Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the time. Even if such pressurized systems were known, they certainly would
not have been used to pressurize water delivered via hollowed-out logs and
clay pipe. The second general area in which they lacked was sanitation, which
is generally taken for granted by those in the industrialized world of today.
Remember, to recognize that a need for something exists (in this case, the
ability to sanitize or disinfect water supplies), it is necessary to define the
nature of the problem. Not until the middle of the 1800s (after countless mil-
lions of deaths from waterborne disease over the centuries) did people realize
that a direct connection between contaminated drinking water and disease
existed. At that point, sanitation of water supplies became an issue.
When the relationship between waterborne diseases and the consump-
tion of drinking water was established, evolving scientific discoveries led
the way toward development of the technology necessary for processing and
disinfection. Drinking water standards were developed by health authori-
ties, scientists, and sanitary engineers.
With the current lofty state of effective technology that we in the United
States and the rest of the developed world enjoy today, we could sit on our
laurels, so to speak, and assume that because of the discoveries developed
over time (at the cost of countless people who died and are still dying from
waterborne-diseases), all is well with us—that problems related to providing
a clean, fresh, palatable drinking water are problems of the past. Are they
really, though? Have we solved all the problems related to ensuring that our
drinking water is clean, fresh, and palatable? Is the water delivered to our
tap as clean, fresh, and palatable as we think it is … as we hope it is? Does
anyone really know?
What we do know is that we have made progress. We have come a long
way from the days of gravity-flow water delivered via mains of logs and clay
or stone, and many of us on this planet have come a long way from the days
of cholera epidemics. Still, perhaps we should consider those who have suf-
fered and survived onslaughts of
Cryptosporidium
delivered to them through
their tap—in Sydney, Australia, in 1998; in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1993; in
Las Vegas, Nevada, in the early 1990s. How safe do they think our drinking
water supply is? If we could, we would ask this same question of a little boy
named Robbie, who died of acute lymphatic leukemia, the probable cause of
which is far less understandable to us: toxic industrial chemicals, unknow-
ingly delivered to him via his local water supply.
References and Recommended Reading
DeZuane, J. (1997).
Handbook of Drinking Water Quality
, 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley
& Sons.
Gerba, C.P. (1996). Risk assessment. In Pepper, I., Gerba, C., and Brusseau, M.L., Eds.,
Pollution Science
. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 301-319.
