Sounds like the American project is failing its residents at basic needs level

It sounds like they had a brief service disruption and the underlying issue is already fixed. They just need to give the system time to flush out any questionable water. It's by no means ideal and seems like they should have had better backups (gravity, generator power) but doesn't seem to be a massive indictment of the system.

Hopefully, but let's not forget about the power crisis that Texas had semi recently which may continue to give Texas a bad name in regards to infrastructure for a long time to come. I doubt that the residents affected forget that quickly.

That because media coverage is generally anti-bitcoin mining. What many don't understand is that bitcoin mining at industrial scale incentivizes energy production, because the miners seek out cheap, otherwise underutilized energy (otherwise they aren't profitable).

During last July's heatwave, Texas's industrial bitcoin mining base "allow[ed] for over 1% of total grid capacity to be pushed back onto the grid for retail and commercial use.” [1] No other industrial-scale use of electricity can be turned off and back on when the grid needs excess capacity without harming that industrial production---you can't shut off a steel mill without enormous damage to production, or turn off a hospital without loss of life; but energy grid operators can sign contacts with bitcoin miners to have the right to dial them down to meet peak grid demand.

And yet, the NY Post article I sighted here spins the story anti-miners, missing the point: had the miner not been consuming power, the grid would have had 1% less to meet the peak heatwave demand. “There are over 1,000 megawatts worth of Bitcoin mining load that responded to ERCOTs conservation request by turning off their machines to conserve energy for the grid.”

Imagine if there were ten times as many miners there---they would have been able to provide 10% additional power to the grid during peak demand.

[1] https://nypost.com/2022/07/13/texas-bitcoin-miners-halt-oper...).

You really drank that koolaid.

Connect the public water utility to a bitcoin mining operation, with contractual rights to dial down/turn off the bitcoin mining and use that electricity as backup should the water treatment plant's other source of electricity fails. When they don't need the backup power it provides security to the bitcoin network, and when they do need it, its there.

If the same happened in a city in another country you just wouldn’t hear about it on international news.

From what I can tell, Houston is usually managed pretty well. For example, they had an extremely low death count from hurricane Harvey.

I'm failing to find any reference to this incident on any non US website. BBC, Deutsche Welle and the Guardian... All no.

Let me guess, the liberal left wing "Main Stream Media" are amplifying it as an attack on the proud patriots of texas.

Case in point, Sydney Au is starting water restrictions despite record rainfall due to quality of water in catchments.. Not that far from boiling water.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/environment-land-and-water/water-rest...

Yeah, nah, it is rather far from boil water notices tbh. Rather heavier rainfalls into mountainous bushclad terrain can significantly increase turbidity and faecal coeliforms in a reservoir.

So treating each cumec takes longer - filters clog faster, UV needs to be applied for longer...

Hence the water restrictions - throughput has to decrease to maintain quality.

Boil water notices occur when your water treatment has entirely failed.

> Boil water notices occur when your water treatment has entirely failed.

I don't know how it is where you live, but here, boil water notices generally happen because of mundane things well downstream of water treatment. Water demand too high, dropping pressure? Boil water notice. Water main breaks? Boil water notice. In this case, although I wouldn't describe it as mundane, the boil water notice occurred because of a temporary power loss resulting in a pressure drop, not because the water was actually known to be contaminated.

It's also hard to compare across water treatment standards. Are the allowed contaminants the same? For example here, no amount of PFAS contamination results in an advisory, even though it's well over the limits.

I think a better point would be a) there's no such thing as the "American" water system; water systems are virtually all designed, implemented, run, and administered by municipal and county governments, with anyone remotely rural on a well; and b) any minor water failures in the US are going to garner extra attention for the next couple years because of the Jackson debacle.

OTOH, I have well water for myself. ;)

EDIT: Also here's a boil water notice in New South Wales from flooding events, 22 days ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/residents-boil-drin...

> starting water restrictions

Not starting.

"The NSW Government has announced that Water Wise Guidelines have replaced Level 1 water restrictions [...] The restrictions have eased, but let’s stay water wise."

Not sure it's a story at all outside of Houston. When I lived in Atlanta, boil water advisories were pretty common because pumping stations losing pressure and a random assortment of other issues that plagued the neglected, but being rebuilt by court order, water system. Though stories about Atlanta's sewage overflows into the river sometimes made news outside of the local area, simple boil water advisories didn't.

