Summer Session Kansan
Page 5
Scientists Work to Tap Oceans; Goal: Method to Remove Salt
(Eitor's Note: Following is the second of three dispatches on what is being done to conserve water in the United States.)
NEW YORK—(UPI)Many communities in the United States, both urban and rural, have recurrent severe shortages of fresh water. Some have chronic shortages. Yet the country as a whole has an abundance of fresh water, scientists say.
Dramatic figures are published from time to time about how our present population of around 180 million uses several hundred gallons of water per person every day in various ways, compared with four or five gallons a century ago.
What is lost sight of is that we don't consume most of this water by using it. Of the 270 billion gallons a day used in 1960, only 61 billion gallons was consumed. The rest was returned to streams, lakes or underground sources for re-use.
We have fresh water enough to last the country for several thousand years, even at rapidly increasing rates of use, according to the experts.
By Leroy Pope United Press International
NEVERTHELESS there are se-
vere problems.
And we are learning how to increase the gap between "use" of water and "consumption" of water.
One is that it is in precisely the regions where water is scarcest, that the largest proportion of water "used" is actually "consumed"一the arid and semi-arid farming regions of the west. Irrigation is the great consumer of water and irrigation has to be practiced in those regions.
Another problem is that the water distribution systems of many of our big cities cannot deliver water fast enough to meet greatly increased demands in summer. Their reservoir systems are not adequate either. The American Waterworks Association estimates that American cities and towns need to spend a minimum of $5 billion to bring their water plants and pipe systems up to date.
An even bigger problem is pollution. There are many kinds of pollution—but two main kinds, bacterial and chemical.
The bacterial pollution comes from man-the concentrations in small areas of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people whose presence creates sewage.
Curiously and quite contrary to what most people imagine, the industrial or chemical pollution is by far the more serious problem.
THE CONTAMINATION of water by sewage is relatively cheap and easy to overcome. At every meeting of the American Waterworks Association and at many other scientific meetings, papers are read showing how easy it is. In plaint fact, water containing sewage in anything but enormous quantities is purified more or less naturally by letting it travel through soil or diluting it in the streams of mighty rivers.
Where the sewage is of huge quantity, as from a city, it must be treated with chemicals before it is returned to the soil or to a stream.
But bacteriologists and hydrologists constantly argue that cleaning up water containing sewage is so easy and so safe that those cities which, because of their location, are actually short of fresh water, probably could solve their problems by purifying water containing sewage and re-using it at once.
Of course many people are horrified at such an idea. They refuse to believe the sewage water can be so quickly and thoroughly purified. Yet it is being done every day on a big scale.
Tuesday, June 25, 1963
Sewage effluent from the city of Baltimore, for example, is purified and piped to Bethlehem Steel's huge industrial installations at Sparrows Point, Md. There are many other
such operations in the country on a smaller scale.
The chemical pollution of water is far more difficult to deal with. It can be so difficult that many communities have to outlaw certain industries to protect their water supplies.
FOR EXAMPLE, the laundry industry is one of the biggest users of water and the new detergents it employs are extremely hard to deal with when the foamy water is discharged into small streams or lakes. Yet new filtering and treatment processes make it possible to reuse the same water with a loss of only about 5 percent a day to evaporation. Some engineers predict the laundry industry will soon be using re-circulated water almost entirely.
Yet chemists and scientists are doing much in this field too. Industrial processes are changed to prevent pollution. More significant, in many industries, the polluted water can be re-used over and over with a filtering and chemical process right in the plant.
In Pomono, Calif., water from the city's sewage treatment plant is repiped for use in watering lawns and has been since 1929.
Many hydrologists are interested in methods of "recharging" underground water bearing sands by direct injection of waste waters from sewage treatment plants to save the water. But much more needs to be learned about the risks involved in this. Particularly, it is not known how far through the water-bearing sands pathogenic viruses can travel.
Bacteria can travel only about 250 feet through even porous water bearing sandy soil, it appears.
(Next—Desalting Sea Water.)
Outdoor Sport Ends
ATLANTA — (UPI) — The State Game and Fish Commission announced it intends to enforce rigidly a new regulation prohibiting operation of boats by drunks.
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