The first mass chlorination of a city’s water supply | Hacker News Reader

The first mass chlorination of a city’s water supply

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53 pointsghosh32 comments

With what we know now about beneficial bacteria, I wonder if, in addition to the pathogens, we're killing probiotics? And perhaps the lack of exposure to mild bacteria mean we're more susceptible to immune diseases?

Of course getting rid of the pathogens is a great thing, but perhaps chlorination plays a role in causing some modern problems that are related to the immune system and the gut biome? Anyone have links to studies done on this topic?

An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases: http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergi...

Velasquez-Manoff on Autoimmune Disease, Parasites, and Complexity: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.htm...

"A new way of understanding allergies"? When I was growing up, my mother and father were constantly saying that kids who didn't play in the dirt were the kids who got allergies and got sick all the time. They encouraged us to play with bugs, play in the mud, and run around the neighborhood getting into things that would cause a 'concerned neighbor' to call CPS today. My grandparents on both sides had the same philosophy, and I don't think they're alone on this... pretty sure this was once considered common sense, before the super helicopter parenting + antibacterial everything trend caught on. I get that common sense isn't science, and it's great that someone is compiling the evidence, but that title just comes off as so arrogant. Somewhere out there, there's a book called "water is wet: a new way of understanding liquids".

Does "Epidemic of Absence" actually address chlorine? I thought it was a useful and interesting book, but I don't remember it discussing chlorine in specific.

> I wonder if, in addition to the pathogens, we're killing probiotics?

A study comparing gut bacteria, immune markers etc of rural well water drinkers to city water drinkers might be a place to start.

EPA: "Approximately 15 percent of Americans rely on their own private drinking water"

I think using the word private is a bit misleading. Ground water is shared among all the well users in the area/water shed.

If drank only collected rain water then it would be private. Except for the pollutants picked up from the air.

It depends on the well. My well goes down 65 feet, where it hit a spring, and we have an artesian well off that spring. Every other well within a mile of me had to go down to 225 feet, and they are all certainly sharing a water supply at that level.

I do not believe my well shares water with their supply because they have much safer water than I do. We have many more heavy metals in ours, and more arsenic. They run off some basic water filters, and I have a much more complex water treatment system in my basement.

I'm not pointing this out just to argue - the point is that those of us on a well do maintain an awareness of where our water comes from and what is in it, probably much more so than those on public water supplies.

>I think using the word private is a bit misleading.

For the purposes of this discussion, unless one of your neighbors is pumping chlorine into the ground I think its fine. Also private vs public here refers to the ownership of the water infrastructure.

It might be the case that chlorination of drinking water leads to an uptick in autoimmune diseases. However, many people that suffer from such a disease would not even live to suffer from it.

Over 100 years have passed since chlorine was added to the water. This allows us to "refactor" our old solutions with better ones.

There's little sense in using a dualistic lens when it comes to solutions that have a cost. i.e. "At least Chlorine saves people". No. Chlorine is a solution that has drawbacks. If there are solutions that don't have the drawbacks that Chlorine has, then lets explore those solutions.

Considering humanity's pro-biotic ingestion is primarily, if not exclusively, through food I kinda doubt this is a major concern. I think what's more important is how changing diets affect gut flora more so than clean water or too much soap. There's research in this area and its pretty interesting. I doubt these guys haven't considered water. Its probably just a non-issue.

Note what didn't happen here: he didn't create a startup company to deliver Luxury Water to rich people. He didn't patent the idea, and attempt to collect royalties. He didn't discover the idea while attempting to get rich from some tangentially related business.

Contrary to popular narrative, many of the technologies that make our lives livable came about because dedicated people devoted themselves directly to solving some important problem, not serendipitously while pursuing personal wealth.

Let's not kid ourselves, this wasn't some poor sap working for the common good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Leal

He was professionally established in leadership positions, both in the private and public sector. This man did well for himself.

And there are plenty of examples of men who are well off today and who do selfless things because they can afford to.

There is nothing wrong with earning a living and even, gasp, turning a profit.

If, by "professionally established in leadership positions", you mean to refer to the fact that he had a medical degree, and had spent his prior career working on these problems, then yes, I agree.

That's exactly my point. But nothing you've cited is evidence that the man was rich (or even attempting to profit) from his work for the public good.

No, that is NOT what I mean. What I mean is that he:

1. Established his own medical practice in Paterson, New Jersey.

2. Was appointed City Physician.

3. Founded the outpatient clinic at Paterson General Hospital.

4. Became Health Inspector in Paterson.

5. Became Health Officer in Paterson.

6. Left the city's service and became the sanitary adviser to the East Jersey Water Company.

7. Became President of the Board of Health for Paterson.

He was also a member of "a large number of professional associations".

There is more in the wikipedia page, but I'm getting bored.

He sounds like an awesome guy and certainly somebody who specialized in public health, but there isn't a shred of evidence that he wasn't a shrewd business man.

On the contrary, everything points to him being just that.

As far as him not capitalizing on his invention ... he didn't invent it, by his own admission. Also, let's not forget that he developed the delivery device in the employ of the water company. It's theirs, even if there is something to patent.

If you work at Microsoft and develop a piece of software in the process of working for them, they own the fruits of your labor. That's not a foreign concept to that era.

He didn't discover the idea at all, chlorine was already used to disinfect water. What he did was pump a full city's water supply with it, in secrecy, without any wide-scale trials.

