Keeping the waters pure and safe
Ensuring the quality of the water supply is a top focus for health officials.
Can anyone imagine what life would be like if going to the bathroom was a dangerous proposition?
It used to be, and many readers of this newspaper can probably remember what it was like to use an outhouse instead of having the benefits of indoor plumbing. Having ceramic sinks and toilets with steel fixtures with water on demand is something wholly new in the long view of time.
Every flush of the toilet is a testament to how far America has come in cleaning up and becoming a much healthier place to live. As far back as the early part of the 20th century — less than 100 years after Polk County was founded — outhouses were still in common use. I ndoor plumbing wasn’t a universal feature of life until well into the 1930s.
Even today, there are still plenty of residents in the county who use wells dug on their own property since plumbing for water and sewer isn’t available.
Before the advent of septic systems, going to the bathroom went a little something like this: walk out into the back yard and open the outhouse door, hope a large splinter isn’t sticking out on the seat, and use a variety of items to complete the business at hand.
That system was a sanitary nightmare. Across the country this common practice ended up causing all kinds of unnecessary nightmares, as diseases like cholera, dysentery and more were spread through communities when f l ooding washed out latrines and it ended up contaminating drinking water.
Outbreaks of these diseases still happen today, but mainly outside of the United States in countries where sanitation efforts haven’t become commonplace. That’s because one of the many jobs undertaken by health officials across the country is to make sure that water stays healthy and clean for local residents to drink and enjoy.
Controlling where the waste ends up
The search for clean water is a lot easier than it used to be. From primitive times up until around a century ago, that search could require the hauling of buckets from a stream up to the house, or pumping out of a well.
Nowadays, people just walk over to the sink and fill up a glass with a crystal clear, perfectly safe beverage full of ice cubes coming out of the door of the freezer with the press of a button.
It is one of the many conveniences of modern life that go unnoticed, but once was a hassle to just get a sip of water that wouldn’t potentially kill the person later once a drop quenched dry lips.
A lot of work goes into making sure all the water in the aquifers, streams and creeks remain safe to drink. Part of that process falls onto the shoulders of the Environmental Health division of the Polk County Health Department, who among the many jobs they undertake is testing wells that draw up groundwater, and designing and overseeing the installation of septic systems to ensure that potential contamination stops before a single drop passes our lips.
So for people who are worried their well water might be the cause of an illness, or someone who finds themselves with a smelly mess in their backyard one morning, they get to become well acquainted with Environmental Health Manager Kathy Couey-Miller and her staff at the health department.
Preventing potential causes of communicable diseases such as dysentery, cholera or much nastier bugs is the reason why her office becomes involved in the process of well testing or septic installs and repairs. You don’t go to the building office in Polk County, or to the water department. You make a call to East Ware Street facility in Cedartown and tell Miller your troubles.
“We’re the first stop, and the reason being You have to know if the soil there can support wastewater being discharged into it, and clean it effectively before it re- enters the aquifer and potentially to someone’s wells,” Miller said. “That’s the whole purpose of our program, to protect the drinking water. I think a lot of people forget that, they’re just so focused on I need a septic tank system.”
Before anyone can build or repair a septic tank and get a permit from the county to move forward on a project, they have to submit plans and go through a variety of field work with the Environmental Health division of the Polk County Health Department to ensure the system is being installed in a manner that it will go with the flow of the land, and properly clean the waste over time.
That means that Miller and her team go out to a location where a new onsite waste management system — the official term, but laymen still call them septic tanks — will be installed. Miller said the department looks a variety of areas to ensure that systems are installed in a good spot, can operate safely over time, and the work done by contractors is completed to all current specifications.
Among the first items that a homeowner must undertake to install a system is have a soil analysis done to ensure that once a system is installed the ground around it can both support the buried system and also act as an additional cleaning agent of the waste itself.
The health department requires the testing be conducted by a licensed professional, who thus looks at the samples augured out of the ground to give an overall view of the earth underneath their feet. What Miller said the department looks for is certain types of soil in several classifications.
“For example, minvale soil around here is a rich, beautiful red heavy clay soil that functions in a excellent way to clean wastewater up,” Miller said. “It’s really beautiful soil, no rocks. Really pretty here.”
What a soil scientist is determining is whether a soil can absorb wastewater over a certain amount of time, and filter out the water before it reaches the water table itself. After all, water always runs downhill, and that works the same way as it drains through the soil.
Having a properly designed waste management system therefore can mean the difference between clean water, and contaminated water.
Design and function
around the waste
All the soil sampling is done. The next step then requires a bit more work on the part of the department itself.
A customer brings their property plat and soil test results into the health department to get a permit for a new system, Miller then asks an important question: what are you building this system for?
“A two bedroom home needs a much smaller system than a system for a four or five bedroom home,” Miller said.
Waste management systems designed for homes are always based on the number of bedrooms, not the number of occupants inside of a house.
Also, commercial systems work much differently than those that are being built for a house. An office for a veterinarian would have much different requirements than those for a beauty parlor for a system, and so on.
Therefore, it is important to understand the general use of a on-site waste management system as much as the ground that will filter out the waste. Even before they sit down on a computer and provide the specifications for the system that homeowner or business might use, Miller or one of her team will be heading out to take a look at the site itself, looking at how steep or low the land might be, and how water will drain away above and below ground.
