Understanding Water Contamination and Purification Methods

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Early this morning, people scrambled to their neighborhood grocery store to load up on water. As words spread about possible contaminated drinking water supplies, shells begin to clear out of bottled water. This all comes after the chemical spill in the Delaware River, Up River in Bucks County on Friday. Can a home distiller help with toxic chemical spills? Over 8,000 gallons of toxic chemicals just got dumped into the Delaware River, and Philadelphia is freaking out. That's roughly 200 barrels worth. Let's quickly discuss the chemicals, answer this question, and, and then look at a few other water purification methods.

So, The chemical that spilled is a latex emulsion used in various consumer products. One chemical in it is butylacrylate, a clear colorless liquid that can irritate nose throat and skin and can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. We've been told that there were these three chemicals, and we can guess it's some of the others that might have been there. These all have CDC-defined exposure limits between 5 and 100 parts per million. If we run some very, very ballpark math, converting gallons, to liters, looking at the flow rate of the Delaware River, and assuming it mixes over the course of an hour, we get a concentration of around 14 parts per million. But these chemicals degrade and mix, so we should be dealing with way less than that. But we try to avoid even small amounts of bad things, so let's talk distillation.

Water distillation works by boiling water and then collecting the steam. Particulates like salt and heavy metals get left behind, but chemicals are a different story. It depends on their boiling point. If their boiling point is higher than that of water, then they get left behind when water boils. Although distillers, often have a boiling point a little above 212. But if we look at the chemicals from earlier, two out of the three have a boiling point that is the same as water, and some of the possible ones have much lower, meaning that they'll turn to gas along with water and not get removed.

So what about the other ad-home methods? A good carbon filter will remove 70 to 90% of most organic compounds, like these, and passing through multiple times will have an additive benefit. The best option, though, is to combine it with a reverse osmosis system, which generally gets over 90% by itself. But thankfully, the Philadelphia Water Department is continuously testing the water releasing updates and so far I've said that it's definitely safe until tonight and likely through the rest of Thursday at least. So stay safe.

Additional notes

Caption: What type of water do you drink? #chemicalspill #philadelphia #science #edutok Can water filters or distillers remove toxic chemicals?

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