water water everywhere, not a drop to drink.

Have you had enough rain yet?

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        You have to love the rain, when so many places have none. It is a resource we take for granted here in Ohio because it seems as if we have more than I share. But you must look at the potential every time we pick up a water bottle and then we are reminded at just how we have been taking this resource for granted. I have seen a dollar a bottle for the equivalent of a glass of water. Wow, wonder how much came down and ran down my gutter this morning. I would like to have just the amount of money in dollars, which ran out of my pond and on to the creek despite my best efforts of conserving. Surely I have lost hundreds of dollars if not thousands, just this morning.

     This water we buy in bottles for the most part is nothing more than city water purified through a reverse osmosis water purification unit then treated with ultraviolet light to reduce and eliminate algae growth, then filtered through a fine water filter capable of removing 99 percent of any organic or chemical matter. This is done through water derived from your municipal system or a regular well or spring. The filter is the trick. I have seen water bottles to be used in survival situations where you can essentially take mud puddle water and drink it. A-w-w this takes me back to my Halliburton days.

    Excuse me as I regress and offer supporting evidence as to how important water is when you don’t have any. After college I wasn’t able to find to many farm jobs that would compete with the wages the oilfield was paying so I took a job with a Halliburton fracing crew, and yes it was way back as we go on our way back machine here to the year 1976 , and I needed money and a job to keep me out the bars and from going crazy after 20 years of living on the farm. Anyhow I would go out nightly about the town, then  daily and quite early we would leave to frac an oil well site . Much the way they do it now, except we were only fracking one hole. Now they use ten times the water as they frac multiple holes at on the same drilling pad. The job was dirty, muddy, and still dangerous as you would watch the frac lines jump up and down under the pressure being exerted.

     The heat and the roar of the engines, would drive us laborers away from the fracing operations and we would gather a safe distance away in the heat. After a particularly long setup and a hangover from the night before I was in dire need of a drink of water, and the boss forgot to fill the water jug. How ironic was this ?Here we are pumping thousands of gallons of water down a well and polluting it forever with who knows what , and the essence of why we were here . Which is to provide oil and gas for humans is somehow mute as we now need that same water for humans first. We complained to the boss and he said you should always bring your own water to be sure. Yes he is right and wrong. It is his responsibility to provide the water and it is mine to make sure I have something just in case the dumb ass forgets. Back then we wouldn’t complain or you would lose your job. So we took turns at a mud hole that looked fairly clean on the side of the job site. I took the liner out of my hard hat and dipped it into the hole and retrieved enough water to keep me going. We had no choice. It was about 90 degrees and we were cooking. Eventually if you boil a teakettle without adding water it will go dry and that was what we were doing. It probably saved us from heat exhaustion or stroke. Water is important, even mud puddles.

     Back to the future and the San Diego fires and the destruction associated with drought conditions , one could easily see why we here in Ohio should take a second look at a resource that literally will fall money into our laps. If for no other reason than should we examine this topic, but for our own preservation. What if it was us suffering from the lack of water? What if it was us that needed the rain? Conservation efforts we take today could dampen or improve our situation to help get us through hard times or cyclical flows of precipitation especially in drought conditions. Building dams and pools where wildlife can visit and drink will help preserve our habitats as they are.  By creating more ponds, be it mud puddle size or larger we will increase the diversity of the wildlife that will visit there especially in hard times.

      Here is a thought I had, if say we install a stainless steel roof system on our houses that would collect and run through a primary filter all the rain water that would fall on your roof, this water would then go to a further treatment much like they do on bottled water where hopefully 99.9 percent of the water passes through and is stored in a tank in your basement for your house hold use. No chemicals added and no fluorine to cause possible illnesses, and have soft water to wash your hair. And when you run out just turn on the city water. If you think the city water or well water is cleaner you had better take a second look at what you are drinking. Municipalities tend to take their water from wherever they can regardless of the industrial plants upstream or the sewage treatment plants which discharge directly back into the same river they pull the water from. If you have a well in the same aquifer beside a river even if it is cased it, the aquifer can still be contaminated outside the bounds of the river banks. The EPA  has standards by which city water should be kept within, and the water is treated and is sanitary , but without the treatment you still need to boil. And why? Because of all the stuff in there.

    Maybe rainwater doesn’t look so bad. Maybe a porous roof system would allow rain to pass through but would keep the dirt and bird poop out something like a terra cotta two way system, where it could also be used as a fire preventer making your house safer and last longer. Hmm what a concept. Maker houses last longer look better, be safer, might just put a few contractors out of business selling their vinyl masterpieces. We could have cleaner softer clothes, and skin for that matter and save a bunch of energy in the process, by utilizing something that literally falls from the sky and on our heads. Doesn’t look so bad out there after all, does it?