crang.com through the years

Throughout the Christmas break I'm going to feature some of the original crang.com sites. Click here for the original Ma Crang's Home Cookin' site and here for the second version. Baby we've come a long way!

Everybody have a Merry Christmas and remember your family first over the holidays!

Thanks to everyone who helped me communicate to Videon (@Home) how lousy the server is that my site resides on. As of December 16 it seems to be working properly. I have my fingers crossed. If it seems slow or times out for you, please send an e-mail to their customer service on my behalf. Just mention that you've had trouble loading this site and would appreciate if something could be done about it. Hopefully it will continue working properly. Thanks again!

As always, send me your suggestions for future columns on crang.com.

© December 23, 2000

Winnipeg's Water Catastrophe - Part 2

I hauled out my old microscope to take a look at what made up the goo strained out of my City of Winnipeg water last week. I really only expected to see clay particles as that's what the sludge looked like. But to my surprise, the sludge was made up entirely of fibrous particles looking almost exactly like asbestos. Not that I think it's asbestos, but it is definitely made up of fibrous strands. I asked my biologist friend if she had any idea what these strands could be - I thought it might be algae. She told me she'd never seen anything like it (sort of the same line a mechanic gives you) but it did not look like algae. She thought algae would be segmented.

So I took the water filter "strainings" to a couple of labs for analysis. The first lab, "Northwest Laboratories" at the University of Manitoba told me they wouldn't test it but it looked like algae. I scoffed at them and asked if they knew where I might take it for testing. I was told that they had no idea but it wouldn't be cheap. Well, if they had no idea, how did they know it wouldn't be cheap?

I then took the sample to the City laboratory. The technician there was really helpful. He also suspected that the sludge was algae. This was because he knew for a fact that algae levels had recently skyrocketed in the Winnipeg water system. I asked if this wasn't a rather odd time of year for this to happen and he replied, "Yes. It's not normal at this time of year." He went on to explain that because of cryptosporidium in the main reservoir, the City had closed that reservoir and opened a stagnant one which caused a rush of algae through the system. When I asked whether he thought the City would go through with building the new water treatment plant, he assured me that the City was in need of the plant and that it would be built.

So there you have it. Even though I'm not convinced that the sludge was algae, at least it's possible it was. At the very least, the use of a stagnant reservoir was most likely the cause of whatever it was that clogged my filter. After watching my new, clean filter for over a week, I've seen no sign of a build-up and have not noticed any lowering of the water pressure in my house. A final note, there is still cryptosporidium in our water supply and even though the Provincial "expert" always quoted in the Winnipeg Free Press (you know her name - she's a "doctor" with initials M. F.) says not to worry, worry. Or at least boil. If you're healthy (and how many of us in Winnipeg can say that anymore - see Bacteria - The Silent Killers), you won't die. You'll only crap your pants a lot.

Read further on cryptospridium and giardia:

http://www.purewater4u.com/freeinfo/cysts.htm
http://www.camp.ca/aerobiology/giardia.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/crypto/cryptos.htm
http://www.city.winnipeg.mb.ca/interhom/pdf/WaterWorks/crypto.pdf

Thanks to everyone who helped me communicate to Videon (@Home) how lousy the server is that my site resides on. As of December 16 it seems to be working properly. I have my fingers crossed. If it seems slow or times out for you, please send an e-mail to their customer service on my behalf. Just mention that you've had trouble loading this site and would appreciate if something could be done about it. Hopefully it will continue working properly. Thanks again!

Wanna see stars? Check out the Sky View Cafe!

As always, send me your suggestions for future columns on crang.com. See you next week when we'll meet The Backyard Biologist.

© December 16, 2000

Winnipeg's Water Catastrophe - Part 1

I'm going to take a break from the tongue-in-cheek stories for a while. For the next few weeks I'm going to publish a series of stories on the City of Winnipeg's major water problem. I'm going to try to get to the bottom of the water quality problem the City has been having - a problem which the vast majority of Winnipeggers are unaware.

I always wondered about the lack of proper water treatment for the City of Winnipeg. All the City has ever done to "clean" the water is to dose it with chlorine. When I heard that the levels of chlorine they were using could cause serious medical problems, I decided it was time to do something about my concerns. About a year ago, I installed a couple of filters in my house. The first one was at my kitchen sink. This filter removes chlorine, odours, rust, sediment, and parasites such as cryptosporidium and giardia. This water we would use for drinking, making ice cubes - anything where the water wasn't boiled before being consumed. The second filter is a whole-house filter. It is installed right after the water meter (on the house side). This filter removes chlorine, rust and sediment.

