The questions “How drinkable is the city water?” & “Where does our drinking water come from?” are in the news nationally and locally.
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Speaker: Here we go!
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Dr. Regina: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. My name’s Regina Barber DeGraaff. I’m an educator, pop culture enthusiast, TV watcher. I’m here with my co-host Jordan Baker. How’s it going?
Jordan: It is going well. Improv is going well. It’s gonna be outdated once I tell everybody, but Bellinghamlet and Pirates is happening.
Regina: Oh my gosh! I want to see Pirates. So, we’re here today with our guest, Eric Johnston. He works for the City of Bellingham. So this is gonna be a local/topical national episode. We’re gonna talk about water quality. Welcome.
Eric: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Regina: Before we go into — would you say controversial topic of water quality in our nation?
Eric: Well, I think certainly drinking water quality is a concern of many people across the United States right now. Controversially, I don’t think there’s much controversy. Lead in drinking water is a bad idea. There’s no controversy in that.
Regina: I like the answer. [Laughing.]
Eric: Yeah. It’s certainly been interesting to watch being in the water industry and things that seem pretty clear cut about keeping our drinking water safe that seem to have not really worked and what’s really sad about that is people’s lack of trust or loss of trust in the government’s responsibility to provide that safe drinking water, and that’s unfortunate. But, there’s really no controversy. We have an obligation to provide safe drinking water and that’s pretty clear.
Regina: That is refreshing.
Jordan: I’m gonna raise my hand, because I’m a little behind the times on my water quality learning-ness.
Regina: [Laughing.] Education.
Jordan: Yeah, education. I think the only controversy that I ever heard about was fluoride in the water.
Eric: Oh yeah. I think that it would be fair to say that the majority of most municipal water systems are putting fluoride in the water system.
Regina: Okay.
Eric: There’s quite a bit of discussion. Some of the communities down in southwest United States with naturally occurring fluoride in the system. There’s a question as to how much fluoride they should put in there. Sometimes those conversations get construed or misconstrued as it gets out to different areas. Certainly, excessive fluoride would be very, very bad.
Regina: Anyway, so let’s get to actually some history because we ask this to all of our guests, because I’d like our listeners to understand how you actually get into science or how you get into STEM, which is science, technology, engineering, and math. So, I wanted to ask you Eric, what field of STEM were you educated in and how did you get into that? What was your “ah hah” moment as a child or as a young adult?
Eric: I think maybe my “ah hah” moment was I liked smashing things with hammers.
Jordan: Oh yeah!
Regina: Who doesn’t? Breaking glass is the funnest.
Eric: Well, in the backyard, pounding on rocks with a hammer. That was just always great fun and working with tools. So, as a really young kid, that was just appealing to me. As a teenager, I ended up getting a job for a construction company and decided that would the neat thing to do and go out, pound hammers, use power tools and nail guns. Nail guns are just lots of fun.
Regina: They are. I’ve seen Penn and Teller.
Eric: [Laughing.] Lots of big tools and lots of noise, that was pretty attractive. So, I decided at some point that I didn’t want to be the guy pounding the nails. I wanted to be the guy telling the guy how to pound the nails.
[Laughing.]
Regina: We all want to be management.
Eric: Exactly. Somehow being outside in January in Washington was probably not what I wanted to do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but —
Regina: So, you grew up in Washington?
Eric: I did. I grew up in Olympia and at some point decided to go to school. I went to Washington State University and was looking into their construction management program.
Regina: Go Cougs. I also went to Washington State University.
Eric: Go Cougs. It’s a great place to go. So, I was getting ready to get into that program, discovered for one extra semester of math I could get a degree in engineering, so went from construction management to civil engineering and was much better suited for that. Engineering is just the practical application of science and research to improving society, improving infrastructure, and safe roads, and safe water, and safe environment.
Regina: Safe bridges. We definitely need that in Washington.
Eric: [Laughing.] Everywhere. But just trying to provide the infrastructure that we use. That was kinda my connection, just the attraction from building things and then went through the engineering program, decided to go work for a big consulting company building big dams throughout the United States and then all over the world.
After a couple years of that, decided I didn’t want to travel five days a week. Changed my attention to working in the public sector and went from consulting to working on public infrastructure. Very quickly enjoyed providing the things that we enjoy every day.
One of my very first projects as a municipal engineer was putting a sidewalk in on a street that you’d see a young lady in a wheelchair going down the middle of the road. We put the sidewalks in and now that young lady can use the sidewalks instead of going down the middle of the street. That was really attractive. My career changed from Discovery Channel engineering to municipal engineering and protecting public health and keeping people safe and providing infrastructure for people to use. That’s my short background.
Regina: I think that’s really amazing because there’s so many places, even in King County, that there’s no sidewalks. People don’t realize how much that affects everybody’s everyday life. You can’t walk your baby in your stroller, your kids can’t ride their bikes, because they’re not gonna ride down these big roads. If you have more people walking around, you have a, sometimes a safer community. It’s a lot of social justice, almost, put in how you plan a city.
Eric: There very much is. That’s kind of the softer science of things, but there’s still science and research behind that.
Regina: No, absolutely.
Eric: What really attracted me to the engineering side was that the math and the chemistry and the basic physics that became really what we do. Now, I hardly use that anymore after 18 years of doing this business, but that’s the basis of what trains engineers. One of the benefits that I saw in my STEM education through college — and I don’t use third degree order differential equations anymore —
Regina: I don’t either. Not for this show.
Eric: [Laughing.] But, it teaches you how to think. So, the basis of the STEM program is a way to teach people how to think and how to rationally solve problems and to identify solutions that make sense and you can repeat them.
Regina: It basically teaches you what to do with your curiosity. I think so many humans are curious, even ones that don’t go into STEM. Once you actually end up in a science class, you’re like, oh, I can ask these questions and I can figure out how to find the answer or how to actually get some information to help with these questions.
Eric: That’s right. I don’t know how this works, but let’s figure out how to make this work and put it to a better use.
