Fort Worth Flush
The water supply chain for Fort Worth Texas area that I live in starts at one of these six lakes or reservoirs; Lake Bridgeport, Eagle Mountain Lake, Lake Worth, Benbrook Lake, Cedar Creek Reservoir and Richland-Chambers Reservoir. Once it is pulled from one of these sources it is taken to a water treatment facility where the water goes through processes to remove and kill the bacteria so it can then be ready to be pumped out to the public for safe drinking water. After we use the water the water flows through pipes till it reaches the Village Creek Water Reclamation Facility. Once it reaches this facility the waste water will begin a new treatment to remove the bacteria and diseases from it. After the water has been treated and tested it can end up flowing back into the Trinity River. In this facility they also have a Biosolids Program. This program takes out the biosolids in the wastewater and after intense treatments and studies, if it passes, it will be allowed to be used for agricultural benefits, fertilizer.
References
- City of Fort Worth. Accessed February 5, 2016. http://fortworthtexas.gov/.
Part 1-c
This challenge would not have been so difficult if I didn’t have to run my washer or shower today. Since a shower uses roughly 5gallons a min I failed miserably at the 2gallons usage for the day. Even if I took out taking a shower I still needed to run my washer to get clothes cleaned for the coming week. I don’t use a lot of water to cook but we do drink a lot of water in my house and my 2 dogs go through roughly 2 water bowls a day. If I were to use the motto that my mother likes to use, “if its brown flush it down, if its yellow let it mellow”, then I could have made this experiment work. I intended on making this experiment work but it is really hard when you need to clean clothes, shower, wash dishes and flush. If I was forced to live off of 2 gallons a day I could make it work but with the water available at my fingertips it makes it very easy to just use it.
Hello Tenaya, thanks for replying to my blog post and thanks for the input! I can agree with you that this challenge was really hard, especially when we have all the water we want at our fingertips. Also, seeing that your water can come from any of 6 different sources sounds like you live in a large populated area. You used less water in one day than I do which doesn’t seem like it would be hard. Looking at your calculations looks like I made a few mistakes on my own, seeing how my average was so high. It is also interesting to me that your waste management system will take the waste water and use it for agricultural purposes, which is very smart.
Hello Tenaya I am interested in the Biosolids Program you mentioned in the post. I think this program requires really high technology devices. So I made further research on this program. In China, we mostly focused on the quantity rather than quality of water we treated. So the government ends up building more facilities, occupying more lands rather than improving the quality and efficiency. My experiment failed too.
Here is my post on water management in Beijing, China. Maybe you can check out:
http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/02/06/43614/