Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink

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#1613862 18-Aug-2016 17:07

jmh:

frankv:

What Mike said resonates with what's been on the news... it appears that the HDC was NOT chlorinating the water from all its bores, presumably because they had acceptably low levels of E coli. And suddenly there's a Campylobacteriosis outbreak, and it seems they've narrowed the source down to a particular bore or group of bores, which they're now chlorinating. The suggestion was made that an improperly constructed bore could be the source of the contamination.

I'll throw in another possibility... if there is excessive water drawn from an aquifer, the water pressure in the aquifer decreases, potentially to the point where water (and contaminants) from the surface can get down into the aquifer. This excessive draw might not be from the bore that lets in the contamination... it may be a nearby bore. A scary thought is that the contamination may be happening miles upstream from the bore where it is detected. I wonder how long Campylobacter, etc can survive in underground water systems?

Incidentally, about a quarter to a half of NZ animals and birds are infected with Campylobacter. In the UK, 100% of poultry is infected.

I've heard scary things about chicken here too - always make sure you cook it real well. I trended more towards lamb these days.

Agreed. The one and only time I visited a NZ KFC I got to spend 9 days in hospital with listeriosis.

Needless to say, I prefer beef burgers!

frankv

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#1613989 18-Aug-2016 21:29

Geektastic:

frankv:

Incidentally, about a quarter to a half of NZ animals and birds are infected with Campylobacter. In the UK, 100% of poultry is infected.

Agreed. The one and only time I visited a NZ KFC I got to spend 9 days in hospital with listeriosis.

Needless to say, I prefer beef burgers!

Ummm... read it again... In NZ, cattle are about as likely to be infected as poultry.

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#1614009 18-Aug-2016 22:05

I'm amazed NZ has so much trouble with water. I lived in the Kapiti region for nearly 10 years and they had to have bores (that needed treatment, due to pipe and kettle hard-water damage), and water restrictions due to "drought".

Now I live in one of the most drought-prone areas of the world and have never had a water restriction. We even pay tens of millions a year for a desalinisation plant that isn't even used!

Maybe if NZ planned ahead a bit and built reservoirs, dams, etc and stopped taking water straight from rivers and bores at random amounts, these things wouldn't happen?

Edit: I can even water my lawn with a built in sprinkler system AND wash my car in summer... Yeah, it costs me money, but I can also drink out of the tap without being sick. :p

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#1614018 18-Aug-2016 22:37

Ireland nationalised its water system as a part of the GFC bailout - http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/anti-water-meter-protests-spread-to-dublin-1.1771005 and it has saved costs, but no one wants to invest in it...

NZs drinking water is poor because the density of the population is so low and regular earthquakes continually damage the distribution network. If you then overlay public ignorance ie. it rains a lot, so this should be easy/cheap etc, this all comes down to no one wanting to pay to have a network which is efficient.

Given this is a tech forum - here is a business idea - pipes and joins with rfid tags for location and deformation/leak sensing. Range of the tags is tricky given it is underground. But theoretically a stretch/break of the antenna as the pipe deforms (suggesting a leak) could be integrated into the rfid mechanism, you might need a big radio power source to penetrate the ground but could save lots of $

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#1614023 18-Aug-2016 23:03

blakamin:

I'm amazed NZ has so much trouble with water. I lived in the Kapiti region for nearly 10 years and they had to have bores (that needed treatment, due to pipe and kettle hard-water damage), and water restrictions due to "drought".

Now I live in one of the most drought-prone areas of the world and have never had a water restriction. We even pay tens of millions a year for a desalinisation plant that isn't even used!

Maybe if NZ planned ahead a bit and built reservoirs, dams, etc and stopped taking water straight from rivers and bores at random amounts, these things wouldn't happen?

