10/29/10 Pineview and East Canyon

[riverdog]

You don't get herds of hundreds of wildlife hanging out on the edge of the reservoir like you do with sheep. The number one risk for a stream to be contaminated with giardia in the Western US is if there is cattle grazing in the watershed. Water treatment facilities are not 100% effective all the time. Bacteria from livestock is fairly easy to remove and takes a major problem at a treatment facility to become a problem. Various parasitic cysts are much harder for a water treatment plant to deal with. If numbers are high enough ( usually from domestic animals but occasional from wildlife) then there can be enough that get through periodically to cause illness in humans. These cyst are resistant to chemical disinfection and are mainly removed by coagulation-filtration process. Usually this removes 2-3 log of cysts ( 99- 99.9%) So again it's a number game and a minor breakdown or hundreds of animals next to the reservoir does sometime result in enough cysts getting through to cause human illness. Millions of American have been sicken in the past 2 decades because of this. The 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee was linked to cattle. It sickened 400,000 and dozens died. Smaller outbreaks do happen all the time. WET1 nothing personal but you might educate yourself before replying on something you obviously know little about. I suggest starting with googling 1993 Milwaukee Cryptosporidium Outbreak or parasites water treatment systems failure. I deal with problems associated with parasites almost everyday at work for the last 20 years so it's not a new topic for me. I also see victims of human trafficking here in Utah from time to time so I know a bit about it. Here's a few links if you're not familiar with the problem: 32http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/largest_us_human_trafficking_case_tied_to_slaves_in_utah/C619/L619/
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/70007...?s_cid=rss-
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