Yesterday they shut off my water

... just as I was about to brush my teeth before class, and my roommate J had to take a sponge bath with water from the rain water barrel.

World, I want to tell you that before my Chesapeake Bay class, I had no clue where my drinking water came from, or where my sewage went. It just isn't something that I think about during the day. Do you want to knowhow much cow and chicken poop goes into the river before they take it into the treatment plant? It's not very appetizing. So let me tell you a little about the geography of where I live.

I live on Tapawingo Rd (SW) in Vienna, VA. That's a suburb outside of Wasthington D.C., all the way out onthe metro Orange Line. It takes me about half an hour with the metro to get to the Potomac River (the border of VA and DC), which eventually drains into the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay watershed is

64,000 square miles large and reaches all the way up to the state of New York, down to Delaware and across to West Virginia. I am one of the 17 million people who live in the watershed (cbf.org).

(image from http://www.baydreaming.com/)

One of the larger rivers or tributaries to the Bay is the Potomac, where I get my water from. For the city of Vienna, we get 80% of our water from the Potomac and 20% from the Occoquan River. The water I drink is treated at the Corbalis Treatment Plant, on the Potomac near the entrance of the Seneca Creek.

The run-off from my lawn flows into the Hunter’s Branch creek, which is part of the Accotink

watershed. This leads to Lake Accotink, which then flows into Accotink Bay which leads to Gunston Cove, part of the Potomac River, and then leads down to the Chesapeake Bay. The groundcover in this watershed is varied, as it goes through suburban areas of Vienna, Fairfax, Springfield, and Fort Belvoir. The watershed goes through green areas such as parks (Mantua, Eakin Community, Accotink Stream Valley, Wakefield, and finally Lake Accotink Park), back yards, and non residential areas, where the ground cover seems to be shrubs andother plants, protected by trees.

(image from accotink.org)

My sewage travels to the Noman M. Cole Jr Pollution Control Plant, located on the Pohick Creek close to where it joins the Potomac River at Pohick Bay, according to the Fairfax County Water website. The Noman M. Cole Jr. Plant is a primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment plant, cleaning the water enough to release it into the Pohick Bay. The process of cleaning the water starts with primary treatment which separates the solids (trash and sludge) from the liquid. The secondary treatment process involves removing nitrogen by pumping the water through filtration tanks where microorganisms eat the organic matter and nutrients. Those organisms then settle and are removed from the water. Tertiary treatment removes Phosphorous from the wastewater and then disinfects the water with a chlorination process (www.waterandwastewater.com/plant_directory/Detailed/58.html).

Most of the places in this area get their water from rivers instead of aquifers, and it all flows back into the Chesapeake Bay. Makes you want to live upstream of all the farmers and development...