Boil Water Notice for City of Houston

https://mailchi.mp/houstontx/boilwaternoticenovember2022

by mfiguiere • 4 years ago

36 29 4 years ago

mailchi.mp

giardini• 4 years ago

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2022/11/28/boil-wat...

cuteboy192• 4 years ago

So why is water unsafe below a certain pressure?

phnofive• 4 years ago

Water grids are designed to flow in only one direction; a drop in pressure allows potentially contaminated water to flow backward into the pipes, e.g., from a crack that allows a small amount of water out into the surrounding soil.

cuteboy192• 4 years ago

I feel like no matter the pressure, if there is a crack and a dirty puddle outside then it will always contaminate the water

2Gkashmiri2• 4 years ago

ooooo....

in new delhi, india back 7-9 years ago i was living in a pretty garbage area by my normal standards and one of the things we had to be careful about was when to use the water pump. do it during off time and the water from the tap would be green, it would stink and taste like vomit. that was a really really terrible experience and bad living standards. unless you are poor and cannot afford any other reasonably okay living place, one should not be living in those conditions.

dalbasal• 4 years ago

So... some ignorant questions?

(1) Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc. IE, is there such a thing as nonpotable water that's still OK for domestic use?

(2) If there is such a thing, are there major cost or environmental savings to be had from running a nonpotable water grid?

My thinking is that treating water at home is not that hard. You can easily have one filtered tap at home. It's cheap and easy to retrofit.

Is it not overkill/inefficient to run a drinking water grid when 99% of the water waters lawns and washes dishes?

rsynnott• 4 years ago

My thinking is that treating water at home is not that hard. You can easily have one filtered tap at home. It's cheap and easy to retrofit.

I mean, define 'filtered'. A brita-type filter will do precisely nothing for most things that require a boil notice (nor will it do anything for most heavy metal contaminants etc).

In general, "filtered" taps primarily remove chlorine and calcium carbonate, mostly for taste reasons.

Doing actual water treatment at home is not going to be particularly economic or safe.

World177• 4 years ago

Water treatment at home isn’t difficult as long as it isn’t polluted with something bad like hydrocarbons. A distiller can be purchased for less than $100. There are many homes in Texas that are using heaters that aren’t heat pumps, so in the winter, it probably is economical if excluding the original purchase price. A reverse osmosis system can also be purchased for less than $500, but requires more maintenance.

lm28469• 4 years ago

A brita-type filter will do precisely nothing for most things that require a boil notice

Well, it might do something, give a nice warm and humid substrate for bacterias to develop

olliej3• 4 years ago

What about the reverse osmosis filters many homes have?

rippercushions• 4 years ago

1) There are many, many countries where tap water is not potable. Don't gargle with it when showering, and you'll be fine.

2) Assuming you're in a climate where this makes sense, the easiest source of non-potable water is to simply collect rainwater, so you don't really need a grid for this. In the other direction, use of "grey water" (domestic non-sewage wastewater) for purposes like irrigation is also increasingly common.

morelisp• 4 years ago

Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc.

Have you ever gone swimming in a natural body of water?

gumby2• 4 years ago

Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc. IE, is there such a thing as nonpotable water that's still OK for domestic use?

Certainly. As a kid in 60s/70s, when in India we washed, brushed teeth etc with tap water (were careful not to swallow any!) but only drank water that had been boiled or otherwise treated (the fetish for plastic bottles of water had thankfully not developed anywhere yet). This was visiting relatives, so it's not the case that our guts had adapted to the local intestinal flora.

I think there's an economy of scale of running a single pipe of potable water to each location rather than running (and maintaining) a dual system, which would have "leakage" (both the physical kind, which is normal, but would occur 2X, and the case of people accidentally drinking from the wrong pipe).

aperson_hello• 4 years ago

The big problem is that point of use treatment invariably misses people. People who don't realize their system broke, those who can't afford $200 for a new one or the extra $5/month in operating costs. The extra public health burden is way more costly than treating all the water. And heavy nonpotable water users are often using gray water or untreated well water anyway!

olliej3• 4 years ago

I wonder how long this will last? a boiled water requirement in response to a short term pressure loss seems more like a "lets be safe" rule than a "things are contaminated". When I was a kid we had a 3 week boiled water restriction due to a seagull getting trapped and dying inside a water tank.

devilbunny• 4 years ago

Bare minimum of three days after pressure is restored for microbial cultures to be considered negative.

nunez• 4 years ago

fyi: houston is a BIG metropolitan area, over 10k sq miles. this only affects parts of the city core.

Boil Water Notice for City of Houston

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