Orlando urges residents to conserve water because of surge in hospitalizations | Hacker News Reader

Orlando urges residents to conserve water because of surge in hospitalizations

washingtonpost.com

49 pointsdredmorbius51 comments

It sounds like if people do not cut back, then they will do the reasonable thing and prioritize sending oxygen to the hospitals, accepting that this means people's tap water will start smelling sulfurous [EDIT: and maybe need boiling before drinking]

> To reduce demand for liquid oxygen, OUC is asking water customers to immediately limit irrigating their lawns and landscapes. If OUC’s liquid oxygen supplies continue to be depleted and water usage isn’t reduced, water quality may be impacted. -- https://www.ouc.com/water-info

not precisely-- while the ozone they produce from liquid oxygen does serve the purpose of making the water more palatable, it serves a higher purpose as their primary disinfectant. the faq in the link you provided states that OUD doesn't have the capacity to sufficiently disinfect water using chlorine alone

if people do not cut back, Orlando will have to issue a boil-water notice

If people aren't aware of the notification will the water quality decrease be followed by an increase in hospitalizations?

> hydrogen sulfide from water pumped in from the Lower Floridan Aquifer.

Those who have not experienced Florida water do not recognize just how big a deal that is. The water is "potable", sure, but it's viciously stinky. Some people can't adapt to it at all. I've known people who lost livestock they imported, because it couldn't adapt to the water.

Can you let the water sit for awhile to get rid of the stink?

That's not as effective as other methods.

Aeration, oxidation, and ion treatments seem most commonly used.

https://extension.psu.edu/hydrogen-sulfide-rotten-egg-odor-i...

I solved the problem with this: https://www.amazon.com/Injection-manganese-Removal-Oxidizing... ... works really well and requires little/no maintenance for the first few years. Before that I had a chlorine injection system and it was a nightmare (maintenance-wise).

Very cool solution. I know many people that spent an extra $15k to drill 200+ft deep wells into the aquifer just to avoid the sulphur smell in the water from shallow wells. This would be a very cost effective workaround.

Did the 200ft deep well fix the issue in all cases?

Yeah the aquifer is sulfer-free but the surface water smells of sulphur in most areas.

Another article that buries the real reason there is a shortage.

>In August, Florida hospitals were struggling to get their hands on oxygen supplies in part because there were few truck drivers available who were qualified to transport it.

So it seems there is more than enough O2, it's just that they don't have enough Truck Drivers that are licensed to transport it. Either way it's still a problem but it's not related to the production of Liquid Oxygen.

Have any of the waterparks or amusement parks been asked to cut back at all?

How much additional water does a waterproof need per day? I imagine they reuse as much as they possibly can.

As much as they can, sure, but you can only optimize so much when your setup is a giant exercise in maximizing evaporative surface area

Evaporation is substantial. They do chlorinate their own water though - at least in Disney and Universal Studios, so if they're pulling their own groundwater it would not affect the local water.

what about evaporation? When I had a pool we needed to top it up weekly; I imagine a waterpark has the same challenge at several magnitudes,

Can’t you bring in liquid oxygen from other areas of the country by truck?

Requires people licensed to transport liquid oxygen as well as tanker trucks designed for it; with so much unplanned for demand, it's hard to balance the needs of medical and industrial oxygen quickly.

Better yet, couldn’t you use electricity to break up some water molecules, so sulfide oxidation happens in situ? As an extra bonus, hydrogen fuel.

The actual chemical used in treatment here is ozone, not oxygen. Ozone is not stable enough to be transported any great distance, so it has to be made on-site, which involves zapping oxygen with electrical arcs. The oxygen feed must be a pure oxygen atmosphere, unless you want your ozone to be heavily contaminated with various nitrogen oxides. So you need pure oxygen in industrial quantities, which means shipping in liquid oxygen.

Industrially, oxygen comes from filtering it out of the air--air is about 22% oxygen, after all. It's possible to do that on site, but the maintenance of the machine to filter it isn't really worth it compared to just ordering a new tanker of liquid oxygen every few days.

Another issue with breaking up water molecules is you need a fairly pure source of water to do that. The water in a water treatment plant is anything but pure.

> It's possible to do that on site, but the maintenance of the machine to filter it isn't really worth it compared to just ordering a new tanker of liquid oxygen every few days.

The former is a thing. Some hospitals do on-site generation instead of trucking it in. If they’re extracting from air; seems like a waste of separated N2/argon/other gases, but the disintermediation might pay for it all.

https://www.class1inc.com/news.php?id=75

But the problem with COVID is that its peak capacity wasn’t designed for that much draw and they had to move patients elsewhere. Not even sure if they can store in the liquid state or accept deliveries in liquid.

Why would you do so when you have for free in the air? Then you would need the same amount of energy and the same process to make it liquid, since it's very impractical and dangerous to store and move high pressure oxigen

"Free in the air" is not pure in the air.

As noted, the ozone process requires high-purity O2 as source stock. That's recovered from atmospheric air through one of several processes. My understanding is that cryogenic seperattion is the principle method (it's a bit like fractional distillation, but in reverse, seperating air into its constituent gasses based on their liquification temperatures).

There's also pressure-swing absorption and membrane technology (differential diffusion), as well as by-product availability from other processes (e.g., nitrogen production).

See:

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2007/data/papers/78_...

(I've known all this longer than you have. By as much as five minutes.)

you can't just add electricity to the water. the treatment plant already exists and probably needs to be running & producing potable water 24/7 with little room for fiddling around. besides, you can provide oxidation by running the water through an aerator, if you have one.

It takes them six paragraphs to get to the relationship between oxygen and water?!?

They don't use chlorine?

They use chlorine.

The liquid oxygen is used to produce ozone, which, in addition to solving their taste and odor issues, is a potent disinfectant. However, ozone doesn't leave a detectable disinfectant residual in the water like chlorine does. Testing for that residual allows you to show that at any given tap in your distribution system, the water remains disinfected.

By using ozone for primary disinfection, you can greatly reduce the amount of chlorine you add to the water before you send it out into the distribution system, so you end up with fewer undesirable disinfection byproducts. Orlando's problem seems to be that they don't have the capacity to adequately disinfect the water with chlorine alone.

From the article:

> the city’s water regulator uses liquid oxygen as part of its process for removing foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide from water pumped in from the Lower Floridan Aquifer.

I live here and have a well, the aquifer water is pretty much rotten eggs.

Florida has a higher age 65+ Vaccination rate than California or New York:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

We're rehashing all of the same arguments from 2020. The Southern States peak earlier in the year for respiratory viruses due to latitude:

https://youtu.be/013L9J7WhuU

So what's happening in the South now is a preview of what will happen in the Northern States, perhaps even worse since the vaccines will further drop in effectiveness due to time duration (hence the need for 'boosters').

That may be true of respitory illnesses generally but it’s the opposite of what happened with covid: https://covidactnow.org/share/44853/?redirectTo=%2Fus%2Filli...

In every other surge the south lagged in cases. This time they lead (and the difference in how much is startling).

I live in Canada and health authorities are making the same error. July cases lower than March/April so they relaxed. But summer is supposed to be low.

All stats in August 2021 are worse than August 2020 despite vaccinations. Not an optimistic setup for winter.

How are these vaccinated counted? Is this the federal government or the state? I heard the state is delaying giving out infections and deaths by weeks making look like it's not that bad. If the state is counting the vaccinations I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are also inaccurate.

This isn’t true at all

CA and NY will likely peak in the next week or two and their curves look nothing like the southern states.

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