The Big Thirst, page 22
What is 1 part per trillion?
Think of it in terms of your own income. Most of us will not earn $10 million in our entire working lives—you would have to earn $100,000 for each of 100 years.
Now, look around you for a penny. You probably don’t have to look beyond your pocket, the bottom of your purse, the drawer in your desk. Pennies are everywhere.
If you earned $10 million in your lifetime, 1 part per billion of that income would be a single penny, out of all the pennies that rattle through your life. So the new ability to test for substances at a concentration of 1 part per trillion is the same as the ability to find a single penny out of a lifetime of $10 million in earnings, not for one person but for 1,000 people. And not just to find a penny, but to find a single specific penny.
Put another way, it’s the ability to zero in on one specific second out of 1 trillion seconds, 1 second out of 31,689 years.
That kind of detection capability is simply astounding. Something that appears as a couple parts per trillion is in the water, but only barely.
That testing ability has allowed us to discover a whole wave of things that we never realized are in our water—almost like the discovery, one hundred years ago, of the bacteriological pollutants in water.
The result this time is a little tricky: Some of the things we’re “discovering” have been in the water all along; others are relatively new. The water itself isn’t dirtier. We’re just seeing the water we once thought was clean in a new way.
That we couldn’t detect the “dirt” ten years ago doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, and doesn’t mean it wasn’t damaging the environment or human health. The tricky part is that the opposite is also true: The fact that we can detect the substances, their very presence in the water, doesn’t mean they are harmful, or even significant. Just because we suddenly realize there’s stuff in the water we didn’t know was there before doesn’t mean we have to take it out.
We actually don’t know. That is, we don’t know how clean the water needs to be.
One reason we don’t know has to do with the second big change in our water supplies: what we’re putting into the water. We’ve started to wash substances into our wastewater, and into our lakes, reservoirs, and rivers, that simply didn’t exist a hundred or even fifty years ago.
Tens of millions of people now take maintenance pharmaceuticals every day: antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering medicine join birth control pills and blood-pressure medicine, along with somewhat rarer cancer and organ-transplant drugs. The residues of those medicines end up in our urine and in our wastewater. Farms, mines, and gas-drilling operations use all kinds of exotic chemicals, some regulated and some not, that end up in wastewater. And all the products of modern life—from shampoos and detergents to the fire-retardant chemicals that infuse our children’s pajamas—are depositing a faint rainbow of contamination in our rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. Because of the way water works, of course, that means those substances are also starting to appear in the raw water that utilities rely on to supply our tap water.
What we don’t know is if these micropollutants in our water are hurting us, and how.
“It is the difference between what’s detectable and what’s dangerous,” says Shane Snyder, a toxicologist who is codirector of the Arizona Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants at the University of Arizona. Snyder was one of the scientists who helped first discover the micropollutants in U.S. water supplies, and until August 2010, he ran an unusual research and development laboratory for Patricia Mulroy’s Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas.
We have the ability to pollute our water in ways that are new, and we have an ability to detect those pollutants that is new—but our ability to understand their impact on the environment and our own long-term health is seriously lagging.
And, of course, what you don’t understand you can’t effectively regulate. In the United States, the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is updated periodically, requires utilities to test for 91 contaminants, but it was written 35 years ago. Big U.S. water utilities routinely find hundreds of unregulated chemicals in their water supplies, albeit in minuscule amounts. Water systems haven’t kept up with modern technology. They haven’t kept up with our ability to ask questions about what’s in our water, and to figure out what it might be doing to us and how best to neutralize it.
The amounts of most such substances are almost unimaginably tiny, the equivalent, as Snyder puts it, of a single grain of sand in an Olympic-size swimming pool. But many of the chemicals are what’s called “endocrine disruptors”—that is, in animals, and potentially in humans, they have the ability to act like hormones. The very nature of hormones is that a tiny amount can have a significant impact.
The superficially easy solution is simply to filter the substances out of the water. And in purely technical terms, we can of course filter our tap water to whatever level of cleanliness we desire. But to take out substances that appear only in the parts-per-billion and parts-per-trillion range would, with current technology, double or triple or quadruple the cost of cleaning the water. It would dramatically increase the power required (“we don’t have enough power plants in the country to do that,” says Snyder). And it would be premature, if not foolish, on at least two counts. First, 95 percent of the water that utilities provide isn’t used for drinking or cooking, it’s used to flush the toilet, fill the bathtub, and water the lawn. That water doesn’t need to be ultra-purified. Second, we don’t actually know which substances are hurting us, so we’d be spending enormous amounts of scarce money on a public health effort that might not, in the end, improve public health.
For the moment, that kind of purity should be reserved for drinking water, and the way to achieve it is to filter the water you actually drink—at the tap.
That doesn’t require any technological breakthrough. The most ordinary of water filters, an activated-charcoal filter like those found in Brita pitchers, PUR faucet attachments, or the cartridges built into refrigerators, “are incredible at taking this stuff out,” says Snyder. “Almost anything in the water binds to the charcoal—the chemicals, the pharmaceuticals, the disinfection byproducts.” For anyone worried about the quality of his or her tap water, the filters offer an easy and inexpensive margin of reassurance. The only issue, says Snyder, is how long the filters last. They should be replaced every couple months, because their effectiveness fades.
