the ground, or into a local estuary. Wastewater treatment is a relatively new innovation, historically speaking. Why haven't we all died from this omnipresent water "pollution"?
Well, Mother Nature "treats" the waste products by dilution (with rainwater), filtration (through the earth), and biological degrading (by bacteria and insects that reside in the soil and in the water). Has it occurred to you that even today, people build an outhouse on one side of their property, then sink a water well on the other side of the property, assuming those two bodies of water will never meet? And the well water is generally safe for human consumption.
One could say that a wastewater treatment plant replicates the natural processes that have taken place in the ground and in the water throughout history. It is diluting it, settling out the solids, allowing engineered bacteria to treat it, and filtering it, before dumping it into The River.
Further, people and animals have drunk river and lake water for eons, without significant treatment. Mark Twain, in his book, "Life on the Mississippi," describes the table water served in restaurants on steamboats on the Mississippi in the mid-1800's. The finicky diners would allow the sediment in the water to float down to the bottom of the glass, so that the water they drank was relatively clear, while the "tough guys" would mix it up and drink it "brown."
And presumably they didn't get sick or die. Can you imagine what was in that water? In wastewater science terms, they were consuming water loaded with (a) dissolved solids, (b) suspended solids, and (3) biologicals. Yuk.
This is not to say that disease did not spread through tainted drinking water. This was a constant problem in cities where population density did not allow Mother Nature to do her work efficiently enough for human requirements. But we have evolved to tolerate - and even thrive on - certain "impurities" in our water, and even in our food. So there is really no need to adhere to informal rules about not eating food that has fallen on the floor, and so on. And you don't need to drink bottled water - which is a colossal scam. You won't die.
And people who work in commercial nuclear power plants, and who have served in the "nuclear Navy" have a lower cancer incidence than the general population, despite much higher than average exposure to nuclear radiation. But that's a subject for a different thread.
