Drinking Water

For many of us, we take it for granted that the water that comes out of the faucet at home is good quality.  It is good enough that you don't even think about it when you drink it.  Well that was not true in Vietnam, at least where I was stationed.

The first time I drank potable water, I gagged.  It was horrible.  Have you ever swallowed heavily chlorinated water from a swimming pool?  That is how our potable water tasted.  To drink the water, it had to be laced with a little Kool-Aid.  Everyone did it.  Just enough Kool-Aid to take the taste of chlorine away.  In the jungle, I carried a two quart canteen with Kool-Aid for drinking and used  other canteens with plain water for washing and cooking.

Late in my tour, I learned where the water was coming from.  The snapshot below will give you an idea of the quality of the water before it was treated.  It was chocolate brown in color and know one knew what living thing had pissed or shit in it recently.  So to make it drinkable, they used specialty trucks that contained a water treatment plant.  Back then I didn't know a damn thing about water treatment.  In my engineering career that followed the Army however, I learned enough to surmise what was going on.

The truck, in the picture above pumped water directly out of the river and into a settling chamber.  There, the larger solids that float or sink were removed.  The funnel-shaped tank on the right side was likely used for settling.  Then,  the water passed through a sand filter to remove the finer solids.   Water leaving the filter would have looked a hell of a lot better than where it was pumped from.  It would have been reasonably clear and look drinkable.  If you tried to drink the water however, you soon would be doubled over and puking from the bacteria that still thrived there.

So the final step was chlorination.  Chlorine bleach was metered into the water.  In the States where bleach is used for water purification, just enough is added to kill the bacteria and leave behind a very small residual for safety.  The residual is so small that you generally cannot taste it.  In Vietnam, they overdosed with chlorine because the system was not very sophisticated.  Better to be safe than sorry.

When my tour was up and I left Vietnam, I was thankful to leave behind a lot of nastiness and one of those nasty things was the drinking water.