Is it a headline in international news? I don’t think anyone elsewhere cares to be honest.

This isn't a sign of that, this is a sign that it's working as intended.

The Michigan lead pipes or whatever might be a better story to point to if you want to show a failure like the one you suggest.

When you already believe something, you can start seeing proofs everywhere.

Water grids malfunction. Some water management departments suck. Some are good. Some cities have better infrastructure than others.

Inevitably though, these are taken as "see! I'm right." Tories are evil. Democrats are useless. Communism doesn't work. Capitalism hates humans. Bureaucrats suck. Privatisation is a failure. Regulators are ne'erdowells. Etc. Etc.

One of the first principles of formal logic deals with this sort of thing. Reductio and absurdum. When a statement or logical method can yield every conclusion and it's opposite, it's the logic or assumptions that are false.

I don't actually believe it from this example alone but wanted to say it. Your reading is a little simplistic and condescending

Fair enough. I can see why you say this, and I would probably feel the same way if our positions were reversed. Perhaps there is a better way that I should have phrased this.

OTOH, I'm somewhat stumped. Some forms tend to be condescending or dismissive. Assigning motives, for example. Meta, like my response to your comment. Yet, motivated reasoning exists. Cognitive fallacies recur. Etc.

I don't want to be condescending or bad faith. But in these cases, I don't see much daylight between condescending and just not commenting. There is such a thing as adopting a worldview, and then suddenly seeing everything through that lens. As you say, you already hold the position that "the American project is failing its residents." When the water grid has a fault, it's proof of this. My contention is that if you had previously adopted an alternative worldview, you'd hold the recurring culprit (capitalism, bureaucracy, republicans, environmentalism, etc.) responsible by the same logic.

I get what you're saying but you should recognize a level of "meta" in peoples behavior as well rather than take for granted a kind of intellectual immediacy to what people say. I'm aware of the audience here and have intention to agitate. To be open with you. Also your line of thought can apply to really anything, not just the problem of crediting

I mean Canada had a bunch of people die from unsafe drinking water not that long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak

The article is very in-depth and shows a long list of failures, well into the disaster response. But it was also 22 years ago.

Here are all the current water quality notices in Canada right now.

There are dozens of them.

http://www.watertoday.ca/textm.asp

This only suggests that quality control and warning system are working. The 2000 case is infamous because both didn't work and caused deaths and permanent injury.

Depends. This sounds like an incident. If this is a regular occurrence then there's something that needs to be fixed, that is, funds need to be reallocated to redevelop core infrastructure.

It is not just America. The whole west is failing in differing ways, to differing degrees, and at different states; but the heading is generally the same. This is also just the start of a lagging problem. It’s civilizational cancer or HIV, not a laceration or broken bone. The whole immune system is unable to detect what is killing the body, let alone act against the threat to its existence. By the time it is obvious to the naive and short sighted that there is a problem, things will long have been terminal.

Or the Texas project anyway.

So why is water unsafe below a certain pressure?

Water grids are designed to flow in only one direction; a drop in pressure allows potentially contaminated water to flow backward into the pipes, e.g., from a crack that allows a small amount of water out into the surrounding soil.

I feel like no matter the pressure, if there is a crack and a dirty puddle outside then it will always contaminate the water

No, if pressure is higher on the inside it'll just constantly go from inside the pipe to outside it, and outside contaminants won't leak in.

Similar concept... clean rooms are positively pressured to keep germs, dirt, etc. from entering the room.

Isolation rooms are negatively pressured to keep bad stuff from leaving.

ooooo....

in new delhi, india back 7-9 years ago i was living in a pretty garbage area by my normal standards and one of the things we had to be careful about was when to use the water pump. do it during off time and the water from the tap would be green, it would stink and taste like vomit. that was a really really terrible experience and bad living standards. unless you are poor and cannot afford any other reasonably okay living place, one should not be living in those conditions.

> unless you are poor and cannot afford any other reasonably okay living place, one should not be living in those conditions.

??? Are you actually saying poor people do not deserve clean water?

no.. absolutely not. i have "actually lived" there so its not like that.

Come on, dude: he's clearly saying, "Yes, (of course, obviously) really poor people in the world we actually live in have to face dirty water and worse, but this is not acceptable."

So... some ignorant questions?