I was happy to have the chlorine removed from our supply of water. Especially with the whole-house filter. One of the big problems with chlorine in the water is breathing it in while taking a shower. As the water is sprayed into the shower, chlorine molecules become airborne and are inhaled into our lungs. Chlorine molecules are a known carcinogen. The only remaining problems with the water quality would involve ingesting water from washing vegetables or while brushing our teeth. These seemed to be acceptable risks since boiling water for these uses seemed a little extreme to say the least.

My family noticed an immediate difference in our day-to-day health. The bouts of stomach troubles that we would get, mysteriously at the same time as each other, really seemed to have eased off. Until the end of October of this year.

Suddenly everybody was sick and couldn't get over it. Coincidentally at the same time the whole-house water filter plugged up and there was barely enough water pressure to have a shower. The filter had only been on for 2 months. The normal length of time for the filter to last is 3 months and I've noticed negligible loss in water pressure even up to 4 months. So 2 months was certainly early for the filter to plug up but I thought perhaps the water had been a little more turbid than usual. My associate at work suggested the Fall turnover of the water in the City reservoirs - a process not unlike a temperature inversion in the atmosphere. This seemed to make sense. It was the right time of year and this would certainly cause a little turbulence in the water supply. So I replaced the filter. ONE WEEK LATER it was plugged again.

I took a closer look at the filter this time and found that it was full of sludge! After ONE WEEK. I called the City Lab in charge of testing for Winnipeg's water quality and found out that indeed the City's water was very turbid right now due to the fact that they had run one of the City reservoirs right down to make repairs to it. No bacteria or parasites had been found in the water, however. I questioned the Lab employee about the recent addition of phosphoric acid to our water supply. (We had been told in the Winnipeg Free Press that this would coat the lead pipes, prevent further deterioration of these pipes and that there was more phosphoric acid in a bottle of coke.) The Lab employee told me that as I suspected the phosphoric acid has been "cleaning out" our water lines throughout the City. He said not to worry - just boil our water if we have any immuno-suppressed people in our household.

Wow! This was the standard response from the City of Winnipeg to people who showed any concern about the quality of our water supply. Do they realize what an inane idea that is? Boil your water before you brush your teeth? Boil your water before you wash some lettuce? This solution is completely off the wall and totally unrealistic. And then guess what? Two days after I talked to this fellow, The Winnipeg Free Press announced that cryptosporidium had been found in our water supply and the City had no idea how it got there. I'll give them a clue. Cryptosporidium comes from runoff from land that has infected animal feces on it. The Free Press article went on to say not to worry, only immuno-compromised people will die and that these people should boil their water. Healthy people won't die. But they don't explain that healthy people will just get ill. I don't know about you but being ill from a gut-invading parasite isn't my idea of a trip to the beach.

So now we have something in the water that's clogging my filters (and let me point out that I live in a new area of Winnipeg completely serviced with plastic watermains and copper lines from the street to the house) and we have cryptosporidium present in the reservoirs. Now I can't even protect myself from the cryptosporidium by filtering the water.

I tried flushing my filter and that seemed to clean it out enough to give us a decent flow of water. The showers were still a little brutal but I thought that if there was any time to be filtering the water, now was it. Within a couple of weeks the filter had clogged beyond the point of being able to clean it out, so I bought another one and installed it late last Wednesday night. Hopefully, the turbidity had eased off and this filter would last for a while. Early Sunday morning, when my daughter tried to have a shower, I quickly learned that there was once again very little water pressure. I checked the filter and found it to be full of sludge. After 3 days of use. Now what do I do?

First of all, I've collected most of the sludge off of this 3-day old filter and this week I'll attempt to find a non-partisan lab to have it analyzed. I took a picture of the sludge in the filter and you can view it on the Picture of the Week page. If anybody has any connections or names of people that I could contact to get something done about this problem please let me know. Barring this, I'm going to phone my councillor and the Water Department this week also.

I read a recent report from a Federal Health official that stated that all Winnipeggers should boil their water year round, even though our Provincial Health official tells us not to worry. Does she not remember Walkerton? And, the City just voted 15-1 to build a water treatment plant by 2006. This isn't being done because the City councillors are kind people - they are scared. They remember. And the only reason I took notice of this was because of a clogged filter.

To be continued...

Please lend me a hand. I've been having a great deal of trouble lately with the server that houses this web site. I've had more and more complaints about the time-outs and slow speed when attempting to load it. I've tried contacting both Videon and @Home but to no avail. I am going to continue hounding them to do something about it but it may help if you would send an e-mail to their customer service on my behalf. Just mention that you've had trouble loading this site and would appreciate if something could be done about it. I'll let you know if I have any luck with them.

Wanna see stars? Check out the Sky View Cafe!

As always, send me your suggestions for future columns on crang.com. See you next week.

© December 2, 2000