Water as a pollutant

Laer, at Cheat Seeking Missiles, notes an article in which drinking water is classified as a pollutant.

In case you haven't read your most recent copy of the Capital Ag Press, here's the latest:

A court ruling that forces New York City to have a pollution discharge permit for drinking water the city pipes in from elsewhere may threaten irrigation systems in the West.

Let's pause here for a moment for the uninitiated. A discharge permit is what you need to get if you're discharging pollutants to the environment. Back in the 70s when the Clean Water Act went into effect, this was a good thing. Industries and municipalities were dumping all sorts of nastiness into the nation's waters - our waters - and it caused nasty things to happen, like the Cuyahoga River catching fire.

But that was long ago, and the big nasty pollutants and polluters are all under control. What's not under control are environmentalists intent on using these laws to bring down our nation, so they came up with the idea of calling water a pollutant. If New York City buys water from upstate New York and puts it into its pipe, these guys want New York to have to consider that water a pollutant and get a discharge permit.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain why it is that drinking water would be required to have a pollutant discharge permit.  In the absence of information, maybe some speculation will do.

I happen to work for a local water department, in the water quality section.  Because of this, I hear about the impact of various regulations on the water system.  Pollutant discharge regulations have had an impact on how we handle water during, among other things, flushing water mains to clean them out, and emptying a reservoir when levels of bromate got too high.

In the case of flushing, the problem is that chlorine and chloramine are both considered pollutants.  Now I could see the point if the water were being discharged into a river or lake.  A shot of chlorine could easily poison fish.  However, when we flush water mains, the water is discharged into the storm drain system.  The storm drains are those openings at curb level in the streets, into which water runs during (duh!) storms.  They also collect water from normal run-off, and anything that falls into the streets, or is thrown there, is liable to wind up in the storm drains. This includes waste from wild, stray, and non-so-stray animals.  (And some people, I suspect.) 

Now, suppose you pour into this mess some water with one or two parts per million of chlorine. Chances are, this chlorine will be below detectable levels before the water's gone ten yards.  It certainly won't make it to the Los Angeles river, never mind to the ocean.

But we have to add a compound to remove chlorine from water expelled during flushes anyway.  Fortunately, vitamin C does the job just fine, and (so far), it's not a pollutant.  (It's a food!)

When we had to empty a couple of reservoirs because of bromate contamination, one of the issues we had to deal with was the cloudiness of the water.  Cloudiness (turbidity, measured in Nephelometric Turbidity Units or NTU) is due to very fine suspended particles in the water.  The regulations demanded that water entering the Los Angeles river could not produce a significant rise in the cloudiness.  So the day before water discharge started, we had to measure the turbidity in the river, and then monitor the turbidity in the water being pumped out of the reservoir.

Fortunately, we were able to measure the turbidity in the river right after a thunderstorm in the mountains, so it was up around 50 NTU, and the reservoir water stayed nice and low until we started getting to the bottom, with accumulated sediment.  But there were a few periods where we had to pause the discharge, and then re-start with a measured baseline in the river down around 3 NTU.  Since we can serve water to customers when its turbidity is as high as 5 NTU, we were looking at a situation where water that we could legally serve to customers was too "polluted" to dump into the river.

So I doubt that water itself is a pollutant.  If New York City were dischrging distilled water, I feel quite confident that it would not need a permit. However, if the water were the same purity as distilled water, I suspect New York City would find something else to do with it.  (Maybe even make salsa.) 

The pollutant in question is stuff in the water, stuff we're perfectly content to have flowing through our water mains and into our glasses.