Jordan: I was always told curiosity kills the cat. So, I just take everything and just go.
Regina: [Laughing.] You’re like, I have a lot of feline traits.
Jordan: Stop, okay. Go, okay. Don’t ask questions.
Regina: Don’t ask questions. He’s totally lying, listeners. He has to learn to do improv.
Jordan: I definitely live my life in the gray area.
Regina: Yeah.
Jordan: I find all the loopholes in all the rules.
Regina: Well, and you have to be curious of what the person on stage is gonna do next, because you have to like anticipate it and react to it, right?
Jordan: Sure. But that’s just listening and reacting.
Regina: I think you’re a scientist deep down, Jordan. We’re gonna do this show for like 10 years and then you’re gonna go back and get a science degree.
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Regina: I have a question about like basically the history of Bellingham, or just cities in general. When did cities start regulating water, start cleaning the water so it was drinkable, maybe plumbing? When did that all happen? I seriously do not know.
Eric: That’s a good question, because it’s a pretty recent development. It’s only been in the last 150, not quite 200, years where people have actually taken drinking water and treated it or dealt with it to keep it from making us sick.
The Romans many, many years ago figured out ways to get water from point A to point B and those things still work. But, it wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that people figured out that you couldn’t have human waste in your drinking water supply and not get sick. So, you had the major cholera outbreaks and typhoid outbreaks in London that led to the science that said the communicable disease is not caused by some ethereal misting.
You’re not getting sick from the fog; you’re getting sick from the drinking water. A big portion of the public health and the social equity things and the things that created the urban cities in the late 1800s came from the need to have safe and reliable drinking water and waste disposal.
In the 1850s, when London started putting in the — treating drinking water and having the sewers be discharged instead of being collected in people’s basements, that that led to a major change.
Regina: [Gasp.] Wait, what?
Eric: So, London, and this is pretty well established —
Regina: It’s always London.
Eric: Before they had common sewers, it was either just dumped in the street or they would have what they would call the night soil, the solids portion of human waste would be collecting in the basement.
Regina: The night soil. I’m going to call it that from now on. Thank you Eric. [Joke/joking.]
[Laughing.]
Eric: Night soil collectors would go in and remove the night soil from people’s basements and haul it out and use it for fertilizer.
Regina: Oh my god, this could totally be a sci-fi fantasy book called the night soil collectors.
Eric: The night soilers.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: Eh, might want to work on that title. [Joke/joking.]
Eric: They’re coming. They’re coming. [Joke/joking.]
[Laughing.]
Regina: That is amazing.
Eric: So that started the idea of creating the sewer system, which led to a drastic improvement of public health in many highly urbanized environments: New York City and London and throughout Europe.
Regina: Right. That’s amazing.
Eric: In the late 1890s, people figured out that chlorine could kill bacteria. They knew that bacteria was in the water supply and so a couple of smart guys, a couple of smart engineers from Washington State figured out that —
Regina: Really?
Eric: Washington State University. No, I’m just kidding.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: I was gonna say, something about the Cougars coming in. Go Cougs!
Eric: They figured out a way to add chlorine to drinking water supply. When they did that, they were able to eliminate the bacteria that was making people sick in their drinking water.
Regina: So, this happened in the ’70s you said?
Eric: 1890s.
Regina: Not in the ’70s. [Laughing.]
Eric: In the 1890s and they figured that out, but it didn’t start to become widely used until 1910. The technology that we use today to use chlorine to disinfect water really didn’t come into effect until the 1940s.
Regina: Okay.
Eric: It took not quite 100 years, but then you had this basic level of providing safe, reliable drinking water and efficient ways of disposing of our waste in the water supply.
Regina: But that was because there were still rural people that had wells and stuff, right? You’re talking about like city systems, or even in the city systems that didn’t happen until 1940?
Eric: Yeah. In 1940, it was kinda of a newer thing to get urban environments up onto that high level of drinking water. In Bellingham, we would look at the wastewater treatment system. The city was doing basic screening of our wastewater up until the 1960s. It wasn’t until the 1960s or ’70s that we finally put a primary treatment system in.
Regina: See, I knew there was ’70s in there.
[Laughing.]
Eric: It wasn’t until the 1980s that added what we call a secondary treatment. So, it’s only been a recent last 20 or 30 years we’ve added a higher level of treatment to protect the bay.
Contrast that with Victoria, which is just kind of the basic primary level, letting it go. That’ll change.
Regina: Wow. All these decades, this is happening. What did people do? How did they get their water then?
Eric: How they get their water is maybe different than how the water is made safe. The two things kind of went hand-in-hand. One was keeping it safe and then getting it to people’s homes. So, they had to go put pipes and pumps and treatment plants and ways to get water to people’s home.
Sometimes we’ll say that water is free, but we charge you for delivery. You can get all the free water you want, but I’ll bring it to your house 24/7, 365 days a week, and you can just turn the tap on and it will come out and it’s safe to drink and you can drink that water. That’s kind of the difference, right? At least in my brain.
Regina: 1899.
Eric: 1890s.
Regina: If I wanted to drink water at my home, I wanted a jug of water, what would I do? How would I go get that?
Eric: Depending on where you live, sometimes you would go to the communal well. So, in the urban environment — urban London — you went to this community well. It was very easily polluted. So, you had these massive outbreaks of communicable diseases because everyone was using the same polluted water supply.
They decided to fix that, treat the water, and they shut the wells down. Well how do people get their water? Well, now they’re gonna find a different way to do that.
Rather than the well that’s contaminated by human waste in the middle of town, you’ve gotta bring water from a different source into the community.
Regina: Were there like water delivery trucks like there were milk guys?
Eric: You know, I don’t know how that was done.
Regina: I’m like, how did this work?
Eric: We do the same kind of thing today though. We don’t let you put a septic system on top of your drinking water well. There has to be separation. Those are basic principles that were completely foreign to people in the 1820s. That was just a novel concept. Today we take it for granted, but that’s how that was done.
