Every once in a while you will hear about a community receiving a ‘boil water’ order from its local health officials. Most often these orders get issued because some event, usually an accident of some sort, has resulted in the introduction of unwanted bacteria into the drinking water supply. A water main breaking or traces of excrement from an animal (such as a beaver… see Beaver Fever) managing to get through municipal water treatment systems serve as examples of such events.

Basically speaking, State and Federal governments require that notices go out to anyone possibly affected by compromised water quality standards. These notices typically advise people to boil their drinking (tap) water for at least one full minute before consuming it in any form. One minute of rolling boil should kill off any potentially harmful bacteria.

Affected water consumption uses include brushing of teeth, water used to prepare food, water used for drinking, water used to make ice, water used to clean surfaces where food gets prepared, water used for gargling, water used to clean one’s face, etc.

As a general rule, any water that could find its way into the mouth (directly or indirectly) should get boiled before use.

The agency issuing the ‘water boil order’ will perform routine testing on the affected water supply and notify people when a sufficient number of water tests show that no more harmful bacteria exist in the water.

One should always remember that no government body will provide notification that the water feeding a private wells contains harmful bacteria and that 100% of the responsibility for the purity and safety of well water rests with well owners. Therefore health officials suggest well owners test the levels of bacteria in their water periodically.

Save a few dollars on bacteria in water testing when you purchase WaterWorks Bacteria Check by the case at Filter Water.

While the idea of a shower head changing colors in response to a change in water temperature sounds kind of amusing, we think people ought to consider installing a shower head that will improve the quality of their shower water rather than the lighting in their shower stall.

Again, we find the following ‘technology’ rather cool… but somewhat superficial in the grand scheme of things.

You got your skin burned in the hot shower due to a mistake of turning up the temperature control too high as you couldn’t see the reading on the control knob clearly. So, you’ll need a better gadget that would tell you in a more prominent way that the water is burning hot. Here comes a color changing illuminated shower head, which changes color according to the temperature of the water. When you’re increasing the temperature of the water, the color will change from white when it’s cold, to blue, then purple and finally the hot red.

The color changing illuminated shower head features a temperature-sensitive color-changing LED. The shower head needs neither battery nor external power to run. All it depends is the water that runs through it. Installation is easy, just unscrew your current shower head and screw this one on. ( source )

Really cool looking shower colors may do a lot to set the mood for some things, like, um… Well, never mind that. Let’s just focus on the idea that shower heads designed to remove chlorine, excessive water hardness, or other water impurities make a lot of sense.

Note: WaterSafe makes a test kit to test both chlorine and water hardness. Details here.

We don’t know anyone that would LIKE the idea of drinking water containing human waste… except those two girls from that nasty ‘2 girls, 1 cup’ viral video that circulated for a while. Nasty. Just plain nasty.

At any rate, people installing a new well should make sure to place it no less than 100 feet from the nearest septic tank and/or septic system. See below.

Most Star Valley residents get their water from a well, flush their toilets into to a septic system and have never tested their groundwater.

That’s a potentially toxic combination, especially if a septic system is within 100 feet of a well or starts to leak. In that case, it could deposit waterborne pathogens and fecal matter into the groundwater.

Because residents are not required to test their well water, “they could be drinking themselves to death and not even know it,” said Vern Leis, chairman of the Water and Sewer Commission. ( source )

Homeowners have sole responsibility for the quality of the water coming from their wells and should maintain an active regimen of well water testing in addition to having their water checked by a certified water testing laboratory at least once a year and definitely after unusually heavy rains, periods of drought, or whenever some other event, natural or caused by mankind, may have affected the source of your drinking water.

China makes the news once more, and this time it looks like some public officials may wind up in a lot of trouble with the Chinese Ministry of Health if they don’t straighten up and fly right when it comes to telling the truth about the number of H1N1 cases and H1N1 related fatalities in their province.

BEIJING — China’s health ministry ordered accurate reporting of the spread of H1N1 influenza and threatened to punish officials who conceal cases of the virus after a prominent medical expert raised doubts about the true number of deaths reported to date.

In a statement posted late Thursday on the Ministry of Health’s Web site, spokesman Deng Haihua reiterated the need for local health departments to ensure timely reporting of H1N1 cases, and welcomed the media and the public to supervise and discuss the ministry’s work in fighting H1N1. Mr. Deng said that concealment, underreporting, or delays in transmitting information about the spread of the illness would be subject to punishment.