(1) Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc. IE, is there such a thing as nonpotable water that's still OK for domestic use?

(2) If there is such a thing, are there major cost or environmental savings to be had from running a nonpotable water grid?

My thinking is that treating water at home is not that hard. You can easily have one filtered tap at home. It's cheap and easy to retrofit.

Is it not overkill/inefficient to run a drinking water grid when 99% of the water waters lawns and washes dishes?

> My thinking is that treating water at home is not that hard. You can easily have one filtered tap at home. It's cheap and easy to retrofit.

I mean, define 'filtered'. A brita-type filter will do precisely nothing for most things that require a boil notice (nor will it do anything for most heavy metal contaminants etc).

In general, "filtered" taps primarily remove chlorine and calcium carbonate, mostly for taste reasons.

Doing actual water treatment at home is not going to be particularly economic or safe.

Water treatment at home isn’t difficult as long as it isn’t polluted with something bad like hydrocarbons. A distiller can be purchased for less than $100. There are many homes in Texas that are using heaters that aren’t heat pumps, so in the winter, it probably is economical if excluding the original purchase price. A reverse osmosis system can also be purchased for less than $500, but requires more maintenance.

> A brita-type filter will do precisely nothing for most things that require a boil notice

Well, it might do something, give a nice warm and humid substrate for bacterias to develop

What about the reverse osmosis filters many homes have?

I wouldn't say "many". RO is expensive and energy-intensive.

The under sink filters I'm aware of cost ~$200 and run passively off water pressure

Under sink filter != reverse-osmosis

Not all under sink filters are RO but some are. There are a variety of options on the market and the prices are much cheaper than bottled water over a year.

Right, but that doesn't mean all under sink filtration systems are RO. RO is a very specific method of filtration

We were talking specifically about RO filters. The one I have in my espresso setup cost a couple hundred and runs on water pressure, undercutting the claim that it’s expensive or energy intensive.

(They are water intensive - I would reconsider that if I still lived in California)

Not really. They aren't common in the US, but outside the US you can buy a $200 unit that will produce RO water a few gallons an hour.

1) There are many, many countries where tap water is not potable. Don't gargle with it when showering, and you'll be fine.

2) Assuming you're in a climate where this makes sense, the easiest source of non-potable water is to simply collect rainwater, so you don't really need a grid for this. In the other direction, use of "grey water" (domestic non-sewage wastewater) for purposes like irrigation is also increasingly common.

> Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc.

Have you ever gone swimming in a natural body of water?

> Is there much daylight between unsafe to drink and unsafe to shower/etc. IE, is there such a thing as nonpotable water that's still OK for domestic use?

Certainly. As a kid in 60s/70s, when in India we washed, brushed teeth etc with tap water (were careful not to swallow any!) but only drank water that had been boiled or otherwise treated (the fetish for plastic bottles of water had thankfully not developed anywhere yet). This was visiting relatives, so it's not the case that our guts had adapted to the local intestinal flora.

I think there's an economy of scale of running a single pipe of potable water to each location rather than running (and maintaining) a dual system, which would have "leakage" (both the physical kind, which is normal, but would occur 2X, and the case of people accidentally drinking from the wrong pipe).

The big problem is that point of use treatment invariably misses people. People who don't realize their system broke, those who can't afford $200 for a new one or the extra $5/month in operating costs. The extra public health burden is way more costly than treating all the water. And heavy nonpotable water users are often using gray water or untreated well water anyway!

Hmm. Texas power grid strikes again. How's that privatization working out for y'all?

Was it the grid? The linked article only says "power outage", but doesn't mention a grid failure.

Do you have another source with details?

Wow, real insightful snarky comment.

I got tired of this nonsense when Texans were doing it to Californians over wildfires and their own power failures. And I got even more tired of it when Californians did it to Texans.

Exactly as planned I think.

Welcome your new feudal lords, they may throw you a bottle of water (probably Coke though), but watch you don't choke on the plastic.

I wonder how long this will last? a boiled water requirement in response to a short term pressure loss seems more like a "lets be safe" rule than a "things are contaminated". When I was a kid we had a 3 week boiled water restriction due to a seagull getting trapped and dying inside a water tank.

Bare minimum of three days after pressure is restored for microbial cultures to be considered negative.

fyi: houston is a BIG metropolitan area, over 10k sq miles. this only affects parts of the city core.