Jordan: I heard that back in the day in the 1800s and even 1700s, that when beer was being made that a lot of people would think that beer was from the gods or something, because they were boiling the water and they didn’t know that just boiling the water would get rid of all the contaminants or whatever. But they actually thought that beer was saving them. So people were drinking beer instead of water.
Regina: Even to the childrens?
Jordan: Yeah.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: I watched a thing on the Discovery Channel or something. It was How Beer Saved the World by Mike Rowe or something like that.
Eric: Well, the British navy was famous for that. Drinking rum rather than the water, because the rum wouldn’t go bad and the drinking water would get foul.
Regina: So, we’re gonna take a quick break actually. Then, when we come back, I want to talk more about this idea of — okay, once we have transportation for this clean water, I want to talk about how we make it clean, these sewer plants and — what are they called, waste treatment plants?
Eric: We have water plants and wastewater plants.
Regina: Okay. We’re gonna talk about those two plants and what’s the difference. We’re also gonna talk about the difference between water quality — or the different water quality topics you were talking about.
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? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
? Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
? Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
? Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
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? And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large automobile?”
? And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”
? And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”
Regina: Welcome back to Spark Science where we’re talking to Eric Johnston about water quality. So, I want to actually take this time to talk about, when you hear the term water quality, which we’ve been hearing in the news and everything, what does somebody who actually does this for a living, what do you think about, and like all the nuances?
Eric: So, water quality, it means two things to me, particularly in Bellingham where we talk an awful lot about and do a lot of things to help improve surface water quality. Water quality of our lakes, of our creeks, of our saltwater of the bay, that’s critically important.
The other portion is drinking water quality and sometimes the two get used interchangeably and synonymously, but they’re kind of two different things.
The water quality means environmental health, and how healthy is the environment. How healthy are the creeks? Is the water temperature high enough? Is there enough dissolved oxygen? What’s the algae doing in the lake this year? What’s the nutrient content in the saltwater bodies? How is the health of our environment being reflected in the water quality of the creeks, how muddy they are, all those types of things play into that.
Regina: If there’s like a shopping cart in it, stuff like that.
Eric: Yes, that would be bad. That would be unhealthy. [Laughing.]
Regina: I’ve seen that in many different cities, so I’m just saying.
Eric: We see that to some extent in Bellingham. We try to take action to that. The city and the community places a very high value on water quality and for good reason. We spend millions of dollars every year to help protect and keep our surface water quality to the high standard that’s expected.
The other aspect is drinking water quality. When we say drinking water quality, what that means is the water that comes out of my tap, is it safe to drink? Can I trust it? Can I rely on it? Does it taste good? Does it look good? All those things that we would expect out of tap water. So those two kind of become separated, but often times they can be used interchangeably, fortunately.
So, we can have a very high quality drinking water and still need to be concerned about the quality of the water that that source is coming from. We see that with Lake Whatcom. So, Lake Whatcom, we get concerned about the water quality of the lake. We’re concerned about high phosphorus loading, which leads to high nutrient loading.
Regina: How would somebody notice that without actually going and taking samples? Or they couldn’t?
Eric: You probably wouldn’t. So, from the surface, Lake Whatcom looks beautiful. It’s blue, it’s clear, it’s good to swim in, you can take your boat out on there, you can enjoy the esthetics of the lake. We are increasingly concerned about the health of that lake by adding higher levels of nutrients, which allow for more organics to grow in the lake, and as those organics die off then that consumes the oxygen that’s in the water, and we get low dissolved oxygen levels. When that happens, then that affects fish, that affects the quality of the water, that affects lots of different things.
So, it’s important to keep the water quality as high as we can. So, the community, the city, the county, and the government agencies around the lake, the water/sewer districts, are doing many, many things to help improve and maintain the water quality of that lake.
We see that with, you can’t dig a hole in your backyard in December. That’s to prevent the erosion that could put nutrients into the lake.
Regina: Wait, so you — [Laughing.] I did not know.
Eric: In the watershed, there’s a specific set of laws —
Regina: Where is the watershed?
Eric: It’s the area directly around the lake. Any area of land that, if a drop of rain fell would go towards the lake would be the watershed.
Regina: Okay, got it.
Eric: So, within that particular area, there are very strict controls on what people can do.
Regina: Like burying their cats and stuff.
Eric: Yeah. [Laughing.]
Regina: I mean, these things happen, right?
Eric: They do, they do. So, we get concerned about the construction practices that result in runoff and wanting to find ways to reduce the amount of nitrogen, to reduce the amount of phosphorus, to reduce the amount of soil erosion that’s going down into Lake Whatcom. By reducing that down, we help to improve the quality of the lake.
That’s got the attention of the city, and the county, and the state, and the federal government to a large extent to help preserve and protect the quality of that lake.
Regina: And you work with fishing people, right?
Eric: Yes. We work with lots of different interest groups. Because the lake is not just a source of water for the community. It’s also a very valued source of recreation, for fishing, for people boating, for just enjoying the esthetics of the lake. It’s a reservoir that gets used for many, many purposes. So, it’s important to reflect all of those, and find a balance for all those interests.
The other aspect is drinking water quality. As we were talking earlier about the need to help protect public health. So, we take water, comes out of the lake, and it goes through a pipe that’s about a quarter mile long. Takes water off the lake at pretty low level within the underwater, comes into the water treatment plant and we do some things to it and then send it down through a series of pipes into your home. We call that the water treatment plant.
So, the water that’s in the lake is pretty, very high quality water in terms of perspective of drinking water. Compare Lake Whatcom to the Mississippi River or — [Laughing.]
Regina: Do we want to do that?
Eric: We don’t. We don’t need to do that, because Lake Whatcom is of a much higher quality water than many other places. But it still needs to be treated. We still need to do things to keep it safe for people to drink.
So, what we do is we remove some of the particulates, the turbidity. There’s a scientific term for you.
