fineprint

Less words, more story.

by Erin Zlomek

Earthy. Moldy. Swampy. Not the smells you want wafting up your nose when sniffing your drinking water, right? Well, that’s exactly what a Drexel grad and two Philadelphia-area water officials have encountered in their quest to make the world’s drinking supply safer. Andrea Dietrich, the former Dragon who now teaches at Virginia Tech; Gary Burlingame, supervisor of water quality and research for the Philadelphia Water Department; and Thomas Gittelman, chemistry lab manager for the Philadelphia Suburban Corp.; have been traveling around the country to help utilities pinpoint chemicals in water supplies through smell tests. (As an aside, officials with PSC, the largest U.S.-based, investor-owned water utility, announced Tuesday that the company’s name will change to Aqua America Inc.)

Since receiving a grant from the American Water Works Association (AWWA) in 1998, the trio has worked to develop an odor table to explain what certain aromas mean about what's in the water. Their aim is to teach officials at smaller water utilities how to identify, and address, contamination more effectively. It's a way to help them catch up with larger utilities that already have extensive testing programs in place.

"Most of the water testing done today requires panels of 10 to 100 people," Dietrich says, explaining that their lessons train one person to figure it out on his or her own. "That's not always available."

Burlingame notes that he and Gittelman are in a unique position to help, since the Philadelphia region has one of the most extensive water-treatment plants in the country.

Here, a water supply for 1.6 million people is drawn from the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Then, it's treated to a point where officials consider it safe. (Even though a National Resources Defense Council study found high lead levels and dangerous chlorination byproducts in the city's water supply, the Water Department website boasts that "Philadelphians do not suffer from the water-spread diseases present in many communities around the world.")

With Philly's role in the water-quality world on the rise, the city will host the AWWA national convention in November. But alas, time is running out on the odor-table project, which took the trio everywhere from the Midwest to Korea. Though their funding dries up next year, they think much has been accomplished.

"This project wasn't expected to last forever," says Dietrich, who hints that discontinuing such research will hurt those who don't stick to bottled water. "Water is essential to life. We're simply trying to improve public water's overall quality for the consumer."