Edit: I can even water my lawn with a built in sprinkler system AND wash my car in summer... Yeah, it costs me money, but I can also drink out of the tap without being sick. :p

Agreed. The lack of storage reservoirs is astonishing. They are also an excellent recreational resource, commonly used for sailing, trout fishing, wind surfing and even scuba diving! Rutland Water, which I used to manage, has a 26 mile cycle path around it as well.

I personally put it down to the fact that water in NZ still remains a local council issue with no sort of national strategy, no national distribution and so on. Plus the immense levels of whining that results from the endless consultation that seems to be required to do anything at all.

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#1614046 19-Aug-2016 07:16

Reservoirs? Has anyone driven around NZ eyes open? Let me see now, Wellington region, Twin Lakes Temarua,Karori , Haywards,Ngauranga plus the huge underground reserves just as an example

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#1614058 19-Aug-2016 08:07

MikeB4: Reservoirs? Has anyone driven around NZ eyes open? Let me see now, Wellington region, Twin Lakes Temarua,Karori , Haywards,Ngauranga plus the huge underground reserves just as an example

They are all pretty small. I'm talking about things that have circumferences over 10 miles...that one you pass going over the Rimutakas is like a large pond.

We also have no method of taking water from one region where it rains a lot to others where it rains less in order to even out peaks and troughs. We need that - we ought not to be having so many drought regions annually when we have areas where it never seems to stop raining.

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#1614067 19-Aug-2016 08:36

Geektastic:

MikeB4: Reservoirs? Has anyone driven around NZ eyes open? Let me see now, Wellington region, Twin Lakes Temarua,Karori , Haywards,Ngauranga plus the huge underground reserves just as an example

They are all pretty small. I'm talking about things that have circumferences over 10 miles...that one you pass going over the Rimutakas is like a large pond.

We also have no method of taking water from one region where it rains a lot to others where it rains less in order to even out peaks and troughs. We need that - we ought not to be having so many drought regions annually when we have areas where it never seems to stop raining.

Let me introduce NZ, small place only 4.6 Million folks, Wellington region around 400K we don't need reservoirs 16km's. The Twin lakes hold more than enough and add to that the aquifers .

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#1614070 19-Aug-2016 08:41

The UK does have a certain advantages. It does tend to rain everywhere almost all of the time, the effect of which is permanently etched on the general disposition of the population, but at least it makes keeping reservoirs full a simple task. Then there's the once a week shower/bath thing - though a great hygiene improvement since the days where they'd have the kids "sewn in" to their clothes for the winter months, that saves a hell of a lot of water vs the crazy and wasteful concept of washing once a day.

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#1614074 19-Aug-2016 08:57

I have to wonder if the outbreak/contamination had something to do with all the rain the Hawkes Bay had a couple of weeks ago (5-6 Aug)? Maybe some sort of sewage back flow or over flow?

Presence of E.Coli is used as a measure of faecal contamination and therefore an indication of other contamination. Campylobacter is not normally present in humans but it is in cow excrement and also the birds that pick away at it or other contaminated areas.

Once in an outside environment, campylobacter is near impossible to control without chemical treatment.

Campylobacter ingestion (human) is usually from a couple of vectors

Contaminated water tanks from bird poo on roof/gutters

Dairy workers not cleaning hands/clothes properly

Not cooking chicken properly or more often, bad food prep using unwashed utensils or surfaces that had been used for raw chicken to prepare other uncooked food.

Campylobacter is a motile bacteria and can survive in wet conditions for a very long time.

It is easily killed with heat and effective chlorination. (Correct pH, has to be 6-6.8ish, chlorine concentration and contact time with chlorine) This is one of the many ways campylobacter is controlled with chicken during evisceration and processing before cold storage.

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#1614091 19-Aug-2016 09:30

I know a researcher who undertook a sizeable epidemiological study of campylarbacter infection in NZ. By looking at what strains were prevalent in poultry, cattle and people they were able to show that cattle were the predominant source of infection in rural patients and poultry in urban patients.

Under the drinking water standards, operators are supposed to risk assess the catchment their drinking water is sourced from - to identify potential sources of poo-llution such as animals, septic tanks etc etc. With an aquifer that can be very difficult.

