I want to respond to Mr. Dailey's letter regarding Delmarva water problems April 6. I am a semi-retired water treatment professional of nearly 30 years.
Delaware exemplifies why the problems with water are often too expensive to be corrected at the point of distribution for public water.
We have so many private wells, small municipal and community well plants it just isn't practical to correct logistically or financially at the source.
The people in the water improvement industry have been telling people this for four decades or more. "The day will come where you will have to be responsible for the quality of the water for your home." A very small fraction of water (less than 5 percent) goes to residential use (greatest percentage to commercial and industrial purposes), and less than 1 percent of that is used for drinking and cooking purposes.
Think about this: the average household of four people will use between 60-100 gallons of water, per person, per day. These are industry, government figures. Let's just say the number is 300 gallons or 75 gallons per person for all functions in the home. If you ask each person how much water they drink per day, few would say the recommended eight glasses of 8 oz. per day. This means this home with four people uses about two gallons per day total, out of their 300 gallons; get the picture?
It is the duty, responsibility of homeowners with private wells to make sure their well water is safe to drink. They should conduct a test each year on their well, and the county offers test kits at a very nominal cost.
So, the technology is available today which will protect water sources, private well or municipal source water. The individual needs to take responsibility for the safety of their drinking and household water.
If we expect that government could even fix the problems at the source, the cost once it got into the bureaucratic system would be far too great, not to mention almost impossible to fix. The fact is, the other consideration here in Delaware are all the ponds, waterways, canals, wetlands and marshes where you just can not lay conventional pipe for distribution. That is a bigger prohibitive problem than the cost to the taxpayer.
You can get more information by checking www.wqa.org, the international association of water treatment companies.
Bill Eckard
Lewes
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