Sadly this is pretty common. Here are some nasty pictures from a recent one in greater Vancouver.

I’m a water engineer with a PhD, so not a tech nerd but definitely a nerd :) I came here mostly because I find the Reddit app annoying and the app I was using came here.

The Romans used lead as a sweetener…

Systems that were already using activated carbon or ion exchange for organics removal may have some treatment capacity, but otherwise the first systems specifically for treating drinking water are being designed and constructed now. There are contaminated sites that already have treatment or containment in place.

This is very interesting. Currently, most ion exchange systems that remove PFAS have to dispose of their brine as hazardous waste, which is very costly and doesn’t necessarily destroy PFAS - in Florida, for example, they inject the brine into a deep aquifer.

A lot of novel technologies target PFAS destruction in these concentrated waste streams, but often further concentration is required before you can effectively destroy PFAS with advanced oxidation processes. If they could use low-UV to destroy it without further concentration or additional chemicals (beside the salt already used to regenerate the resin), ion exchange would become a much better solution for treated PFAS contaminated water.

It’s “forever” in the environmental sense that they don’t break down naturally (or at least very, very slowly). That said, “forever chemicals” is more of a media buzzword than a term that scientists use.

Exactly my workflow, but I used R Markdown!

I wrote about half of my thesis in R Markdown using Git to backup my work. It’s fantastic because you can have your plots and statistics integrated directly into your paper and formatting in Markdown is much easier than straight up latex.

There are lots of things dissolved in our water that give it “flavour”, but the goal of all utilities is to minimize this as much as possible. Some water objectively tastes better than others, and a common segment of local drinking water conferences is a taste test. That said, for normal people usually the water they prefer is what their palette is used to. Someone who grew up drinking groundwater with very high alkalinity and pH will prefer that over surface water that is actually more “pure”. Similarly, if you normally drink water from a private well that you don’t add chlorine to, you likely dislike the taste of “city water”.

The common offenders for bad tasting water are excessive chlorine and some specific organic compounds. Both of these flavours can be removed using a granular activated carbon filter (e.g., a Britta), but you can actually remove the chlorine by just letting your water sit in the fridge for a while.

It’s not nothing, it’s just below the freezing point of water. Zero energy is zero Kelvin. This is also a bad take because Fahrenheit also goes negative. I suppose you should just start using Kelvin if that is your opinion.

Abolished is one way to put it… I suspect Louis had stronger words when it was his turn to meet Madame Guillotine.

Most toilet papers are fine, although some systems struggle with Costco’s stuff. Toilet paper is designed to break apart in water. That said, you shouldn’t flush any other products. Paper towels don’t break down the same way, and wipes will almost certainly cause damage, even if they are marketed as flushable!!

Math using janky excel spreadsheets, tell drafters what we want drawings to look like, but mostly a lot of reading and writing. The secret to engineering (at least in my area) is that communication skills are just as important as technical understanding.