How Exactly Does Water Get to Homes - #Science

This figure shows an idealized version of a 'magic' water system drawn by many subjects.
Credit: Indiana University


Now there's a novel schematic.

New Indiana University research shows many Americans don't know how clean water gets to their homes and especially what happens after wastewater is flushed away, knowledge that is vital in confronting challenges including droughts and failing infrastructure that can lead to contamination.

The researchers asked about 500 university students to draw diagrams illustrating how water reaches the sink and how it is returned to the natural environment. Twenty-nine percent of the participants didn't draw a water treatment plant and 64 percent did not draw a wastewater treatment plan.

Science Daily:  How exactly does water get to homes?


The researchers didn't go from there to explain how the water system works since the point is many people don't know and the recommendation from that is obvious but the interested student can follow the original link.


From my own guesswork, water comes from a river or a reservoir and goes up to a treatment plant then goes to some complex system of piping, often old, to get to the distribution points in homes, offices, factories, etc.

It seems there must be a bypass to blow off clean water back to the source if too much pressure builds.

The output stage seems it must push grey or black water out through a parallel system of wastewater pipes from which they're delivered to a treatment plant and returned to the source.

It seems there must be grey water which can be purified and made clean again but there's also black water into which maybe a factory has pumped some chemical poisons.  By law, I believe that's illegal and the factory needs to manage that black water in some safe manner but we hear when there's been a failure at which time the intakes shut down on a river until the upstream pollution from that release has passed.  If you have lived in Cincinnati then you have experienced that multiple times and it seems typically from Pittsburgh which is upstream.


The system of complex piping which distributes the water is not well-understood by the Rockhouse but we do know a great deal of it is dangerously old with Flint, MI, being only one example of it.  There's no need for citations since there are multiple references to excessive levels of lead in the water in different cities.

That comes back to the Law of Evolutionary Potential since it's faster, easier, and cheaper to build a new city with new infrastructure but that's also practically impossible.  The alternative is to replace the existing infrastructure but it's too difficult and expensive plus it's hidden so people really don't know until it breaks.

The article may give some light to why it's permitted to stall in such a way since the research shows relatively few people have much awareness of how it works.