Hometown water supply

My hometown is Beaver Falls, Pa. The Beaver Falls Municipal Authority is in charge of maintaining the water supply for 23 municipalities. All of our water comes from the Beaver River, which is formed by the meeting of the Mahoning and Shenango Rivers near New Castle. There are also several smaller tributaries, including the Connoquenessing Creek, Pymatuning Creek, and Brush Creek, that feed into the watershed that supplies our water treatment plant. We have two conventional rapid sand/mixed media water treatment plants that include chemical treatment, rapid mixing, flocculation/coagulation, primary/secondary settling, filtration, and disinfection. From the treatment plant, the water moves to the storage tanks. The storage tank in my township holds 1,500,000 gallons, which would be enough for roughly one U.S. citizen to survive for 26 years, according to the data from the module. The water moves through pipes from the storage tanks to my house. When the water is discharged from my house, it moves to the Brady’s Run Sanitary Authority plant, where a series of tanks is used to settle out the waste from the water and uses an all natural biological process utilizing a trickling filter to remove the fine solids from the water. The final result is an exceptional quality of water being discharged from the plant.

Water usage for one day

Flushed toilet 2 times: The average water usage is about 5 gallons per flush for older toilets, so I will use that amount, although I don’t think the toilets use that much water here. Since I flushed the toilet 2 times, that was 10 gallons of water used.

Took a 10 minute shower (included brushing teeth in shower): Penn State uses High Sierra showerheads, which approximately lets out 1.8 gallons per minute. My 10 minute shower was about 18 gallons.

The amount of water I personally used was about 28 gallons.

I indirectly used water through eating in the dining commons because they needed water to cook and clean. I am not sure how much water they use so I cannot include it.

Two gallons for one day

The areas of use for water include cooking, drinking, and cleaning. The priorities I set for water usage in this experiment are drinking and cleaning. Unfortunately, I cannot keep track of the amount of water used for cooking in the dining hall, so I will set aside a gallon for cooking and cleaning dishes. There are 128 ounces in the gallon I have left. In order to stay hydrated, I will use 24 ounces for drinking water, which is about 3 glasses of water. I will set aside another 24 ounces of water for cleaning (washing my face) and brushing my teeth. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to take a full shower with only two gallons of water. I have 80 ounces of water left and I will use that to save for the next day so that I can clean myself a little better. In a real situation, I would not be able to use a toilet to go to the bathroom, but since it is not appropriate to go to the bathroom elsewhere, I will continue to use the toilet. Other than going to the bathroom, I succeeded in using less than 2 gallons of water. I did not shower, but I used a minimal amount of water to wet a rag to wash my face. I also used a very small amount of water to brush my teeth. I wet my brush real quick and then washed it off real quick. I only drank 2 glasses of water, so I even saved some water in that area. For this experiment, I really didn’t do anything different than what I normally do, except for the showering. Typically, I shower once every other day anyways, so I wasn’t missing out on a shower. Geography is very important to water use. The location you are in determines how much water you have available and you need to be able to limit your water use based on that location. For example, the United States uses much more water than is available. Americans waste a lot of water because we take advantage of the fact it is provided to us very conveniently. We don’t think about it because it just comes out of a faucet. Other countries have to work for their clean water and therefore use a lesser amount because it requires a greater effort to acquire fresh water.