Jordan: Turbidity.
Regina: Turbidity. Spark Science.
Eric: It’s a measure of clarity.
Regina: I think we’ve actually, we’ve had that term before on the show. I don’t remember which episode, but go ahead.
[Laughing.]
Eric: So, to explain that, if you were to look at the Skagit River when it’s flooding, the water looks brown. That is a very high turbidity. You can’t see anything through it. Lake Whatcom is very low turbidity, but we do need to remove and control that.
We have to disinfect the water, which means we take and we add chlorine to it to kill the bugs and bacteria that are in that water supply. We have to do that in a way that is enough to kill the bacteria, is not too much to cause people to get sick. We have to do certain things to control the amount of chemical reactions that happen in the system to control lead and copper from coming out and making people sick.
Regina: That’s the main source of our drinking water is Lake Whatcom.
Eric: That’s the only source.
Regina: That’s the only source.
Eric: That’s the only source that we have.
Regina: Okay. What feeds into Lake Whatcom? Is that like glacial water from like the mountains?
Eric: It’s rain water.
Regina: It’s just rain water?
Eric: It’s just rain water. We have all of the rain water that falls within that watershed, the basin. Water that would fall, it would go into Lake Whatcom.
Regina: Okay.
Eric: We have a secondary source that we use on occasion. We don’t use it very much, but allows us to pull water off the upper fork of the Nooksack River and divert water into Lake Whatcom. By and large, the vast majority of our water is just rain runoff that fills that reservoir up. There’s a dam on the lake that we help control it, which is why we call it a reservoir and not a lake. It’s got a dam that controls that. So, we call those — technically, scientifically — those are reservoirs.
Regina: Okay. I didn’t know this. I know there’s so many lakes that are fed by rivers. I’m not a geologist. Is that what that would be? I look to Jordan.
Jordan: [Laughing.] Yeah, I dunno about geology.
Regina: So, it’s basically rain water, but some Nooksack water goes into Lake Whatcom.
Eric: Correct. But, by and large, for the most part, Lake Whatcom is fed by creeks and that provides all the water that the city of Bellingham at 100 some odd thousand people use for drinking water every day.
Jordan: I can believe that, because I lived in Sudden Valley for like 8 years and I don’t think my lawn was ever dry.
[Laughing.]
I can totally believe that.
Regina: And you did not dig any holes in December, was it?
Jordan: Not that I recall.
Eric: October through April.
Regina: Okay. When it rains —
Eric: When it rains, that water goes in the reservoir. We control the level of the lake to make sure that we’ve got enough water to last us through the dry seasons. Last summer, people saw the lake go down lower than it normally has in years past. That’s affected by the drought. We take a very proactive approach to track and monitor the history of how rainfall events occur and make sure we have enough water in that reservoir to last us through the dry season that sometimes happens in Washington.
Regina: Yeah, well it happened last summer.
Eric: Yeah. It was pretty dry last summer. It was going down lower than it had been for many years. We needed to be aware of that.
Jordan: You just said, you’ve looked into the history of it. Is there like a pattern that you can kind of tell? Are we getting less rain now than we ever have or more rain now?
Eric: It’s a bit of a different pattern I think. Of a short history, it’s hard to gauge geologic history versus short-term operational history, but the last 20-30 years, from what I can see, and I’m not an expert in that hydrogeology world, but we see much more intense rainstorms in the fall and the springtime, and longer periods where we get no rainfall.
Jordan: So, it about evens out?
Eric: Well, we have enough water to drink. We have enough water to store. We’re certainly not decreasing in the amount of water we have available to us.
Regina: We’re very lucky in Washington State.
Eric: We very much are, but the challenge is to manage that in a way that can last us and meet all of our needs.
[? Talking Heads playing Once in a Lifetime ?]
? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
? Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
? Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
? Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Jordan: Is there a way that maybe we could just buy up all the houses that are on the coast of the reservoir, and just say, hey we’re gonna raise up the creek a little bit, and we’re gonna raise up Lake Whatcom, about 20 feet.
Regina: Those houses are affordable, so maybe the city could do it.
Jordan: Yeah, right? That’s what I’m saying.
[Laughing.]
Regina: He looks so scared. Eric is looking very, very scared.
[Laughing.]
Eric: Absolutely. I think before we start buying houses to store more water, we recognize that we have plenty of water. We have absolutely no need to do that. There’s enough water in that lake to do all the things that we need to do.
Regina: Do you still have enemies in Sudden Valley? Is that what this is about?
Jordan: No.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: I know there was always, in Sudden Valley, I don’t know if it was more or less, but there was always talking about there’s algae on the dam or whatever. We had watering schedules, and don’t wash your cars.
Regina: I don’t wash my car ever anyway.
Eric: Yeah, all those things are done specifically to help keep the lake water quality as good as we can make it. There’s a long term plan that will help improve that. That means not washing your car and using the low phosphorus, low nitrogen fertilizers in your yard. That means not digging holes in the rainy season and doing things to we all can do at our homes to help protect that quality of the lake.
Regina: And not burying your pets.
Eric: Because the results on the algae that you see or hear about and that’s problematic. Because when that algae dies, it kills the oxygen, which impairs the health of the lake.
Regina: So, before we go into the sewer treatment plant, because our listeners know Jordan and I like to talk about poop, but before we talk about that, I want to talk about — so we get our water from Lake Whatcom, but there are so many stories in national news right now about drinking water problems in the quality of like Flint. I just have this article right here about D.C. drinking water that was apparently very bad as well.
I know you keep up on this, so can you tell our listeners kind of maybe a little bit about Flint, maybe a little about other cities that are having similar issues and why we are not going to have those issues.
Eric: Absolutely. That’s a great message. The city of Bellingham has great water and many communities do, but the issue that’s happened in Flint most recently, and was a problem in D.C., and was a problem in many communities, is the amount of lead that can leach out of plumbing fixtures.
