TASTES AND ODORS IN PUBLIC WATER SUPPLIES, CAUSES AND REMEDIES [with DISCUSSION]

Much attention has been given to the problem of taste and odor elimination or prevention in public water supplies within the past few years. This increased interest is, no doubt, in part due to the rising standards of water quality and to increasing public demand for water free from any objectionable characteristics. It is also due, however, to increased volumes of industrial wastes that are being poured into the rivers used as sources of public water supply, principal among which are phenolic substances carried by wastes from coke and charcoal by-products plants, from creosoting works and gas plants, and oily wastes from oil fields and oil refineries. With the exception of these, there are no outstanding or frequently encountered tastes and odors due to industrial wastes, although any industrial waste may directly or indirectly, if present in sufficient concentration, produce unpleasant qualities in a public water supply. Coincident with increasing volume of coke and charcoal by-product wastes, there has been increasing use of chlorine for the disinfection of public water supply. Unfortunately, the phenols and chlorine combine to form chlorophenols which have very much greater taste producing power than the phenols alone. The problem of tastes and odors in public water supply is not, however, a new one. It is quite as old as the problem of furnishing public «water supplies. Until comparatively recently, practically all tastes and odors in public water supplies were due to the presence of organisms, generally of microscopic size and known under the general category of "Plankton." The late George С Whipple began a systematic study of these organisms in relation to public water supply in 1889 at the Chestnut Hill Reservoirs of the Boston Public Water Supply. These studies resulted in the publication in 1899 of a book on the Microscopy of Drinking Water, which, as revised in 1927 by Professors Fair and Whipple, constitutes the most