But a Brita pitcher isn’t any way to manage the micropollutants in the long term. Understanding them, and finding a way of explaining their impact to people without scientific training, is one of the critical issues of water policy in the next decade. More and more we will want to reuse our wastewater, because as water scarcity grows, the wastewater that utilities already have will be one of our easiest and least expensive “sources” of water. But that wastewater is precisely where the micropollutants turn up first.
So if we’re going to reuse wastewater successfully—whether as gray water for things like irrigating athletic fields and golf courses, or as a source of fresh drinking water—we need to understand how clean it has to be, to know how to clean it, and to be able to make people comfortable that it is, in fact, clean.
Shane Snyder, whose institute is doing exactly the kind of research the water industry needs, says that rather than try to filter drinking water, it may be much smarter to find ways of removing the pollutants from our wastewater before we release it back into lakes, rivers, and aquifers. The micropollutants, he points out, are not just an issue for people. “It’s not a drinking water problem,” he says, “it’s an environmental problem. Let’s take it out of the wastewater, not just because of human health, but because of environmental health.”
An aggressive and open effort to understand what’s in the water in developed countries, where it’s coming from, and what impact it has, should not only bolster confidence in tap water, it should make possible all kinds of innovative water reuse without getting tangled in the debate Toowoomba put itself through. The very concern that Americans express about the safety of their drinking water should mean there is support for making sure water supplies are well taken care of.37
Even Toowoomba’s Mayor Di started out skeptical about drinking recycled wastewater. But she gave herself the time, along with hands-on visits to actual water purification facilities, to get comfortable with purified wastewater. What she didn’t do was give her constituents the same space to get comfortable—she wanted them to take the water she was giving them on faith.
Water itself doesn’t respond much to the power of belief. “In the last eleven years, we have not had a lot of rain,” says Rosemary Morley. “The city also hasn’t run dry of water. Droughts do end, and when the drought breaks, our reservoirs will fill up, and we’ll be fine.”
“One of these days,” says Clive Berghofer, “it will rain.”
Actually, maybe not.
Three years after the referendum, there had still been almost no rain, and Toowoomba’s reservoirs had fallen to 90 percent empty. The three reservoirs looked stark, scary. A vast reservoir that is 90 percent empty is kind of a spooky place—like standing on the side of an empty Olympic-size swimming pool. Vaguely ominous, even dangerous. An empty reservoir is so big, and so empty, that your immediate thought is, That’s not right— they should fill that thing up.
In fact, after years of uncertainty, in late 2009, Toowoomba was rescued. Twelve hours a day, from dawn to dusk, construction crews furiously laid twenty-four miles of pipe that now connect Toowoomba’s independent water system to the sprawling water grid of the state of Queensland— the water system that supplies Brisbane and its surrounding communities.
To get the pipeline in the ground on a tightly orchestrated nine-month schedule, five construction gangs worked on separate stretches simultaneously. Each segment of the Toowoomba pipeline is a fat black steel pipe forty-four feet long—longer than a typical American yellow school bus. The pipes are lined with a thin layer of black concrete, and the interior diameter is thirty inches. There are 3,600 segments of pipe to be buried and sealed—beneath fields, through the heart of a small town, along a gorge. The pipeline goes dramatically uphill—rising 754 feet from Queensland’s Wivenhoe reservoir to Toowoomba’s Cressbrook reservoir, the height of a sixty-story skyscraper. It’s not a trivial push. When the pumps kick on each day, the water sitting in the twenty-four miles of pipeline angled up the mountains weighs 38 million pounds. (The grade is significant enough that the pipe enters Cressbrook at the base of the dam, not over the side, to save thirty meters of elevation.)
The pipeline is designed to pump 14,000 megaliters of water up to Toowoomba each year, enough water just from the pipeline to supply all of Toowoomba’s present needs. With additional pumps, it could supply 18,000 megaliters.
The pipeline is costing A$187 million (US$156 million)—about A$8 million per mile, with Toowoomba’s water customers paying A$75 million. But the advanced water purification plant voters rejected would have cost A$68 million. And because the feds and the state would have helped pay for the recycling system, Toowoomba would only have had to foot one-third of that cost—A$23 million. So the most immediate cost of the referendum is A$52 million in extra costs to sustain the flow of water to Toowoomba. That comes to A$433 per person in Toowoomba—it’s why the city’s water bills will double over the next several years.
A pipeline from Wivenhoe was one of the ideas considered before Flanagan and the council settled on recycling. It was rejected, in part, on the basis of cost.
Sending the water from Wivenhoe to Cressbrook requires significant amounts of energy. Each day, electric pumps will push 60 million pounds of water up the mountains, equivalent to pushing a train loaded with 400,000 people up the hill. The electricity is expensive enough that the pumps will operate mostly overnight, to take advantage of off-peak utility rates.38
So the Toowoomba pipeline has two costs that would have been smaller with the recycling plant: the electricity to move all that water is a new operational cost that is permanently added to water bills, on top of the one-time capital cost (the recycling plant would have required electricity too, one-third less than the pipeline).
