Category The World Around us

Many millions of people in developing countries do not have access to clean drinking water and sanitation. In the countryside, people may be forced to use the same ponds, streams, rivers and lakes for drinking and for sewage. In cities, water supply and sewage systems are often inadequate and, in both cases, people may be exposed to serious illnesses such as malaria, cholera and yellow fever.

The United States has one of the safest public drinking water supplies in the world. Over 286 million Americans get their tap water from a community water system. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates drinking water quality in public water systems and sets maximum concentration levels for water chemicals and pollutants.

Sources of drinking water are subject to contamination and require appropriate treatment to remove disease-causing contaminants. Contamination of drinking water supplies can occur in the source water as well as in the distribution system after water treatment has already occurred. There are many sources of water contamination, including naturally occurring chemicals and minerals (for example, arsenic, radon, and uranium), local land use practices (fertilizers, pesticides, and concentrated feeding operations), manufacturing processes, and sewer overflows or wastewater releases.

The presence of contaminants in water can lead to adverse health effects, including gastrointestinal illness, reproductive problems, and neurological disorders. Infants, young children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people whose immune systems are compromised because of AIDS, chemotherapy, or transplant medications, may be especially susceptible to illness from some contaminants.

picture Credit : Google

In parts of the world that receive little rainfall, access to water can be difficult. In such areas, wells May be dug deep underground, or water can he piped from natural springs. Some countries even process seawater at a desalination plant. The seawater is heated, and only pure water evaporates. When it condenses, it is collected, leaving behind the salt in a concentrated form.

It has been the driest start to a summer in over 45 years in the UK. Yet, much of the country had water in reserve when it began, ensuring a continued safe supply for drinking and washing. Millions around the world are not that lucky: despite high rainfall, they go thirsty.

In some of the wettest countries in the world – where rainy days bring a lot more water than the 1248mm average that falls yearly in the UK, according to World Bank data – clean water is extremely hard to get, especially for those living in poverty.

Unlike the UK where it rains all year round, many of these countries face heavy rainfall in one season and severe drought in the next – both exacerbated by climate change – putting water resources under heavy strain.

In some regions, climate change is making water sources increasingly unreliable as flooding contaminates previously drinkable water. Yet, the problem is often not a physical lack of water: some places have significant underground reserves – known as ‘groundwater’ – because of abundant rainfall. Here, thirsty communities cannot get sufficient clean water because of a lack of investment in the infrastructure needed to deliver a reliable supply, indicating a lack of political prioritization.

“Not having clean water to drink is not, for most people, due to a lack of rain. For the one in nine people around the world – 844 million – who do not have clean water close to home it is usually because there is not enough investment in systems to ensure rainwater is captured, stored, treated and piped effectively.”

Papua New Guinea. The impacts of climate change – rising seas and extreme weather – have tainted groundwater, meaning that even though an average of 3055mm of rain falls each year, most of the water is unsafe to drink. The number of people with access to clean water close to home is decreasing: 4.83 million people (or 63 percent of the population) do not have clean water available within a half hour trip.

Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is twice as wet as the UK with 2427mm of rain on average each year, yet, 4 out of 10 people (42%) lack basic access to clean water. The Ebola outbreak was aided by a lack of clean water as health centres and communities struggled to maintain the high hygiene standards needed to halt the spread of the virus.

Liberia. High on the list of the world’s wettest countries with 2421mm of rainfall on average each year, a third of the population remains without access to clean water, or 1.36 million people. Liberia is still recovering from two devastating civil wars that wiped out much of the country’s infrastructure and the 2014 Ebola outbreak demonstrates the urgency to rebuild. 8 in 10 people don’t have toilets and go out in the open, risking contaminating water sources, many of which are already at risk from industrial and mining pollution.

picture Credit : Google

Harmful bacteria that may cause serious diseases and death need to be removed from water before it can be used for domestic purposes. Dirt particles are removed because they can wear away pipes or damage industrial equipment.

Water purification, process by which undesired chemical compounds, organic and inorganic materials, and biological contaminants are removed from water. That process also includes distillation (the conversion of a liquid into vapour to condense it back to liquid form) and deionization (ion removal through the extraction of dissolved salts). One major purpose of water purification is to provide clean drinking water. Water purification also meets the needs of medical, pharmacological, chemical, and industrial applications for clean and potable water. The purification procedure reduces the concentration of contaminants such as suspended particles, parasites, bacteria, algae, viruses, and fungi. Water purification takes place on scales from the large (e.g., for an entire city) to the small (e.g., for individual households).

Most communities rely on natural bodies of water as intake sources for water purification and for day-to-day use. In general, these resources can be classified as groundwater or surface water and commonly include underground aquifers, creeks, streams, rivers, and lakes. With recent technological advancements, oceans and saltwater seas have also been used as alternative water sources for drinking and domestic use.

Clean water is essential for every human being, for drinking, cooking and other daily uses purposes like bathing, brushing, washing clothes etc. It not just makes our life healthier but also fulfills the hygiene purpose.

The regular tap water being supplied in your home might seem clear but possess various sorts of health-affecting bacteria and viruses such as fluorine compounds, chlorine, mercury, lead, pesticides and other types of waste particles.

And its consumption can lead to serious health issues, and sometimes the result can be massively harmful. As per the research contaminated water lead the diseases like- diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio, and is estimated to cause 502 000 diarrhea deaths each year.