What can happen within a water supply is that, as the chemistry of the water changes, that affects the metals that are in the pipes that bring the water to your tap. What happens with lead is that there’s lead in the solder that connects the copper pipes together. These the plumbers that solder joints together with a torch and a coil of lead. That was allowed and was common practice until 1989 or so.
In 1991, there was a federal regulation that was passed that limited the amount of lead that could be allowed in a water system. Lead is a terrible thing to have in your body. Any amount of lead, particularly for young children and for the elderly, is a terrible thing to have.
The goal is zero lead, but the federal government set a limit of 15 parts per billion lead content in the water supply. 15 parts per billion is a couple of grains of sand in a 5 gallon bucket full of sand, so it’s not a large amount, but even at small quantities, lead is a problem.
In Flint particularly, they had lead levels that were measured in the hundreds and even thousands in parts per billion.
Jordan: Wow.
Eric: So, massive amounts of lead on a comparative scale. Federal law says above 15 parts per billion, you have to do something to prevent that. In Flint, they were getting levels that were above 100 or very, very high.
Regina: Right. And this article was talking about how in D.C., it was even, they had higher numbers.
Eric: Very much so. It was not uncommon for many, many communities to deal with that problem. This is the science connection to that. Science researchers were observing problems in the medical industry. We need to deal with this, what’s causing this. Well, this is being caused by lead. Well, where’s the lead coming from? It’s coming from somebody’s drinking water. That leads to the engineers, and the scientists, and the regulators saying, we need to solve this problem. Let’s regulate this and take care of that problem.
It’s the same thing we talked about earlier in terms of the health of the water, the addition of disinfectants and chlorine to prevent cholera. Lead is the same issue. Science led to a need to minimize the health effect and get lead out of the system.
The regulations got put into place. Bellingham is nowhere near even close to the issues that Flint and D.C. were seeing. Our 90th percentile, so 90% of the samples we take for lead are at 4 parts per billion in our most recent year.
Regina: Wow, so we’re even better.
Eric: Our drinking water quality is exceptional when it comes to that. One of the things that Bellingham does is we are aggressive in going after the lead. So if we know of a piece of lead in the system and we find it as we’re out doing maintenance, we will remove that lead from the city system.
What we’ll do in testing for the lead is we find the worst case houses or the houses that we think might be the worst case and those are the ones that we test. We test them in the worst possible scenario. So, rather than letting the tap run for a few minutes and then taking the sample, we tell people — this is what the regulations suggest, in fact require — is that you don’t run the water tap at all for 6 hours and then you take the first sample. That’s what we do in Bellingham. We’re after the worst-case scenario. We’re very confident that we can say our drinking water is safe and here’s why and here’s the test results.
We do things at the water treatment plant to help prevent that. So we adjust the pH, we increase the pH to about 8, and we increase the alkalinity to about 22 parts per million, and that helps control and minimize the chemical reactions that occur inside the pipe systems that result in lead from leaching out of the water and getting into your tap.
Again, there’s a connection back to science that says, here’s the chemical properties that can result in lead leaching and getting into drinking water. We can adjust the water quality that’s naturally around a little less than 7, we can increase the pH to a little more than 8, that reduces that potential for that chemical reaction to occur.
Regina: So, how did it get so bad then in these other places? Is it just that we’re better at attacking or addressing these issues when other people were not?
Eric: I can’t say, again, the failings of government in Flint, I won’t really get into that.
Regina: Since you are a government employee.
[Laughing.]
Eric: Well, there are government employees, and then government employees. Bellingham is a great community to work for because we place great value on doing the things and being proactive with that.
But, in Flint, what happened was they changed the water supply and the pH dropped. The pH went from about an 8, which is where they’d want to be, and they were adding a certain chemical called an orthophosphate to control that lead release. They changed water supplies. The pH dropped to 7. So you had a 10-fold increase in pH, more acidic. Then they stopped adding for whatever reason the orthophosphate. I won’t comment as to why that happened. But that’s what resulted in the lead being leached into the water system.
In Bellingham, we’ve had a very constant and stable supply, and we have not had a change in that chemistry, where it’s a very constant stable. You can see our lead levels decreasing over the last 20 years since those regulations got put into play. So, we’re being very proactive with that. We want to solve that problem by doing what we can do and balancing all of the mix of things we do with drinking water to keep it safe, keep it healthy, keep it clear, keep it usable for our local breweries, and the food processing companies.
Regina: The breweries are really important.
Eric: So, we want to keep an eye on that, but we are pretty aggressive in making sure our water is safe to drink. We’re gonna add another $15 million worth of improvements in the plant this year to help control another set of chemicals that are proving to be problematic or are getting bigger in quantity. We want to get those out of the system as best we can.
Jordan: I have a quick question. Maybe there’s a correlation between the two. I have a few different houses. Two of them have —
Regina: He’s a real estate mogul.
Jordan: Two of them have like the old school pipes with the lead. The new one that I just built last year has all brand new plumbing and it’s all pipes — or all the, what is it, flexible PVC pipes, or whatever it’s called.
Eric: Pecks.
Jordan: Pecks. It’s got pecks. My house has pecks. [Laughing.]
Regina: Right, somebody’s got to.
Jordan: Do you think the lead would be more prevalent in older cities?
Regina: In older houses too?
Jordan: Well, yeah, and like in high rises that are 80 years old, or I don’t know how old a high rise is, but if it was 80 years old, do you think that would be more problematic?
Regina: Like the Bellingham Herald building.
Jordan: Well, in like New York City. They just have to take down all their pipes and start clean?
Eric: It really depends and age is not always the best indicator. So, the tier 1 high risk areas to testing are construction that was in the 1980s. So, in the 1980 construction, because that’s more recent. When 1992-93, when the first regulations came out, those tier 1 homes were the homes that had been there only about 10 years.
