How good is the quality of your water?
This week, in my capacity as Chair of the South East Water Customer Panel, together with other Panel colleagues, I visited one of the company’s water treatment works at Bewl in Kent to learn more about how water is treated before it is of the right quality for customers.
Many customers think that running a water company is simply a matter of collecting rainfall and distributing it through pipes but, as we learned and saw, water in the UK goes through a whole series of stages before it becomes amongst the highest quality water in the world.
At Bewl, the stages are called aeration & flocculation, flotation, ozonisation, filtration, granular activated carbon, disinfection, de-chlorination, and distribution. You can learn a little more about each of these stages here and you can learn a little more about water quality in this short video.
You might think that good quality water in an industrialised country is no big deal. But then you may not have heard of the current situation in Flint, Michigan in the richest nation on earth. Here an entire city of 100,000 is barred from drinking its own water – even cooking with it – because of poisonously high levels of lead.