From an incremental improvement side, probably, but from a new product side, definitely not. You didn't get the Model T, the Macintosh, Edison power and light, etc because of some dedicated people already at their jobs, you got them via outsiders starting their own businesses and, yes perusing personal wealth, while pushing out the old guard. All the while the old guard kept most of the innovative people making TPS reports instead of doing worthwhile things. Most innovators have to flee their day jobs to do what they want to do in their field.

Ford didn't make a better saddle, he made a better horse. The Model T had to come from the outside to disrupt horse and buggy and the only way to really do that is via a capitalist approach. Pursing of wealth is one of the major motivators here and there's nothing wrong with it.

tldr; incentives matter

"From an incremental improvement side, probably, but from a new product side, definitely not."

What in the world are you talking about? Chlorination decreased adult mortality by nearly 50%, and childhood mortality by nearly 75%. These sorts of public-health innovations are what gave us the ability to start pursuing those "new products" you value so highly.

If that's incremental improvement to you, you need to re-examine your assumptions. The incentive here was saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

And what can happen if the people responsible for a water supply screw up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/...

Leal was never responsible for the water supply, he only had a cursory interest in the water supply. His real interest was public health, unlike the Walkerton case, where they were responsible for the water supply and actively withheld information that indicated that the supply was unsafe for culinary use.

>This contamination was due to farm runoff into an adjacent water well

Yet another victim of our universally awful water management in agriculture, and in general. Why is a farmer allowed to discharge polluted water onto someone else's property, whereas if a factory discharged that exact same water it would be a crime?

Our land management (which in modern times mostly falls under the purview of agriculture) needs to start treating the water cycle as the life-critical biophysical process it is, not just as an inconvenience (rain is just 'weather,' and the answer to rain is always 'drainage')

In reality, 'drainage' leads to drought. Drainage is straight hard pipes that shunt all rainfall to the ocean as fast as possible. This prevents aquifer recharge or soil soaking. Buildings and parking lots are 100% runoff surfaces. Even continuously mowed lawns are nearly so due to subsoil hardpan.

Here's a simple math equation. When looking at a continent as a whole:

  water_available_per_hectare (in megalitre/ha) = net_precipitation_per_hectare (ML/day/ha) * average_time_from_fall_to_ocean (days)

As you can see, minimizing the time it takes water to reach the ocean minimizes the water available on the land.[1] And under climate change more of the world is going to start looking like California.

But by using "drainage" as the de facto solution, we're driving the optimization in the exact opposite direction. What we should be doing is slowing down water, sending it on circuitous routes with lots of friction. There are some designs that do exactly that,[2] but they are almost entirely ignored in discussions of water use and policy.

This E. coli incident/mismanagement/market failure is tragic, but it's a symptom of a larger structural problem. We're subsidizing both water addition (huge dam projects and pipelines) and water removal (not making farmers clean up their own mess^Wrunoff), with all the predictably bad results.

[1] Ok, I cheated a bit here. There actually is something clever that you can do - recycle the water. If you harvest and evaporate huge quantities of water shortly after it falls, you can cause new rain a few hundred miles downwind (and buffer floodwaters besides). This is quite absurd for an industrial system, but nevertheless this system powers our modern day rain. And that's why trees cause 80% of terrestrial rainfall: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/full/nature1...

[2] A few that come to mind: swales (i.e. contour following water soaking ditches), the various techniques of Keyline design (farm scale dams/tanks, altering the passive flow of water over land, and use of a deep ripping plow), and productive literally-cheaper-than-dirt biofiltration systems like reed bed ponds and banana circles. Google is your friend here, but a couple links: http://www.cresswater.co.uk/pages/case-studies/whitsome-hill... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ima_ff5xVH4

The way the system was setup, the well that was contaminated was treated as a "deep well" that cannot get contaminated by surface water. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case at all. They might have figured it out in time if they'd followed proper procedure, but the guy in charge was completely incompetent, being unaware of concepts they teach at the beginning of a water management course (such as "turbidity").

It was compounded by the fact that they were trying to hide their improper handling of another well; ironically, that other well was in fact a deep well and did not cause the contamination.

I don't know about Ontario, but here in Quebec the rules on water management in agriculture have become much more stringent in recent years. You need to have a plan in place for all the land and all the animals you own.

Wow, yeah that's really bad.

Good to hear that sane water management is prevailing! You're right, in general the actual water authorities tend to do a pretty good job, because they know their stuff and how complex it is (that guy excepted, obviously). Most of the damage comes from outdated agricultural practices imo.

Fundamentally it's wealth concentration doing most of the damage, by gradually replacing self-sufficient farmers invested in land stewardship with paycheck-to-paycheck mortgage slaves on a tractor 18h/day. This is mainly via regulatory capture leading to our [routinely] bass-ackwards farm bills.

Today he would be treated as a terrorist, which would probably have been for the best. In this case it worked, but how many mad people are so convinced of their own brilliance that they will simply think the public will adore them when they see it works?

Agreed; this guy was dangerous, he just got lucky.

That's not the orginal title. How One Man Poisoned a City’s Water Supply (and Saved Millions of Children’s Lives in the Process)

Presumably clickbait titles are to be avoided

It was the original HN title only a little while ago. Only he didn't poison anyone really. A good title rename.

Is this the historical equivalent of Uber ignoring legal constraints in hopes of later finding a work-around or a change in the law?

Maybe if Uber were convinced they were saving lives and if they did not expect to financially benefit from working around the law.

I don't think that's the case though.

When all you've got is a hammer everything looks like growth hacking.

if they did not expect to financially benefit from working around the law.

How so? The guy had an important position in the (private) company that supplied the water and was being sued for not cleaning it up. It's not exactly a direct incentive, but it's there.

That's not to mention the fame that comes from being the first person to clean up a city's water supply.

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