Finally, in an astonishing twist that no one could have imagined before Toowoomba’s tumult of the last four years, the new pipeline will inevitably bring to Toowoomba’s water mains, and Toowoomba’s kitchen faucets, exactly what it has fought to avoid: purified, recycled wastewater. While Toowoomba was debating whether to build an advanced wastewater treatment plant, the big water system on the coast, the South East Queensland Water Grid, spent A$2.5 billion to build three such facilities; together they can purify ten times as much water each day as Toowoomba uses. Those three plants are up and running, using the technology Kev Flanagan proposed, and the highly purified water they produce is being supplied to power plants. The utility Seqwater isn’t using any of it in drinking water reservoirs yet. But Seqwater has been very clear: When Wivenhoe Dam falls below 40 percent full, the recycled water will be piped to Wivenhoe, and from there to Toowoomba.
Meanwhile, Kev Flanagan quietly went ahead and built a new water purification plant anyway, so he could sell Toowoomba’s purified wastewater to the coal mine that originally inspired the idea to use the water closer to home. The new plant doesn’t use reverse osmosis, so it doesn’t produce water of drinking-water quality. But Toowoomba has a twenty-eight-year contract to supply the coal mine with purified water. Right now, the coal mine is buying A$8.5 million worth of wastewater from Toowoomba a year, so after repaying the A$14 million cost of the plant, that contract will yield at least A$200 million for Toowoomba.
“It’s very nice. It gives me a bit of satisfaction,” says Flanagan. “I’m not the dumbest engineer around.”
Mayor Di Thorley served out the remaining twenty months of her second term after the referendum, then bought a tavern in Tasmania, Australia’s island state, 1,400 miles from Toowoomba. The first big newspaper story about Thorley running her own pub opens with her breaking up a fight between two male patrons.
Snow Manners, the cerebral opponent who ran Rosemary Morley’s first public meeting about recycled wastewater, says that, upon reflection, he thinks he could have successfully persuaded Toowoomba to accept the idea—that he could have done what Mayor Di and Kev Flanagan failed to do in the face of his opposition.
“I could have sold it,” Manners says, with slight smile. “I would have used a gradual process. I would have put it in fountains and had goldfish swimming in it, with water lilies.”
7
Who Stopped the Rain?
I think the days of big water are gone.
—Laurie Arthur, Australian rice farmer
LAURIE ARTHUR jounces around his farm in a white 2006 4WD Toyota Land Cruiser that is dusted with grit to the windowsills, equally dirty inside and outside, the way only farm vehicles get dirty. Across the front end is bolted a grille to reduce the danger from hitting kangaroos. Arthur killed one the previous night, with his wife, Deb, in the passenger seat, on the way to a Mother’s Day dinner. During the workday, three dogs keep Arthur company from the rear cargo compartment. Three antennas wang from the front bumper—he’s got radios and a dash-mounted cell phone, to be able to stay in touch across a lot of distance. A box of rifle cartridges is jammed in a crevice of the front seat (the guns are locked up in the house); a lot of tools are in easy reach across the backseat.
Arthur is a rice farmer in the basin of Australia’s Murray River, with 10,450 acres of fields in the wide-open rangeland called the Riverina. At the extremes, he has fields 40 kilometers (25 miles) from each other; his nearest neighbor, who also happens to be his best friend, is fellow farmer Nick Lowing, 20 kilometers down the road; the Thai restaurant where he, Deb, and their daughter Lauren had Mother’s Day dinner is 70 kilometers from home; the nearest movie theater is 160 kilometers away.
Arthur’s farm neighborhood is crisscrossed with well-maintained dirt roads, and Arthur cruises at 100 kilometers per hour (just over 60 mph), often flanked by squads of kangaroos, who move with the ease of dolphins alongside a boat.
Arthur points out a wedge-tailed eagle, gliding low above the scrub. Native to Australia, the black-feathered raptors are as big as bald eagles, the largest birds of prey in Australia, and are often seen feasting on road-killed kangaroo. Farmers in the Murray basin grumble about them, because they have a reputation for taking young lambs. Arthur is more tolerant.
“I think they just get the lambs that are dead already,” says Arthur. “Sure, they do kill the occasional lamb that’s not dead. But they do it with such style.”
Although the little town of Moulamein, near Arthur’s farm, is about 150 miles from the edge of the true Australian outback, and all this land has been ranched and farmed for 150 years, this is the Australian bush. The land is arid, flat, and empty; it is no place to underestimate nature.
No one knows that better than Laurie Arthur.
Normally, he’s a rice farmer on land that is fertile but dry. His water comes from irrigation canals, supplied by the Murray River.
Now he’s trying to be a rice farmer in the Big Dry. The irrigation canals are dry, the Murray River itself is dry.
We wheel into an empty brown field called Jurassic Park—Australian farmers call their fields “paddocks,” and Arthur names all his paddocks. “The previous farmer wasn’t that attentive,” he says. “His excavator broke down here, and when we bought this, it was a jungle rather than a well-tended field. So we called it Jurassic Park.”