All of that is taken into account when the system is designed, which in itself is a complicated process taking into account a variety of factors.
Before moving forward, now is a good time to explain how a these waste management or septic systems actually do their work.
Take for instance doing a round of dishes. All the sudsy mess and leftover food and drink get washed down the drain just like anything else. Add in the soap and grease, gristle and gunk that goes out a pipe and out into the yard somewhere. Usually it is a place that is going to work well with the slope of the land, allowing everything to move in a steady and natural flow as water is wont to do.
Buried in the back yard of many homes since the 1940s and 1950s, septic tanks have undergone several changes in materials and upgrades in the way they hold and process waste. But the basic idea of the tank remains the same: It allows for solids to collect and be processed by bacteria within, and water to flow out into the ground via a drain field, usually via additional pipes that stretch outward from the tank.
All of this works because of a process of settling and anaerobic process using bacteria that decomposes solid waste and other kinds of bio-filtering processes that thus allow for water to escape back into nature without the worry of immediate contamination.
Usually, a septic system will last for several decades, but eventually like anything manmade they break down. Unfortunately, Miller said that when a system finally stops processing waste like it should or becomes overfilled, a home or business owner won’t find out until it is too late.
“It will either back up in their house, or waste will surface in the yard,” Miller said. “You might get a few symptoms before hand that can be a warning, but usually we don’t see that.”
Sinks will begin to take longer to drain is one way a homeowner can tell they might have a problem, or it just could be a clog.
One way or another, that gets Miller’s department involved as well.
“You can’t legally repair your system without having a permit through our office,” she said.
Most of the permits for repairs and for new installation are handled either by the homeowner or the contractors who are doing the work.
That falls to companies like Minge Septic Service, who get called out to tackle the nasty job of doing the work like pumping sludge from the waste system tanks underground, or making repairs or new installations overall.
Their a company that on average installs or repairs around 72 systems a year on average, give or take and are one of several who do the work locally.
A lot of systems get the attention of the health department. Just last year, Miller reported that 112 new or repaired systems were permitted through her office, with 97 inspections completed as well. Additionally, her office conducted 40 existing system evaluations and heard 10 complaints of sewage problems.
Miller said a process is in place to make sure that any system repairs also ensure to prevent groundwater, and go through the same sort of inspection and evaluation before they are signed off as being ready for operation.
Ultimately all of this is done to make sure that people who don’t have access to drinking water from the cities or Polk County Water Authority can ultimately be sure that what they are pumping out of the ground is safe. Yet, as much as that is the goal, sometimes water turns out to be contaminated anyhow.
Safe sips save lives
Even today, water contamination is a real possibility for people living in Polk County.
It only takes a few microbes of a bacteria in drops of water to get into a person’s system, where it then goes to work doing what a bacteria does: eating, growing and making new copies. What it does to the insides of someone who has now taken in those bacteria depend entirely on the strain.
It isn’t commonplace by any measure, but Environmental Health does get involved when people find that they’ve been exposed to contaminated water.
Miller pointed to a recent example where physicians contacted her to determine what might be causing a local woman to get sick over and over again with the same ailment.
“The patient in question was on a well water system,” Miller said. “They kept getting sick from E.coli and were getting hospitalized time and again.”
This ended up being one of a handful of wells that tested positive for contaminants in 2017 of the 13 samples that were taken based on requests from local residents or physicians. Miller said tests are processed locally with the help of the Cedartown Water Authority and their lab, where they’ll run any samples the department brings for them for testing on their equipment. If samples come back positive for contaminants or diseases, then Miller has them done a second time and an investigation into the cause. After some troubleshooting, Miller came up with a reason for the contamination: the groundwater contamination from cows in the pasture near the well source was causing the patient to get sick over and over again, and required a simple fix. In fact, Miller said that those who have contamination problems with their wells should all consider adding a UV- based filtering system to clean their water. After all, these days a well consists of systems drilled down into aquifers and pumped up, not like the stone-lined wishing wells from a Disney cartoon one might conjure up in the mind’s eye. Most are perfectly safe to drink water right from the ground, but she points out that there’s no need to take the chance.
Miller adds that as the cost of Ultraviolet light filtering systems have come down over t he years, they provide a real alternative to chlorinator- based systems that are costly, change the taste of the water and require maintenance throughout the year
“It only takes a few bacteria to cause a real problem,” Miller said.
There’s other reasons for people to require help from the Health Department with well water testing and waste management system inspections. Foster and adoptive families require tests of a waste management system whenever they wish to take a child into their home, for instance. Loans for homeowners can’t be processed for those selling land with wells without those being tested. There’s other areas of the job that take time and attention for Miller and her team as well.
All the work comes down to one ultimate goal: providing for safe water for all, and overcoming public health problems before they have a chance to grow due to contaminations that can be prevented.
So with every request they process for new waste management system, and every test the health department runs when a well is suspected to have a problem, Environmental Health is on the front lines making sure that local residents can rest safe that no matter where the source of the water is coming out of their taps, the department is working hard to ensure each drop is safe to drink.