S has HTF....Think You Have Enough Water on Hand? So Did Toledo

[Rick]

Holy Toledo. The entire region is without water!!!

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...ater/13505697/

[kyratshooter]

This is a toxic algae bloom and they can not even drink the water if they BOIL it!!

I am not certain if the level of filters I use are even adequate on this pollutant.

I saw coverage on the news last night and they had police guarding the water distribution points.

Long, long lines waiting for the 1 case per family allowance.

It appeared a hardship but everyone seemed to be staying calm and no general breakdown of the social order was occurring.

I thought that when they shut off the water everyone was supposed to go insane, riot, pillage and form a "Golden Horde" ??

[Grizz123]

The S seems to be flying everywhere at the moment

[LowKey]

Keep on pouring on the fertilizer (phosphorus.) Agriculture and residential use the main culprits.
Similar happened in the 70s and a cutback in phosphorus pollution cleared it up by the mid 80s according to one article I read. Actually that article was pretty funny because even though they just got done talking about recurring blooms in the 70s, they had to use the last sentence of the article to say that Global Warming may increase the likelihood of higher levels of runoff and warmer water temps. No. Higher levels of runoff are due to using to darn much fertilizer on dead earth big ag farms.

[alaskabushman]

Wow, sounds rough! Yet another reason to keep preparing for the unknown. I wonder how many preppers live in the area and are glad they have a couple 55 gallon drums of water on hand. My town has no water service so everyone is self sufficient. I have a 1500 gallon tank that is fed by a spring, which then gravity flows to my house.

[crashdive123]

Drinking water has long been one of my concerns, and therefor something I prep for. On a normal day I have just over 100 gallons of purified drinking water available (not counting sources of water I could make drinkable). If there is an event on the horizon that gives me concern I will increase that volume by quite a bit. Not all of my drinking water is stored in one location to hopefully negate a localized loss of "stuff".

[Batch]

Crash, how do you store your water?

[ElevenBravo]

Zonkers... thats, scarey!

EB

[crashdive123]

Crash, how do you store your water?

I use 8 and 7 gallon water containers (blue cubes and green jerry cans). Additionally we keep at quite a few single gallons and cases of 20 ounce bottles on hand for normal use.

This does not count rain barrels for watering and flushing.

[knife nut]

Crash, do you treat your stored water? The water you would use for drinking.

[kyratshooter]

I have been reading up on this.

Not just the situation today but the background.

There is more too this than meets the eye at first glance.

This happens in Lake Erie EVERY YEAR and the filtration plants have always been able to control the water quality.

This is not even the worst algae bloom they have dealt with. It is only the 4th largest since 2000.

The treatment for the blue-green algae is ozone and carbon filtering. They have the machinery in place and deal with this specific issue every year.

Did somebody at the plant drop the ball? Since there are several treatment plants involved I can not see all of them screwing up at the same time.

OR

They got a shipment of substandard chemicals from their "lowest bid supplier" at the treatment plants which failed to remove the toxins from the water when used at the recommended levels.

They had the exact same problem last fall and were in a "do not use" situation for 2 days and have been on alert every since.

[Rick]

We have had several on here talk about their lake or pond being their reserve water. If an event like this to occur to them their reserve would be gone. It has given me pause to think since my 50 gallon water heater has always been part of my reserve. I now have to consider that gone and can only look to those containers I have stored for water.

[crashdive123]

Crash, do you treat your stored water? The water you would use for drinking.

I do not, but I rotate it regularly. The 8 and 7 gallon containers are filled with tap water which is already chlorinated.

[hunter63]

I would have to go look up the number of chorine drops per gal, but my stored bulk water is treated.....50 gal give or take.
They get changed out spring and fall.
http://water.epa.gov/drink/emerprep/...sinfection.cfm

Water heater water I consider as flushing water, but do have a sawdust toilet ready.

Basement sump pump may be also a source....doesn't run a lot, so who know what's in it.

[kyratshooter]

They have now lifted the ban and the Toledo water is safe to drink. The claim is that the toxins have "dissipated" to below safe levels.

How do they dissipate? Are they simply diluted or do they lose potency over time?

Does chlorine have no affect of these particular organisms?

Or is it the toxins produced by the organisms that get you?

You can treat for the organisms and kill them, but still have the poisons they produced before you killed them to worry about.

The statements said boiling just concentrated the toxins, the potency of which was otherwise unaffected by heat.

That was a real shock to me, since I have always been trained that boiling is the preferred method of purification when all else is suspect.

[alaskabushman]

So glad I live in a rainforest! If all else fails, set out a bucket.

[LowKey]

And hope your rain isn't radioactive...

It isn't the organism itself. You can kill that all day long, but the toxin it produces is still in the water. Kinda like boiling water taken downstream from a PCB dump. You might kill the girardia in the water, but you are concentrating the PCBs.

This has been happening in Lake Erie since the early 60s if not before. Back then they blamed sewage disposal into the lake. Today it is run-off from farms as far away as southern Michigan and Illinois, at the headwaters of the main river that feeds into the west end of Lake Erie. I see they throw in a little Global Warming for effect too.

They are saying winds caused the algal bloom to drift over the water intakes this time, rather than blowing it out mid lake where it doesn't usually affect the water supply quite so badly.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/algae...val-1407183729

[Wildthang]

Well I live east of Toledo about 12 miles east and 2 miles from lake Erie. I have a well so I was not worried in the least about the water at my place. I even drove over to Maumee Bay and looked at the green stuff at the beach. And what do a know, there were 2 little kids down there playing in the water and was even splashing around in the green stuff. I had to wonder where their parents were!
One thing the news didn't mention is that the Ottowa river feeds into the bay on the north west corner, which comes down from Detroit. This river has been polluted for as long as anyone can remember around here and has fecal matter, all kinds of bacteria, and chemicals. Also there are thousands of geese that use the east bay for home and they fill the water with poop!
Then you have the crop runoff, so there are a lot of reasons the green stuff blooms. Funny thing, the town of Oregon just east of Toledo gets its water from the same lake, and there was no problem with that water, and they were filling the tanks in Oregon to take to Toledo. The water treatment plant for Oregon is only 3 miles from my house and the intake is about a mile out in the lake, and airiel photos showed the algie bloom around that intake!
So why wasn't there a concern with the Oregon water system? Something is funny with this entire scenario!

[Power Giant]

I don't mess around with the water thing, either. I have a 200' drilled well through granite the whole way. The source is at the 180' level, but the static level of the water is at around 35'. There is a DC submersible pump that I have dangled in there to about the 50' level, but I occasionally move it up or down, depending on the static level. There is a brand new pump on the shelf. The DC pump is powered either by the battery bank, or the solar panels. It pumps into a cistern inside the house, to prevent it from freezing. Recently, a hellacious wind storm blew through here, knocking out the grid power for about a week. We never even knew about it until later. The locals without generator backup were without water. Maybe a case of "ignorance is bliss"? (me being the ignorant one?)

[diddap]

wells can go bad, too, you know. there's nothing guaranteed about them as a water source.