Everybody likes to show of their new toys and Jon Jarvis with West Virginia American Water was no different. A few years ago, the local water company invested in ultraviolet technology.
Near the end of the water treatment process, the water is blasted with ultraviolet radiation, similar to light from the sun. Among other things, this radiation kills cryptosporidium, a parasite that can live in water.
People and animals drink the water, pick up an infection from the parasite, and then get diarrhea.
Depending on your overall health, the illness can linger.
“Chlorine will sanitize a lot of things, but doesn’t do much against cryptosporidium,†Jarvis said. “Cryptosporidium has a hard shell. The chlorine doesn’t get through.â€
But ultraviolet radiation does.
“It cracks its shell,†he said, sounding satisfied.
The only good bug is a dead bug.
As cool as this sounded, Jarvis said he couldn’t show it to me. The ultraviolet bulbs were contained in great, dark grey shielding. Water passed in front of the bulbs. You couldn’t look at them when they were turned on.
“If the radiation hit your skin, it would burn it,†he said. “If you looked at it, it would blind you.â€
I stared out into the room of thick pipes. The whole water treatment plant was quieter than I expected, but maybe more dangerous.
As my month spent learning about water began to wind down, I reached out to West Virginia American Water. I was still thinking about the Berkeley Springs Water Tasting contest — and also about the recent 10-year anniversary of the ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä water crisis.
In 2014, a mining industry chemical leaked into the Elk River, not far from the water company’s intake. Locals complained of a strange, sweet smell in the air by late morning and by nightfall, a state of emergency had been declared.
The tainted water closed schools and businesses and ruined the Kanawha Valley’s appetite for black licorice for at least a generation.
Eventually, the water was cleared for human consumption, but it was a long time before many of us were ready to trust it again.
I’d wondered some about the water I routinely drink, which generally seemed fine to me. It was good enough to cook with, good enough to wash dishes with and didn’t taste bad, even if I occasionally forgot to refill the Brita water pitcher in my refrigerator and drank it straight from the tap.
The local water, I thought, tasted at least as good as the water I grew up with in Pearisburg, Virginia, which wasn’t bad either.
Actually, my sisters and I used to drink from the faucet in the bathroom because we thought it tasted better.
Sitting and talking to Rob Burton, the president of West Virginia American Water, I told him the water I knew was pretty good and better than the stuff I remembered drinking at my grandparents’ home in Flint, Michigan.
This was decades before Flint became a poster child for bad water in America.
“It was just kind of foul,†I said. “I think there was sulfur in it. It smelled and tasted weird. I remember that we drank a lot of pop when we went to visit. Everybody seemed to be drinking lots of Faygo red soda.â€
Burton laughed.
He said he was from Kentucky. His family used well water that had iron in it. He said they had a filter, but rust stains were still a problem. And, of course, it tasted a little like iron.
I told him that I thought my granny’s farmhouse in eastern Virginia probably had that. I remembered the yellow stains on the porcelain.
“And funny thing is with the harder water, the water with the heavy minerals, is that it doesn’t make a lot of suds when you add soap.†he said. “So, if you ever travel someplace and they don’t have a very good water softening system, you’ll see that if they have hard water.â€
I asked him whether water companies had to clear more pollutants from drinking sources than they used to. I figured they did. More people would tend to mean more messes and humanity is clever. We’re always inventing new and exciting ways to harm ourselves.
But Burton said not really.
He said the Environmental Protection Agency has tighter restrictions on what can be put into waterways than they did 30 or 40 years ago.
Accidents do happen. A diesel truck can pop a wheel and roll down a hill, dumping hundreds or thousands of gallons of fuel into the water. A vat of stored chemicals can leak.
There’s also influence from agricultural businesses. Fertilizers and pesticides make their way into waterways, though Burton said that the pressure on industry was to reduce chemical contamination.
He also agreed that sometimes we find out about things that we didn’t know we needed to worry about, like the forever chemicals called PFAS.
They’ve been used in manufacturing for decades, but studies indicate that a buildup of some of these chemicals in the human body can cause a whole range of health problems.
“But if you look at the state of rivers over the course of my entire career, I’d say that the water is about the same,†he said. “Some of the rivers are probably cleaner than they were 20 or 30 years ago.â€
Of course, some of the cleanliness of water is visual.
Burton said each water treatment plant is built to the needs of the water it treats. So, no two water treatment facilities are going to be exactly alike. A facility that treats water from a river will be different than a facility that treats water from a lake or from an underground source.
Each system has its own set of issues.
The Elk River is muddy and occasionally choked with debris, which creates a high level of turbidity.
That’s a weird word that’s defined as “the quality of being cloudy, opaque, or thick with suspended matter.â€
“When we get a big rain, you’ll really see the turbidity go up,†Jarvis told me as we walked the grounds. “We get so much run-off from the mountains.â€
Before the treatment plant can sanitize the water and make it safe for drinking, they have to make the water look like something someone would want to drink.
Raw river water goes through several filters before it ever gets to ultraviolet radiation and chlorine.
In late fall, after the leaves have fallen and with dirt coming down from the hills, turbidity can be measured in thousands of units.
Regulations say that the water leaving the facility has to be below one Nephelometric Turbidity Units (NTU).
Decades ago, regulations would allow up to five NTUs.
The technology to clean water has improved.
As Jarvis showed me around, he explained that the water going in and out was tested several times over the course of the day. Pollutants and toxins usually showed up in the samples, which were matched against vast databases.
Advisories were issued if problems arose.
I asked him about taste. Bottled water companies will sometimes tinker with the flavor of water, adding or balancing minerals to get a different flavor.
Burton said they didn’t do that with the municipal water. They weren’t looking to make the water taste a particular way. They just wanted it clean and palatable.
Burton said the most regular complaint about the water was the smell of chorine, which could be stronger depending on where a customer was located in the distribution system.
There wasn’t a lot anyone could do about that. Chlorine, he said, was a sanitizing agent and required.
Burton said the way to remove the smell was to aerate the water. He described pouring a glass of water back and forth between two glasses.
“The main thing, I think, is we’re always trying to be better,†he said.