So, if the water chemistry doesn’t change, a home that’s been there for 20 years has got some, the lead that will leach out has either leached out or it’s got a protective film over it. So, older homes from the ’50s, ’60s, or ’40s, or older buildings, if the water chemistry doesn’t change, then those reactions have probably peaked out or maxed out, or you’ve developed scale over the inside of the pipe to prevent that lead from leaching.
A newer home in the 1980s with copper pipes and lead solder wouldn’t have the time to develop that same protective coating and would be fresh and new and it would be leaching out at a pretty quick rate.
After 1990, after 1990s, new construction used lead-free plumbing fixtures. Those rules changed again in the early 2000s and they went from lead-free being consider less than 8% to less than 0.25%, so construction that has occurred since early 2000s, there’s no lead to speak of in the home.
Regina: So, we’re gonna take a break and during the break I’m going to ask you about my home. When we come back, we’ll talk about the sewage plants, and then we’ll also talk about how does pop culture portray your field.
[? Talking Heads playing Once in a Lifetime ?]
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
? Water dissolving and water removing
? There is water at the bottom of the ocean
? Under the water, carry the water
? Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
? Water dissolving and water removing
? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
? Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
? Into the blue again, into the silent water
Regina: Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re here with a civil engineer and a city employee, Eric Johnston. Is that an okay title for you?
Eric: That’s an awesome title.
Regina: Okay.
Jordan: He’s probably the most professional looking person we’ve had on.
Regina: That’s true, that’s true.
[Laughing.]
For our listeners, he has a tie. You’ll see pictures. We’ll put them on Instagram for you.
Jordan: He’s got a name badge.
Regina: He does. On StarTalk, they have this lightning round thing where they ask questions and the host, who is Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, answers the questions. I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna ask you the questions, and you’re going to answer them as briefly as you can.
Then we’ll talk about poo water, sewage, and then we’ll talk about pop culture.
Jordan: Does our Brita filter actually do anything?
Eric: Yes it does.
[Silence.]
[Laughing.]
Jordan: Excellent. What’s it do?
Eric: So, Brita filters are activated carbon filters and they can remove a number of chemicals and byproducts. If they are rated to do so, they can remove lead from your drinking water. They can help remove the chlorine that is residual in the drinking water as well. They can have some absorption of some minerals and some other chemicals in the water. So, activated carbon does a good job of going an extra level to improve your water.
Jordan: Could I use that same application for like fish tank filters? They have the activated carbon fish tank filters. I could just run it in there instead of using a Brita filter?
Eric: Could. [Laughing.]
Regina: I don’t know. I would think that Brita would be regulated somehow better than aquarium filters.
Eric: In one sense, our water treatment plant is just a really, really big Brita filter.
Regina: That’s the best answer to these questions. I love it.
[Laughing.]
I’m gonna ask one and then I’m gonna let Jordan ask another one. He can pick on his own. Does logging around the lake impact water quality? So, our Lake Whatcom where we get our water.
Eric: Lots of land development activities affect water quality. So, anytime there’s a change to the natural environment, there’s effects to that. So, logging has one effect, development has one effect. Sometimes those affects are positive and negative. So, does logging affect the health of the lake? Yes.
Regina: But our big Brita filter takes care of a lot of it.
Eric: Again, we need to separate water quality health of the lake from our drinking water. Our drinking water is always gonna be safe to drink. We need to do things to improve health of Lake Whatcom.
Jordan: Is taste a good indicator of quality?
Eric: Yes. So, quality — there’s lots of different ways to measure quality. One way for people to — is their water quality or not is the taste. Does taste necessarily indicate that it’s safe to drink? No. But a good tasting water is a quality water, and Bellingham is consistently been rated as a very quality water from taste. This year we won the regional contest for taste test and we beat out Everett and some of our competitors.
Regina: Take that, Everett.
[Laughing.]
Eric: Bellingham water tastes great.
Jordan: It’s like beer tasting.
Regina: Awesome, we won something. I just want to win something.
Jordan: I didn’t even know there was some sort of thing.
Regina: What are the contaminants and issues that we face locally and are they specific or unique to Bellingham?
Eric: Well, unfortunately it’s nice to not be unique. So, in the world of engineering and public health, nobody wants to be first. We all want to do things that are proven to work.
Regina: Yes, if you’re not first, you’re last.
Eric: We don’t want to be first or last. We want to be kind of in the middle. That’s a very safe place for civil engineers to be. The first people to build the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge, well it fell down. That was bad to be first. We want to be the second people and get it right.
Regina: That was the wind’s fault.
Eric: Well, yeah. Well, they didn’t know, but you know, that’s fine.
Regina: It’s fine.
Eric: Engineering is fraught with pushing something forward, having it fail, and then correcting that. So, the issues that Bellingham faces are not unique. In terms of our drinking water quality, they are the same issues that many municipalities face. We work very cooperatively with regional and national organizations to address our problems the same way other people do.
One thing that is unique about Bellingham is we’re gonna be the first municipal water supplier in the state to add a new pre-treatment system to our water plants. We’re gonna use the dissolved air flotation, which means putting little tiny bubbles of air into a water column that will attach and bind onto organics or some algae that comes out of Lake Whatcom, float that to the surface, and take it off the water. Then, take the cleaner water off of the bottom before it goes into our treatment system.
Regina: That’s gonna be awesome to watch. We need to video this.
Eric: It’s gonna be great. Give us about two years and we’ll be there. What that’s gonna help us do is help us to remove a potentially cancer-causing problem chemical that’s in the water system that comes from how we treat water. We’re seeing as we help control the lead, as we see with the chemicals we add, as we see lower water usage, and the need to add additional chlorine to the water supply to keep it safe to drink, we’re seeing an increase or rise, a slow rise in disinfection byproducts, or a class of chemicals called trihalomethanes. There’s more science for you.
Regina: Yeah, I don’t know anything about any of this.
Eric: This will help us control those and minimize those and get us to the point where water is continuing to be safe. We’re nowhere near the regulations or the limits, but we don’t want to even come close to them. So, we’re gonna put that system in place today to keep that in — prevent that from happening in the future.
