SAFE DRINKING WATER: A BEGINNING

There is an old saying that "you never miss the water until the well goes dry." In the United States, we take for granted today that when we open a faucet safe drinking water will flow. However, until about one hundred years ago, that was not always the case.

In the Winter 2010 issue of The Bent, a magazine of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, of which I am a member, Trudy E. Bell offers insight into the origins of modern water purification. (Bell, "Engineers and Enteric Fever:Designing Against Disease," p. 13, et seq.)

Typhoid fever was prevalent in this country in the late 1800s. In 1908, Whipple, a consulting engineer, wrote that "infected water probably caused more typhoid fever than all other causes combined." (Bell, p.14) During 1890-92, approximately 4,500 people died from typhoid fever in Chicago, and the number of cases is estimated at approximately 50,000. Comparable rates were experienced in several other cities. (Bell, p.15)

Typhoid fever is caused by a bacteria of the salmonella family. It results from human ingestion of fecal matter from infected humans. At the time, public water supplies were taken without treatment from lakes and streams to which raw sewage was discharged.

Two engineering discoveries in that period enabled purification of drinking water: first the discovery that intermittent slow-sand filtration both clarified water and removed 99% of bacteria in water. The second discovery, a few short years later, was chlorination, a process to disinfect water quickly adopted by public water supplies and still commonly in use today. (Bell, p. 15-17)

After these discoveries, Whipple wrote in 1921 that "the typhoid fever death rates [in cities] are becoming so low that they can no longer be regarded as sufficient to measure the healthfulness of a water supply." (Bell, p.17)

Today, water utility systems, as well as wastewater utility systems, use a variety of filtration and disinfection methodologies to treat drinking water and discharges of wastewater. Further, Congress has intervened with two major legislative actions to facilitate safe water: the federal Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C. 300f, et seq.) and the federal Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. 1251, et seq.) These statutes impose legal compliance requirements on water and wastewater utility systems respectively.