<p>The news story about Portland city water supply officials ordering 8 million gallons to be flushed away (discarded) because a silly inebriated fool relieved himself in the reservoir got me thinking about a California municipal water authority that has perfected the process of sanitizing and reclaiming waste water. Apparently the water is sufficiently clean and safe for human consumption, but fear of a backlash from the public restricts the water to non-consumption purposes.</p>
<p>A lot of Oregon citizens think that the water authority’s decision is ridiculous, given that we’re talking about 8 million gallons lost, versus a neglible amount of…er…discharge. Many pointed out that there’s lots of animal material and other stuff in municipal water reservoirs anyway.</p>
<p>Would you willingly drink treated water that came from sewage and waste?</p>
<p>Agreed- animals not only urinate in the water- they die in it- I don’t agree with PDX decision.
As long as it tastes OK & is safe for human consumption I would drink it. I am more concerned about hormones & other chemicals that cannot be filtered out, than animal waste which can be treated for.</p>
<p>ALL our fresh groundwater is reclaimed waste. Unless you live where you’re drinking glacial runoff, most of the water you’ve ever drunk has been through countless human and animal digestive systems.</p>
<p>I saw that on the news the other day. I do not think they are telling the whole story, including why the decision to drain the reservoir was made. It just tells you how vulnerable the whole system is.</p>
<p>No - I wouldn’t drink the reclaimed water but that’s a different scenario than this particular ‘discharge’ event you mentioned.</p>
<p>I frankly don’t drink enough water for me to take any risk in this regard - no one does. Very little of the water we used is actually consumed. </p>
<p>There are a lot of reclaimed water lines around here, the pipes are colored purple to distinguish them, but the water’s used for irrigation/landscaping/golf courses/etc. rather than routed to individual homes/businesses where it would be used for drinking/bathing/dishwashing/etc.</p>
<p>I know the reclaimed water gets treated and that ‘they’ claim it’s drinkable but I wouldn’t want to risk their potentially incomplete testing, or faulty or decreased efficiency scrubbing equipment, or 'unknown variables they’re currently not checking for and accommodating. In short, this is fairly new, the purveyors of it have an agenda and therefore may have some bias, and it’s not needed anyway (for drinking water).</p>
<p>There’s a big difference though between treated sewer water and treated rainfall collected water in the degree and types of contaminants in the water - not just in human/other waste but also in everything else people flush down the toilet including drugs/medications and different kinds of bacteria. </p>
<p>If there was a way I could get the reclaimed water to my house to use as irrigation, especially at a lower rate than what I currently pay for water (which is a lot), I’d use it.</p>
<p>I live in Portland and I regularly walk at that reservoir and I drink water from that reservoir. Unless there’s a way to test the man (which there isn’t; he hasn’t been caught) for public health issues, I’d really prefer they get rid of the water. Our water is minimally treated here.</p>
<p>We have no water shortage here this spring! The rivers around here are at or above flood stage.</p>
<p>I would be happy to have houses piped with reclaimed or grey water for laundry/toilets/etc, but that would require entirely new infrastructure.</p>
<p>I lived on acreage and wanted to discharge laundry water into a horse pasture instead of septic, but could not as their could be human waste in it- as opposed to the horse pasture filled with horse poop</p>
<p>All water has to be purified–once that’s done properly, it’s all about the same (including most bottled water). Draining the reservoir because a guy peed in is stupid–somebody probably pees in it every day.</p>
<p>Of course, W.C. Fields supposedly said that he never drank water because “fish function in it.”</p>
<p>Hunt, while I no it sounds unlikely, our water is minimally treated once it gets to the reservoirs–and it’s not treated post-reservoir. It’s not that easy to pee in them. He had to jump the fence. </p>
<p>I understand that urine is normally sterile, in healthy humans. I realize that this is all about the ick factor. But the ick factor is there.</p>
<p>The question was asked: would I drink reclaimed water? All water is, but definition, reclaimed. We have a limited supply of water on our planet. It goes through an evaporation cycle, is reclaimed, is rained down… The water we drink was once dinosaur pee. I have no problem with cleaned recycled water. But I do care a lot how it’s cleaned and if it’s been tested for pathogens, pollutants, and contaminants.</p>
<p>My hometown (north of emeraldkity4) has glacial water. In other places, the water likely comes from a river where purified waste water was discharged upstream, which is almost the same thing as drinking reclaimed water. As dmd77 mentioned, all water is reclaimed, so I don’t have much of an issue with drinking recently reclaimed water.</p>
<p>Draining millions of gallons of water because of urine from one person is absurd. If there is a possibility that some chemical substance was put in the water, that’s a different story, and that may be what’s really going on here.</p>
<p>The explanation here is not too specific, but it seems that there are two sets of reservoirs, and as dmd77 indicates, the one that was tainted was after the treatment step:
[Water</a> System Basics](<a href=“http://www.portlandonline.com/water/index.cfm?c=48904]Water”>About Portland's water system | Portland.gov)
But it’s still silly to discard million gallons of water for one guy’s bladder contents, considering that the reservoir is open to the sky and can be full of bugs, dead birds, bird droppings, and who knows what else.</p>
<p>I talked to my husband about this last night. He agrees with a lot of you that it was just a waste of water. So do some of my PDX friends. The other half are right up there with me on the ICK! factor. My hunch is that the man who made the decision was high on the ICK! factor and looking at that much more than anything else. I find myself wondering what would have happened when the video got out, if they had NOT flushed the water… Headlines like “Portland lets public drink urine!” occur to me.</p>
<p>dmd, it may not be just the ICK! factor that played a role here. It is likely that there is an SOP in place that all water becomes “unsafe for human consumption” and has to be drained out of the reservoir if a security breach occured at the treatment plant, because testing the water for all sorts of nasties takes time.</p>
<p>BB: based on what I’ve read, there doesn’t seem to be such a standard protocol. However, since the one interview I’ve seen appears to be heavily edited, who knows? Journalism with fact-checking and follow-up questions is a dying art.</p>
<p>An article I read on this quoted the person who made the decision and it appears it was largely drained because of the ‘ick factor’ and because that person didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a lot of complaints once the info got out about the ‘enhanced water’ even though it was so diluted it almost certainly wouldn’t be a real health issue. It states that the water isn’t treated from the reservoir to the tap - what’s in there is what you get. It does state that when they drain it for cleaning every now and then they often find dead animals, paint cans, and lots of other debris in the water.
Apparently they’re working on placing all of their final reservoirs underground which should solve a lot of these issues.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, these are the same people deciding whether recycled sewer water (quite different than the natural water cycle) is fit for human consumption hence my wariness.</p>