Regina: Cool.
Jordan: Alright. What’s your mother’s maiden name?
Eric: McIntire.
Regina: Oh, no.
Jordan: What’s your birthday?
Eric: July 4th.
Regina: No, no, no!
Jordan: Social security number?
Eric: I’m not gonna tell you.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: You handed me this thing earlier and I found it quite intriguing, that the Bellingham tap water beats out many of the national water bottle — or bottled water things.
Eric: Yes.
Jordan: I’m looking at the numbers are actually — they look like numbers with zeros and stuff.
Eric: Yeah. [Laughing.] We have great drinking water. In fact, a couple years ago, we had our lab staff go get some bottled water from the store, just a couple random brands, and our drinking water coming out of the tap is as clean and lacking of chemicals as any of those bottled water supplies.
Jordan: Remember, Water Joe?
Eric: I don’t.
Regina: What?
Jordan: It was caffeinated water.
Regina: Oh my God, yes.
Eric: Oh, no. That was, no.
[Laughing.]
Regina: That sounds awful.
Eric: Sugar-free caffeinated water.
Jordan: I don’t remember what — it was just called Water Joe. They sold it at our high school. How did you not know?
Regina: No, as soon as you said that, I started to remember. If you just add sugar, then it’s pop.
Let’s get to our sewage treatment plant, because when Jordan and I were children, we had one field trip to the sewage treatment plant. Do you remember that?
Jordan: Oh yeah.
Regina: Yeah, it was great. I think we’ve already talked about this trip on this show, but where’s our sewage treatment plant and why is it awesome?
Eric: Well, it’s down in the south side of town. It’s on the west side of Fairhaven. We call it the Post Point Wastewater Treatment facility. So, it’s just a little bit south of the train station down there. There’s an open off-leash dog park down there and a little bit of trail that goes around it.
Regina: Yeah, I took my brother’s dog there.
Eric: That’s our wastewater treatment plant. It uses a biological process to remove pollutants that come down in the water supply. Interesting enough, the wastewater that comes in the plant is about 95% just water. That 5% are the extra things that end up in the water supply.
Regina: I think our past guest called them solids.
Eric: Well, yeah. Biosolids. Our plant is pretty good. It’s consistently been awarded awards from the State Department of Ecology for being a great wastewater treatment plant. They do a good job of that.
Jordan: What’s the name of that award?
Eric: The wastewater award.
Jordan: Dang it! [Laughing.]
Eric: But the guys are really good about it. When Ecology comes, they give us the golden plunger, is what they give us. They take a little plunger and paint it gold.
[Laughing.]
Regina: It could’ve been so much better.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: Somebody failed.
Regina: You are our only guest that tells us the large amount of awards your department has gotten. We’ve had no one. Maybe we’ve had no one who has gotten any awards.
Jordan: Maybe they just don’t have a government backing them up.
Regina: That’s right.
Eric: We’re proud of what we do. We like working with poop and it’s fun to do.
Regina: Yeah, it’s true.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: Do you think it would help — I don’t know if you do, but maybe this is an idea for you — the little dog park that’s around there — if there was like a little bin that they could just shove all their dog turds in the little bin and then it just, boom, instantly gets processed?
Regina: Yeah, like those camp trashes.
Jordan: Yeah, sure.
Eric: Just put it in the garbage can.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: Then it just gets processed.
Regina: You can tell all our Bellingham listeners that, please pick up your dog poop.
Eric: Please do. That’s a good point. We were talking about that earlier. Water quality is important. Picking up your pet waste helps improve our water quality.
Regina: Please.
Eric: Our wastewater plant, we just finished a $55 million improvement to improve the process and make it more efficient and help keep that water clean before it goes out to the bay. We’re just getting started now on a project for about 8 years from now to help deal with the biosolids a different way. So, we’re looking at dealing with the biosolids, which is actually not poop. It’s actually the left overs of the critters that chew on the poop. It’s secondary.
Regina: Ohhh.
Eric: That’s a whole other topic.
Jordan: It’s not night soil?
Eric: It’s not night soil.
Regina: Night soil. I swear to you, that book is coming out.
[Laughing.]
Eric: Anyways, we’re going to deal with that a different way and treat it more as a resource rather than a waste product, so that’s something exciting to see in the next couple years.
Regina: That actually is really interesting. I know there’s a lot of recycling and reusing that we talk about in Bellingham, so that would be — that’s very awesome.
[? Talking Heads playing Once in a Lifetime ?]
? Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
? Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
? Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
? Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
? You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
? You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
? You may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
? You may say to yourself, “My God! What have I done?”
Regina: What I want to talk about now, since we’re done, mostly, talking about poop is talk about how — Jordan’s shaking his head. He will never be done is what he’s trying to say.
Every single guest we have on here, we ask them, how does pop culture — this is like movies, TV, even comic books — how do those sources of media represent or portray your field? Is it good or is it bad, or both?
Eric: So, engineers get a bad rap. We get stereotyped as the government employee with the white shirt and the tie — oh wait a minute.
[Laughing.]
Eric: That’s what I’m wearing today.
[Laughing.]
Regina: It’s okay to be the stereotype. It’s okay. I like Star Trek.
Eric: Engineers, we kinda get a bad rap. To some extent, it’s deserved on us, that’s okay, but it’s not necessarily a glamorous profession to be in the municipal engineering side of things.
Regina: You don’t get to be in Entertainment Weekly and stuff like that.
Eric: No we don’t. The pop culture — John Oliver had a great thing on civil engineering. So, the pop culture when it comes to municipal infrastructure talks about blowing stuff up, right? So, the aliens come and they blow up the bridges, and they blow up the towns, and they blow up the cities. There you go. Godzilla comes and destroys the town. Well, that’s what pop culture does to infrastructure is it destroys it.
[Laughing.]
Regina: But it gives you jobs.
Eric: We can rebuild it, that’s right.
Regina: We can rebuild.