Earlier Thursday, state-run media in the southern province of Guangdong reported that Dr. Zhong Nanshan had voiced suspicions about the low number of reported fatalities from H1N1. Dr. Zhong, director of the Institute of Respiratory Diseases in Guangzhou, is best known for speaking out in 2003 against official reports that initially covered up the extent of the SARS epidemic.

“I basically don’t believe the current reported number of nationwide H1N1 deaths,” he was quoted as saying by the Guangzhou Daily. Dr. Zhong said he believed that some regions had concealed reports of H1N1 deaths to create the impression that they had been successful in their local prevention efforts, according to the report.

Since mainland China reported its first H1N1 death in early October, there have been only 53 deaths reported out of nearly 70,000 confirmed cases. According to the World Health Organization, the world-wide mortality rate for H1N1 has been four deaths per 1,000 cases of illness, a ratio that was repeated by China’s Ministry of Health when it warned of the threat posed by H1N1 a few weeks ago. ( source )

While they have not, to our knowledge, found any cases of H1N1 traveling from person to person via drinking water, that does not mean anyone should let their guard down when it comes to water quality testing or purification. Diligent use of available water testing and water disinfecting methods may not play an active role in stopping the spread of the H1N1 virus, that we know of right now, but it can help prevent a whole host of other illnesses.

One place where proper use of sanitizing and disinfecting REALLY matters… childcare facilities and daycare centers. Children know nothing about how germs and bacteria spread and often leave mucous, saliva or other bodily secretions on commonly touched surfaces such as toys, doorknobs, furniture, etc. They mean no harm and don’t do things like that intentionally, but it happens.

For that reason health officials suggest, and have mandated in some states, that operators of childcare and daycare centers have their staff check the chlorine levels in their sanitizing and disinfecting solutions daily. Think of it this way: What good would it do to wipe down a contaminated surface with a cleaning solution incapable of properly disinfecting or sanitizing?

Anyone who knows the authors of Water Testing Blog knows how much they love to drink beer… so it ought to come as no shock that an article involving a brewery AND pristine spring water would catch their attention.

St. Paul, Minn. — Long before glaciers rolled through Minnesota, a massive pool of water circulated throughout the Twin Cities, and soon, residents will be able to line up at a well in St. Paul, and fill up their jugs with the water that experts say is about 30,000 years old.

“When you think about it, the woolly mammoths were drinking that water, potentially,” said Michael Convery, a hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Health. ( source )

We have always believed that better beer would come from better water and now even though the water won’t get put to use as a beer ingredient, some folks in Minnesota will certainly have some fine tasting water — unless the woolly mammoths did a lot of backwashing! Ha ha. Gross.

The brewery will have to test the water for all sorts of things before selling it to the public so woolly mammoth backwash ought not cause any health issues… but what about the water coming from YOUR well, huh?

Recently an article in a Pennsylvania newspaper credited New York City with knowing a very interesting ‘fact’… and apparently that ‘fact’ warrants attention on both sides of the NY/PA border.

New York City has one thing right: We are what we eat and drink, and the water used in Marcellus Shale gas drilling is not sounding very appetizing.

In a startling finding this week, radioactive material was discovered in the wastewater samples analyzed by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.

More testing is sure to follow, but the announcement has New Yorkers on edge and should have Pennsylvanians looking closer, too.

The Marcellus Shale gas drilling process is extremely water intensive. Millions of gallons of water are run through the shale. The resulting wastewater is then treated and discharged, mostly back into public waterways. ( source )

So whether you live in the area affected by the wastewater mentioned in the article or you live pretty much… anywhere that wastewater could possibly enter your drinking water or well water supply, routine testing of your water makes sense.

Another town has received notification that their drinking water may contain levels of lead and copper higher than deemed acceptable by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

A few residents have experienced lead in their drinking water in recent weeks, prompting discussion of Belleville’s aging infrastructure and a warning to people about how to protect their health.

Township Manager Victor Canning said that “a couple of samples” of tap water tested positive for lead, and by law the township had to send notices to those residents. He said there is a bigger picture problem.

“This is something that has to be addressed in areas with older infrastructure,” Canning said.