Water is a limited resource which is chemically treated to obviate various types of harmful viruses or bacteria available in it, that makes approx. 1.1 million ill each year (according to the research) and this is the core reason why water purification is necessary. Since your family’s health is in your hand, you must be very careful with the kind of water they are consuming for their day to day uses.

Several sorts of chemicals and viruses in unfiltered water can increase the chances of some kind of cancer risks. Thus, eliminating these chemicals can help you get rid of such cancer risks. Besides that, pure water also keeps things moving in your digestive tract. It helps to push food through and get you healthy digestion.

picture Credit : Google

All living things depend upon water for their survival; life on Earth would not exist without it. A clean supply of water is essential for people, not only to drink but for sanitation and health reasons. There is plenty of water on Earth, but not everyone has access to the same amount. Demand for water is always increasing, and supplies in many parts of the world are overstretched. In such areas, supplying fresh water can be a time-consuming and expensive business. For many people, a safe, regular supply of water is taken for granted but without it life, and indeed industry, would come to a halt.

Water is a life giver – even a life creator. It lies at the basis of our understanding of how life works. It also lies at the basis of how we understand our own personal lives. Of the four (or five) basic building blocks of life, water is the only one with a visible cycle, which we call the hydrologic cycle. Fire has no cycle that we can see, either do earth or air. And we don’t understand spirit (the ether) enough to know if it does or not. Water is a constant reminder that life repeats.

The hydrologic cycle works as follows: From its most usable state, water evaporates and joins the air as water vapor. When the air cools, the vapor condenses and creates clouds, which help block heat from the sun. Colonies of the ice-nucleating bacterium, P. syringe, blown into the clouds by wind, help them to precipitate and fall as rain, snow, or hail. Much of the precipitation is stored on land as groundwater and lakes, snow and ice. From there water flows to the sea, where it joins the “primordial soup” again as ocean, ready to start the cycle anew.

Here are many of the roles that water provides both for the earth and for humans—that help produce the abundance of life we see around us every day. Without even one of these our lives would be far different.

Without water the air and earth would vacillate between extreme hot and extreme cold every day, everywhere, with a gradual increase in temperature as time goes on. Part of the problem with global warming could be that we are using up too much land water and throwing rain away into the sea.

In addition to being the soup from which life emerged, the ocean and other water bodies act as home for more life than what lives on land. Mammals, fish, birds, insects, trees, plants, algae, krill, and many other forms of life either live directly in water or are wholly dependent upon it for survival. This includes the tiny iceworms, copepods, and diatoms that inhabit trillions of minuscule tunnels in icebergs and their undersides, providing food for whales and fish that migrate to the poles to eat.

Water and carbon dioxide are the two key components of plant photosynthesis, which is how plants make their food. Bees use water to make honey, flowers use water to make nectar, trees use water to make pitch, spiders and snakes use water to make venom, and termites mix saliva with mud to make their homes. Humans use water to make paint, dyes, inks, all kinds of drinks, and we bottle it straight. We use it for paper, fabrics, food processing, chemical compounds, and the manufacture of hundreds of other products essential to modern living.

Without water, plants and many insects and arthropods could not survive, nor would humans have developed the foods and industries we have.

To humans, as creators of our own lives, water is our servant. We use it to grow crops and livestock, to cleanse and keep ourselves healthy, to stimulate ideas for products, and to transport those products. We use its cycles to remind us that our own lives also work in cycles.

But if we abuse water, like masters have a tendency to do with servants, if we don’t care for it and preserve it, we will end up destroying ourselves. We need the rain forests, the swamplands, the open rivers and lakes, the estuaries, icebergs, snow tops—water in all its natural forms we need. And so does the rest of life.

If, instead of commanding it, we could conceive of ourselves as a partner or an intelligent component of water’s own rain and storage cycle, it might encourage us to be more respectful of what water can do and more careful of the way we utilize it.

With water, we thrive. Without water, there is no life. We must learn to value, conserve, and take care of the water we have.

picture Credit : Google

Water is supplied into most homes by underground pipes. It starts its journey in a lake or man-made reservoir and passes through a process of purification before Coming out of the tap in your home.

Collection

The water that flows from your tap is collected from the skies and they fall in the form of snow, rain or hail. The water from the sky goes through the process of collection, storage, cleaning until it is safe enough for drinking. Once the water is safe for drinking then it gets pumped to pipes and flows out of your tap. Other sources of water are deep wells, reservoirs, streams and rivers.

Cleaning

The water that is collected goes through the cleaning and treatment process. The first step in the cleaning process is when the water passes through a large sieve that captures and takes out the debris and dirt from the water. The water goes through a combined physical and chemical process to get rid of the impurities that are left in the water.

Any remnants of bacteria or germs are completely removed to make sure that the water is safe for drinking. The bacteria are removed through the disinfection process using ozone, chlorine or with ultraviolet treatment.

Storage and Delivery

Once the water is thoroughly clean, it is transferred from the water treatment facility to the storage tanks that are covered. The water storage tanks are placed on higher grounds so that there is adequate pressure for the water to flow from the pipes and out of the faucets.

The water mains transport the water up to a point outside your home. The water is then transported into your home by the service pipe that is connected to the valve. The valve is often located under the pavement and it is used to turn off the water when there are maintenance checks or repairs.

Another valve can also be installed inside your home particularly under the kitchen sink. The valve inside your home is used to turn off the water when your indoor plumbing needs repairs.

picture Credit : Google