Jordan: I think the only thing I have that’s sort of pop culture-y is In the Army Now with Pauly Shore. Great movie, check it out.
[Laughing.]
Regina: You’re telling people your age, Jordan. Pauly Shore fan.
Jordan: I didn’t say I was fan. I said it was a movie.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: His brother was a pool man, so they were like, let’s just sign up in the army. We’ll do water treatment. They ended up being like the first people shipped over to wherever they were needed, because people needed water, because it was like a desert area.
Regina: So, you were portrayed by Pauly Shore is what Jordan is saying.
Eric: I’ll take that as a compliment.
Jordan: And Andy Dick.
Regina: Andy Dick, oh no!
Jordan: The girl who played tank girl, I dunno.
Regina: Oh, she was just on Gotham. She’s so great. Ugh, I forgot her name.
Eric: I’m not a pop culture kind of a guy, I don’t even have a television in my house.
Regina: You’re so Bellingham. You’re so Bellingham.
Jordan: He lives in Gig Harbor.
Regina: That’s right.
Eric: What comes to mind is Erin Brockovich. You know the movie, Erin Brockovich. That’s very much water quality. The industry to keep our drinking water safe.
Regina: Civil Action.
Eric: Civil Action. All the John Grisham shows.
Regina: All of them. [Laughing.]
Eric: Pretty much, evil things that people do to the environment that affect our health. That is a reflection of pop culture in my world, yeah.
Regina: But you’re a warrior. You’re the one who isn’t portrayed in those movies actually doing something about it.
Eric: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.
[Laughing.]
Regina: You’re like, ah.
Eric: Yes. Warrior pose. Put that one out there. [Laughing.]
Regina: But it’s true, right? You don’t have the civil engineers. You don’t have the cities, one, portrayed well, and on the other hand, not even mentioned, honestly, in some of those movies.
Eric: That’s right. Very rightly so, the heroes for government are our life safety folks, our policemen and our firefighters who are on the cutting edge, literally risking their lives in some cases. The public works folks, they’re in the background.
The first responders are there right off the bat when the hurricane happens or when the building falls down. Public works is gonna be there two days after and we’ll clean up the mess for the next month. We’ll make sure your water is safe to drink and your sewage is safe to go out in the bay.
My employees, the city’s employees, your public works workers, they’re heroes too. That’s important.
Regina: I agree. So, is there anything else you would like to add? I’ve actually been asking guests this as well. What is the — I know you’re not a pop culture kind of guy, but is there anything in pop culture that you’re loving at this moment? I’m gonna ask Jordan this as well.
Eric: Anything I love in pop culture right now. I love the Avengers. [Laughing.]
Regina: I also like —
Eric: Avengers are awesome. I’m dying to see the two new movies. Between the Avengers and Star Wars, I think my life is just complete. How about that?
Regina: Oh wow. But there’s more coming though, so you have something to live for.
Eric: Something to live for. You know, the new Star Wars movie came out and sitting down in that theater and having that first big blast of the retro Star Wars logo and the music and the star destroyer.
Regina: Did you enjoy every minute of it?
Eric: It was awesome. I was loving it. It was great.
Regina: So, the whole movie you enjoyed?
Eric: Pretty much.
Jordan: Wow. I got nothing on that.
Regina: You got nothing? You’ve got no pop culture you’re loving?
Eric: You could never top Star Wars.
Jordan: Well, I’ve never seen any of Star Wars. I’ve never seen —
Eric: We need to be done. [Joke/joking.]
Jordan: “Out of my sight!” [Joke/joking.]
Regina: You must have to do some research. He does space —
Jordan: We just did, because of this, we just did a thing called heroes.
Regina: Correct, you told me about this.
Jordan: I was a superhero.
Regina: What were your powers?
Jordan: I was a supermom.
Regina: Was it height?
Jordan: I was a supermom. I would just clean up people and infections. Yeah, hero.
Regina: Yeah.
[Laughing.]
Jordan: Supermom! Her spit can like clean anything.
Regina: Yeah. I’ve been slowly obsessed with Zootopia, which we’ve talked about already. I know. I love that movie. It’s amazing.
Jordan: I didn’t even know it was a movie.
Regina: It’s awesome. You should definitely see it.
Jordan: I like the rolling safari where they look like balloon creatures, but they’re in the safari and it’s like, what would it look like if all these animals were around.
Regina: What?
Jordan: It’s on the YouTubes.
Regina: This is not for your child is what you’re saying.
Jordan: Well, I dunno. It is. It’s hilarious. There’s all these pink flamingos. They’re all standing in the water. Then there’s this alligator who’s just floating on the water. He’s like, “Om, om.”
Regina: Perfectly circular.
Jordan: Trying to bite the flamingos and then he ends up upside down in the water and he’s trying to wiggle his little feet and trying to get out.
Regina: Yeah, I’ll try to keep in mind not to ask you these questions in the future.
Jordan: Okay.
Regina: Thank you Eric for coming to speak with us. I want to thank you for keeping our water safe and for helping my fears and my hypochondria. What about you Jordan?
Jordan: I thank you for letting my mom still have a job.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Oh, yes, for our listeners, I forgot to mention that fact.
Jordan: Right. My stepmom works for Eric.
Eric: She’s great. We have hundreds of people who work for the city who every day are doing their jobs to make sure that all of our drinking water is safe. They really do appreciate — we do appreciate the work that they do. It’s important work. Your mom is one of them, so nice job.
Regina: Yes.
Jordan: Treat all of your public servants nicely.
Regina: I know. And see Zootopia. They mention that.
Okay, thank you for coming Eric.
Eric: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
[? Talking Heads playing Once in a Lifetime ?]
? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
? Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Regina: Thank you for joining us. Our producer is Eric Fabrueta [sp?] The engineer today is Nathan Miller. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae.
[? Talking Heads playing Once in a Lifetime ?]
? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
? Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
? Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
? Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
? Same as it ever was, look where my hand was
? Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
? Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
[?Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]