BTW it remains to be if it's just campy causing problems. There are gastro bugs that are resilient to chlorination, and I noticed the council have boil order in place, even though they are chlorinating.

Mike

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#1614100 19-Aug-2016 09:40

National radio this morning (Fri) Mayor on current advice had been discounting risk to the bores that were in use because they were 100s of meters from any possible source of contamination and "the bugs don't travel" or words to that effect. MOW Water scientist from 1970s was disagreeing with that as he had detected migration through that aquifer of 300m in a few days.

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#1614109 19-Aug-2016 09:46

(Just musing now) - I wonder if any of the councils have considered gamma or beta sterilisation of water? Both kinds of radiation are effective against the bugs that are resistant to chlorination, and don't leave chlorine behind to make all the nature types upset. Beta sterilisation has the advantage that you can create the electron beam with a machine (so you can switch it off) whereas gamma has the advantage that you can encapsulate some pellets of cobalt-60 in stainless steel, put them inside the pipe, and forget about them for 10 years.

Of course, nukular, so probably not going to happen in NZ regardless of the benefits.

Edit: studies done.

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#1614130 19-Aug-2016 09:52

Yogi02:
I have to wonder if the outbreak/contamination had something to do with all the rain the Hawkes Bay had a couple of weeks ago (5-6 Aug)? Maybe some sort of sewage back flow or over flow?

Presence of E.Coli is used as a measure of faecal contamination and therefore an indication of other contamination. Campylobacter is not normally present in humans but it is in cow excrement and also the birds that pick away at it or other contaminated areas.

Once in an outside environment, campylobacter is near impossible to control without chemical treatment.

Campylobacter ingestion (human) is usually from a couple of vectors

Contaminated water tanks from bird poo on roof/gutters

Dairy workers not cleaning hands/clothes properly

Not cooking chicken properly or more often, bad food prep using unwashed utensils or surfaces that had been used for raw chicken to prepare other uncooked food.

Campylobacter is a motile bacteria and can survive in wet conditions for a very long time.

It is easily killed with heat and effective chlorination. (Correct pH, has to be 6-6.8ish, chlorine concentration and contact time with chlorine) This is one of the many ways campylobacter is controlled with chicken during evisceration and processing before cold storage.

The rainfall event may well have had an effect but underlying that a systematic cause will likely be identified. The water serices manager said something like when they pin down the timing of the contamination they should be able to work back to get an idea of the source. This is because the water in the aquifier is not a static source but flows through the ground at a known rate.

The same is true of the larger Heretaungs Aquifier. It receives about 50% of its inflow from soakage through the Ngaruroro river system and the rest from general land drainage. It runs like a giant underground river out to sea.

Perhaps the council should have stopped taking water from the smaller aquifier, as the population grew in Havelock North and tapped into the larger, more secure source which would not have cost much to do.

Large reservoir storage in this particular area would not be very logical, if even possible. Clorination would be a safeguard but you get a lot of opposition once you start putting chemicals in the water.

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#1614269 19-Aug-2016 11:57

MikeB4:

Geektastic:

MikeB4: Reservoirs? Has anyone driven around NZ eyes open? Let me see now, Wellington region, Twin Lakes Temarua,Karori , Haywards,Ngauranga plus the huge underground reserves just as an example

They are all pretty small. I'm talking about things that have circumferences over 10 miles...that one you pass going over the Rimutakas is like a large pond.

We also have no method of taking water from one region where it rains a lot to others where it rains less in order to even out peaks and troughs. We need that - we ought not to be having so many drought regions annually when we have areas where it never seems to stop raining.

Let me introduce NZ, small place only 4.6 Million folks, Wellington region around 400K we don't need reservoirs 16km's. The Twin lakes hold more than enough and add to that the aquifers .

Sure. That would be why the Wairarapa has drought restrictions most summers - we do not need reservoirs...

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