Sandeep Burman

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66 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2024 last heard Feb 2024

Sandeep Burman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Health Chatter · Water & Health · 9 Feb 2024 podcast

Drinking water is a fascinating utility because at the end of the day, it is a utility. Public water supplies are a utility. That is provided to us. It is really an intersection of two dimensions. You have the natural environment, which is the sources of our water. Ultimately, that's our lakes and rivers and streams and our underground waters.

And you have all of the infrastructure that takes that raw water and it makes it portable and fit for human consumption. So how much effort you have to spend in making that raw water portable depends on the quality of that raw water, sometimes very little and sometimes a lot. But in terms of water getting compromised, you can see how these two dimensions come together.

We have the natural environment and we have the built environment, and these two have to function hand in hand. And if either of those is not the way they should be, so if the quality of the natural water isn't fit for human consumption, then there you have a problem there. And then sometimes you can have perfectly good

raw water available, but your infrastructure isn't working the way it should be, and then you get compromised there too. So you can have the quality of the water be the problem, and sometimes it's just the quantity. And the quantity, again, it could be you have constraints in the quantity of the natural raw water available to you. That's droughts, and we see some very profound effects of droughts

of climate change happening that is causing different concerns there. And then sometimes the infrastructure, the mechanical things that get the water to you, those may break down. So you can have both quantity and quality aspects introduced from the infrastructure as well. So it's kind of, you know, if you look at it that way, it's like a two by two matrix and you have quantity and quality.

And then you have the raw water and the finished water, which is the natural environment and the infrastructure. So you could have issues kind of on this grid, if you imagine this matrix kind of four quadrants, and each of those could be compromised and constrained, or you could have more than one of these areas. And then the effect starts to magnify itself.

So no, I'm not, and most public water systems are quite robust and there's lots of measures in place to prevent this from happening. But these are kind of these areas, four areas, quantity, quality, and then natural and built. The intersection of these is where you can have the compromise take place.

I think it's the same, you know, living creatures, kind of biologically, we're really all the same. So things that would impair, you know, the human body, probably not very good for, you know, animals, pets, livestock, really the same quality concerns, I think, you know, exist. Yeah. Okay. Clarence.

Well, I'm happy to. Yeah, no. Yeah, I'm happy to report that people in Minnesota can, you know, generally feel really good about their state of water, especially their public water, right? We're lucky in this state that we have a lot of water, as you were saying, we're pretty water rich. And then generally speaking, the quality of those source waters is pretty good, right?

We're predominantly, we predominantly are consumers of groundwater. So most of the public water supplies in the state, you know, 80% of the, population of the state that drinks public water is getting their water from groundwater. And then the remaining 20% is coming from surface water.

And our surface water sources are some pretty well-known sources, primarily the Mississippi River, Lake Superior, and then some kind of smaller lakes in the southern part of the state. Again, blessed with really good water quality inherently in those surface water bodies. And then our groundwaters are pretty high quality too.

So in that regard, you know, we are fairly well off both in terms of quantity and quality. Do have to be careful because the pressures continue to grow in terms of population growth and use of water for not just drinking, but for irrigation, agriculture in other ways, industry. So the demand on water keeps on growing because water is not just a public health,

essential requirement for humans to live, but it's also critical for industry and commerce and recreation. And the same water gets used for all of those purposes. So we have to be careful about using the sheer demands on water. And then we have to keep watching out for threats, you know, both natural and manmade, because again, you can have

Geologically, we have minerals that are not good for us in large quantities, things like arsenic and radium and even iron manganese at high levels could be a problem. And then there's all of the artifacts of our economy of today, you know, lots of agriculture, lots of industry. And again, environmental protection, pretty in a different place today than it probably was 50 years ago.

So a lot of practices that were commonplace and acceptable and even permitted, you know, 50 years ago led to contamination of the waters. And so there's some of that legacy contamination that impacts water supply sometimes, and that has to be dealt with. Going forward, I think we, generally speaking, our environmental laws, our conservation laws are much more rigorous now, much more sophisticated.

So we're probably not causing additional problems in terms of chemical pollution, but we do have a legacy of chemical pollution that has to be diligently monitored. But in spite of all of that, those things are all fairly well understood, fairly well documented. There aren't any kind of hidden dangers that we're going to stumble into with one of our water supplies.

So given this multi-pronged approach that exists of testing the waters, monitoring it, keeping an eye on things, I think public water supplies in Minnesota are some of the safest and most reliable in the country. And I think we have The numbers reflect that. The Safe Drinking Water Act is the underpinning of nationally.

That's how public water supplies are monitored, and we have to comply with that. We have one of the highest compliance rates in the country. We're probably up there in that top 5%, 10% nationally of how well we comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act. So a pretty great record to be proud of. We are a large state. We're sort of in the middle, you know, as far as population and size goes.

So in spite of that, we have a very good track record for how well our public water supplies rank nationally. So lots to be grateful for, but also lots to just be careful and continue to move as well.

Yeah, thanks, Dan. So when it comes to waterborne disease, infectious disease that can spread through your public water supply, the biggest concern really is bacteria and coliform bacteria that's associated with fecal matter. And what's the source of that? That's your... your sanitary system, right, or your wastewater system. And oftentimes, these are just the way our infrastructure is built.

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