Yes. Water that goes down your sink, shower, and toilet go to a large central water treatment plant where it is cleaned and then released into a river or lake. These rivers and lakes are also the same sources for the water treatment plants that take water and clean it again before sending back into the water system that comes back out in your sink, shower, and toilet. This is the water you use to cook, drink, and clean.
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This water cycle is nothing new, it has been going on for millions of years. The water we drink today is the same water the aincient Egyptians drank, and the same water dinosours drank millions of years ago.
Nature has it's own water cycle that continually cleans and replenishes our water. Through evaporation and transpiration, condensation, and precipitation (rain), water gets cleaned and refreshed. Our water treatment plants accelerate this process because we would otherwise run out of fresh water in a short time. The Dallas and Fort Worth area has over 7 million people and it takes a lot of water to sustain our amazing cities.
While we do have vast oceans of water, only 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water. 97% is salt water, which is not suitable for drinking without a very costly process called desalination (removing salt and minerals). Of the 3% of water on Earth that is considered fresh water, 2% of that is locked in the polar ice caps. This leaves approximately 1% of all water on earth that is suitable for use as drinking water.
It is important to not pollute this limited resource because it is increasingly difficult and costly to remove all pollutants from the waters in our lakes and rivers.
While all your household drains do eventually end up at a water treatment plant that cleans the water before relasing it into a river or lake, there is a long journey through the wastewater system before it gets there and once there, the water treatment systems can't clean every single thing out of the water.
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Wipes can get caught in the large pumps that move waste water along the system, and it becomes expensive to repair or constantly clean the intake lines. These costs are passed on to you, the customer through your water bill. Being kind to your pipes saves everyone money.
Many medications are not fully filtered out through the water treatment process. To completely remove everything from wastewater would be incredibly expensive.
Safe, reliable water plays a vital role in all our daily lives, keeping our community healthy, supporting our economy, and contributing to our overall quality of life. That’s why Cleveland Water has a comprehensive water treatment process in place to make sure our customers have access to safe, quality water every day.
Our commitment to providing our customers with quality drinking water is proven through our treatment process. We use a conventional treatment process at all four of our plants to ensure our water meets federal and state requirements as well as the higher industry standards of the Partnership for Safe Water. This process involves the primary steps of coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, disinfection, and finishing to take water from Lake Erie and turn it into clean, safe drinking water.
Beneath the bed of Lake Erie, an intake tunnel, between 7 to 10 feet in diameter and several miles long, brings water to the treatment plant. Near the shore end of the tunnel, we add a chemical called Potassium Permanganate (A). Potassium Permanganate is an oxidant that helps more effectively remove particulates. It also helps control taste, odor, and color as well as quagga mussels and algae.
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