Part 1-a: My hometown water supply comes from the Lake Scranton System. This system obtains its water from the Lake Scranton, Elmhurst, Williams Bridge, Curtis and Hollister reservoirs. It also has six other sources on standby. The average water that is supplied on a daily basis is 19.7 million gallons. Pennsylvania American Water maintains a treatment facility on the Lake Scranton Reservoir is capable of processing 33 million gallons of water per day. This water supply is distributed for residential, commercial, and industrial use. Our wastewater is collected through interceptor lines and brought to one of the three Sewage Treatment Plants in Lackawanna County. Most of the interceptor lines are combined sewer type meaning they collect both storm water runoff as well as sanitary sewage generated by homes and businesses. The closest treatment plant to my house is the Archbald treatment plant. This treatment plant uses the sequencing batch reactor process. Also, this facility consists of grit removal channels, a mechanical bar screen, raw sewage lift pumps, sequencing batch reactors, an ultra-violet disinfection channel, a sludge thickener with polymer coagulation, aerobic digesters and a belt filter press. The capacity of the Archbald treatment plant is 6.0 million gallons per day.
Part 1-b: 
Part 1-c: I analyzed my water usage to see where I can focus to my limit to 2 gallons a day. Showering, washing dishes, and washing my hands were the three areas I focused on. I cut down my shower to five minutes, but still used 10 gallons of water. I failed right from the start, but I was still focused on reducing my water usage for the rest of the day. I washed my hands twice, by using hand sanitizer more often. This reduced 18 gallons to 6 gallons. I reduced the 18 gallons I usually use washing dishes to zero by not doing the dishes that day. In the future, I will wash more dishes at once and less often. I reduced my water usage from 73.73 gallons to 23.73 gallons. A 68% decrease in water usage. Geography has a huge role on water quality, quantity, and use. There is not access to clean water worldwide. Depending on location, climate, resources, and other factors depend on the access to usable water for everyday life. We do not have to work as hard to obtain clean water as does other counties such as developing counties.
Hey Nick, I’m Dorish and I’m currently at Penn State University Park studying aerospace engineering. It was interesting to read about the reservoirs and treatment plant you have in your hometown as mine is a little different since mine comes from many wells in South Bend, Indiana. I liked your graph on your water usage since it gave a really nice visual of how much water you actually used. This way, you were able to reduce everything easily simply by looking at the bars rather than just numbers and trying to figure it out. Your description on how geography affects water usage was really nice since you included how location, climate, resources, and other factors influence how much water is used for different people all over the world. Great post.
Check mine out if you’d like!
http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/02/09/water-trackage-and-usage/
– Dorish Nguyen
Hey Nick, I live in Wilkes-Barre so I know exactly of all the places you are talking about where your water is from. As you also did, I miserably failed the 2 gallons of water test. Instead of taking just a steady shower, I only turned the water on to rinse the soap off. I found this to use less than 10 gallons of water, but as I said I still miserably failed the experiment. The dish washing is something that I thought of as an easy way to reduce water, by either doing them all at once or by doing them by hand. If you’d like to take a look at our similarities you can check out my blog: http://sites.psu.edu/geog30/2016/02/09/module-4-water-usage-2/