For now, he has this advice: “People should let the water run for a couple of minutes to remove any lead or copper issues.”

The substances come from old underground water pipes that need replacing, an expensive proposition, he said.

“We are trying to address this, spending a couple of hundred thousand [dollars], but we’re talking millions and millions to fix it all,” Canning said. ( source )

As stated in the article, tearing up and replacing older copper water lines joined together with solder that contains lead costs a pretty penny and a lot of towns like Belleville simply cannot come up with the money. Therefore residents in these towns owe it to themselves to test their drinking water for dangerous heavy metals such as copper and lead on a regular basis.

According to a study conducted in Australia involving 300 households where half received real filters to filter the collected water and half used fake filters which contained no filtration media, scientists detected no real differences in health or general wellness between those who filtered the rainwater and those who did not.

Does this mean you can safely drink the water falling from the sky in your neck of the woods without filtering it first? That all depends upon where you live… so play it safe and don’t take chances with your health.

1) Submit a sample of collected rainwater to a certified water testing lab for through analysis before consuming.

2) Research safe and effective way to store your collected rainwater because water falling from the sky contains no disinfectants or sanitizers to keep bacteria from living, thriving and breeding.

3) Get into the habit of performing routine testing on your rainwater. Ever-changing environmental factors (including, but in no way limited to, pollution caused by mankind) can result in sudden shifts in water quality. Remember: Experts say acid rain results from pollution and acid rain has killed off entire ecosystems.

Though designed to protect the environment and everything in it, sometimes environmental laws fall short of that goal and actually allow very bad things to happen — such as the unlimited discharging of wastewater containing dissolved metals, and probably several other environmentally unsafe things, from a power plant in Tennessee into the Clinch River.

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–Environmental groups on Thursday took aim a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant that was responsible for a toxic spill last year, challenging a new permit allowing the plant to dump unlimited amounts of additional pollutants into Tennessee’s Clinch River.

Earthjustice, Environmental Integrity Project and the Sierra Club filed the appeal before the Tennessee Water Quality Control Board. It challenges a permit granted last month by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, or TDEC, that allows the TVA to discharge pollutants into the river.

Power plants dump dirty water into rivers in part because of technology to keep soot and ash out of the air. But if the waste is pumped into waterways without being treated, the mixture of water and metals can damage drinking-water supplies and the environment. State are largely responsible for regulating the discharges.

“What we’re seeing on the whole is cleaner air but dirtier water,” said Abigail Dillen, a lawyer with Earthjustice. She said the TVA’s Kingston plant was “not taking the additional steps they need to take to treat their wastewater,” since state environmental regulators hadn’t required it.

The TVA said in a statement that “although an analysis will show that metals are present in the discharged water, state and federal agencies have determined that there is no reasonable potential for these materials to cause an exceedance of any water-quality criteria.” A spokeswoman for the state environmental regulator referred a reporter to the permit, in which TDEC lays out its rationale for the conditions. ( source )

Pretty scary stuff when an organization guilty of polluting the environment can wave a legally issued permit around and say, “Yes, we are guilty of dumping undisclosed amounts of environmentally harmful chemicals into the river but this permit says we can… so there.”

Situations like this make all of us at Water Testing Blog glad the public has access to test kits for metals in drinking water that provide rapid test results for things like copper, iron, manganese, chromium, and lead. For a more general test of the metals content of water, people can also use a product such as SenSafe Water Metals Check to get a semi-quantitative reading of the total metals content of well water, tap water, groundwater, etc.

Conspiracy theorists always speculate that government officials sworn to protect them would gladly trade the health and welfare of any and everyone for a dollar and a donut. Stories like this next one involving public health officials willfully withholding information about potentially dangerous levels of bacteria in the water at popular beaches until after a lucrative holiday has passed don’t really do much to prove them wrong.

CARTHAGE, Mo. — The reaction was dramatic after state officials learned that bacteria levels at Lake of the Ozarks made beaches there unsafe for swimming over the Memorial Day weekend.

True, much of the response stemmed from the fact that the information was withheld until July by state officials, some of whom may have believed that the revelation would hurt business at the lake during the first holiday of the summer. ( source )

Yep. Conspiracy officials would have a field day with that one. Good thing for them, and the rest of us, that quick bacteria test kits for water exist.