Sandeep Burman
speaker
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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Appearances
You know, there's only so much room to put all of your underground utilities. So our sanitary sewer lines and our drinking water lines sometimes are in close proximity. But the big safety measure there is the fact that drinking water is pressurized and that keeps anything from getting into it.
Now, occasionally you have incidents where you lose pressure, you have waterman breaks or mechanical failures. So that's where you worry about the wastewater side of things, or even just shallow groundwater that may be tainted with microorganisms getting into your water supply.
And so there exists lots of procedures to detect those issues and that's when you get those boil water advisories and the non-drink advisories till the problem can be solved and system can be flushed and repaired and lots of sampling takes place to ensure that there are no bacteria showing up and then people can go back to using their water.
So that's the big source of concern is just the bacteria from the outside environment getting into what's essentially a closed and sanitized system, which is your public water supplies, the conveyance for that. There are pathogens that can... live in drinking water systems. And again, there's a number of measures to counteract that.
A properly maintained public water system where the water is moving, is not stagnant, is flushed properly, is not a conducive environment for opportunistic pathogens like Legionella, for instance, very specific conditions have to come together. And usually that's because of a poorly maintained system.
So again, there's multiple ways through which you monitor that to make sure that those conditions never come to exist, where you can have an opportunistic pathogen like Legionella take hold. So in a public water system and kind of closed system that it is, you know, those are kind of the primary things you worry about. It's just bacteria, which is, you know,
all pervasive and present everywhere and the opportunity pathogens. And there's just a host of safety mechanisms in place where those conditions that could be favorable are detected early and fixed. So again, the public water system is very adept at ensuring that waterborne disease doesn't take hold and doesn't propagate through a public water system.
The future in Minnesota is good. We can be hopeful that it's going to be a stable future where both quantity and quality can be sustained. And that again goes back to what we're blessed with for natural resources and then the Then the regulatory and administrative environment that exists, investments that have been made and will continue to be made on the infrastructure side.
And the fact that in Minnesota, we recognize the value of water. By and large, it's a... It's something that cuts across party lines and any other kinds of differences. We may have other things. There's no one questions the value and importance of water to not just everyday life, but to industry and commerce. So, you know, it kind of cuts across all of those things.
So I think this is a state that does recognize the value of water, does recognize the importance to keep making those investments. And we have the national factors working in our favor so far in terms of our resources and resources. So, you know, that, of course, is something that will have to be watched.
You know, as we know that things are changing in the environment and what does the long-term future hold, but we have to adapt to climate and make sure we are conserving and protecting the natural resources so we always have abundant sources. You know, globally, like you said, it is probably a lot more challenging.
Again, we have the impacts of climate change are going to be, you know, widely felt and they're going to vary. And I think... If you look at some of the global statistics, a big chunk of this planet, a lot of countries are in a water-stressed environment, and that's not likely to improve on its own. So they are going to have to be very careful about managing and conserving water.
And again, I think water is, as you said, it's liquid gold. It is probably the constraining resource, and I think that is getting recognized more and more that the availability of water is going to be a driving factor in how nations and economies fare over time. So it is a very, very critical issue, something that everyone needs to pay very close attention to.
Minnesota, I think we can be optimistic. Globally, I think a lot of attention will need to be paid to make sure that everybody on planet Earth has a safe and sustainable water future. That is not a guarantee. lot of work, a lot of hard work.
I think that's a really, really important issue, and that is getting the attention it deserves in Minnesota. Is that happening everywhere else? That's really, really hard to... Really hard to know without knowing kind of in details of how those states or those cities may be managing some of the health equity issues. But this is an issue that in Minnesota has been front and center for a long time.
And it really comes down to, does everybody have access to the same quality of water at kind of the same rates, right? So that's a big focus here for us in Minnesota Department of Health.
working with our other sister agencies, working with the legislature to really try and level that playing field to assure that at least public water supply consumers across the state are really experiencing a level playing field in terms of what they're getting and how much they're having to pay for it.
So we build in a lot of those factors into how systems are funded, how public funds are used, trying to maintain that balance. So that will remain a focus on the public water supply side of things. That's definitely sort of a fundamental part of the process now. It gets a lot more complicated when you look at what's happening on people that have private wells.
You know, 20% of the state's population still gets their water from private water supplies. And there's probably big differences there because people are responsible for upkeep of their private water system entirely on their own. And I think that's the part where the state probably needs to pay some attention to and And you need to cross those barriers off.
Those are private properties and it's private infrastructure. What is the government's role in that? So I think those are discussions that are taking place. There are some fundamental things there that have to be figured out. But if you look at the fact that drinking water,
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