CHAPTER 17
Desalination
Dorp and Sam traveled several hundred miles
over the next few days
and wound up in a mailbox far away in the San
Diego, California area.
Sam lives in Encinitas when he is a boy. But
he didn’t know right away where they had landed. The letter was
delivered,
and the lady retrieved her mail, opened the letter and began to read it.
Sam
gasped. “Oh. My. Gosh.”
“What’s
wrong?”
“That’s
Ms. Brook; a teacher at our school! Whoa! We’re at Ms. Brooks’
house? That means we’re in Encinitas!
We’re close to my
house. Wow!
“Really?”
Dorp asked. “Hmm. Imagine that.”
“Yes! Am
I going to have fun with this! Let me look around. A purple vase on
the table; a blue rug under the table,
the upholstery on the chair
seats has flowers. When I tell Ms. Brook what her dining room looks
like…”
“Sam,
Ms. Brook is going to think that you’ve been looking in her
windows and will send you to see Mr. West.
Wait a bit. There might
be someone else you can spy on in just a few minutes.”
Sam
and Dorp eased out of the house through a drafty window while Ms.
Brooks read the letter from her sister.
The breeze took
them right past Sam’s house. His family was in the front yard.
His
parents were eating huge ice cream waffle cones.
Abby had a little
cone of her own.
“There’s
my family! Is this what you were talking about; that I could spy on
someone else? Abby looks happy.
How can she be happy without me?
”Hey! No fair!” yelled Sam. “They went to Jo-Jo’s Ice Cream
Palace! I beg them to take me there and they won’t except on my
birthday. They say their ice cream is too rich for me. Oh! Dad got a ‘double-chocolate-chunky-tub-O-goodstuff!
And mom got butterbrickle! I love both flavors! Oh, I’ve been
betrayed! I am heartbroken. Maybe I’m not really their child. Maybe
they bought me on the Internet from Finland or someplace like that.
They actually went to the ice cream store without me."
Wait…what are
they saying?” Sam asked. “I’m going to quiz them about today.
It’ll sure make them wonder.
I’ll prove to them I know what they
did.”
“OK,
Sam, time to head for our next stop. You’ve learned more on this
trip than even I thought you would.
And that is a lot of fuss about
ice cream from someone who can’t eat or even taste food.”
They
drifted north pass Sam’s house and wound up near the Carlsbad
Desalination Plant.
“What
is this place?” Sam asked. “I’ve never seen it.”
“Really,
Sam? And you live this close to it? It’s next door to the Encino
Power Plant.
Dorp
explained that it is the largest desalination
plant in the United States.
(Humans also use the word “plant” to identify buildings where
certain industrial processes occur, such as desalination plants, power generation plants, manufacturing plants, etc.).
The 'sal' in desalination means salt.
This plant takes the salt out of seawater
and makes it drinkable. Though there are different ways to remove
salt from water, this method of desalinating seawater is called reverse
osmosis; the same process
used in many home water systems.
The process starts out
a lot like the water treatment plant in Chicago, with strainers and
settling compounds. The thing that makes desalination at this plant
really different from regular water treatment plants is the reverse osmosis
process."
Sam
interrupted: “I’ve heard that word osmosis before. I’ve got it!
Roots absorb water through membranes. Why is it called reverse
osmosis, when we went into the dandelion with regular osmosis?”
“Ah,
Galileo. We moved from a fairly salt-less soil into a saltier root.
Salt is the vacuum that attracts water. That’s how osmosis works to
keep living cells hydrated. Reverse osmosis removes salt solution from sea water. That is reverse of the way nature works. Do
you know what else? Reverse osmosis can take the sugar out of sweet
tea.”
“Anyway,
the process works, and this plant, at full capacity, provides 7-10% of the San Diego-area’s water needs.
We passed another plant like this
at Tampa Bay, Florida, just below Tarpon Springs.”
“Where
was I?” Sam asked.
“Probably
dreaming about food?”
“Busted.
Can we go through the desalination plant?
“Desalination would likely separate us. Perhaps we can drift inside the plant and look at the
machinery.”
They
were able to drift onto the property, and the fresh air intake of the
building drew them into the main filter room of the desalination
plant.
“Sam,
this desalination plant has a lot in common with the Jardine Water
Pant in Chicago.
There
is an intake out in a large body of water
There
are screens to keep out the big stuff
There
are sedimentation tanks to settle-out the small stuff.
Then
something different happens. First, the water is pre-heated in a
vacuum, which makes the process more efficient.
Then the water goes
to those rows and stacks of long tubes you’re looking at now. They
contain Reverse Osmosis filters that take out many contaminants, the
most important being salt.”
“How
do the filters work?” asked Sam.
“You
have watched your mother rinse vegetables in a colander, a device
that holds vegetables larger than the holes in it.
The holes in the
colander let the water and the dirt pass through without the
vegetables escaping.
A reverse osmosis (RO) filter acts the same way.
A water molecule is smaller than a salt molecule. The RO filters are
designed so that water molecules are largest thing that can pass
through. So when salty sea water goes through the filter, the salt is
stopped in the filter and pure water comes out.”
“Hmmm.
Doesn’t the filter clog up pretty quickly then?” asked Sam.
“Excellent question, Galileo. Unlike the colander, the reverse osmosis plant has
a special cleaning system that on a timed cycle, reverse-washes the salt out of the filters to
extend their useful life. The filters don’t last forever, but they
last far longer than coffee-maker filters. As the filters are
cleaned, that salt is sent back to the ocean or sea water it came
from, mixed at a rate compatible with the local
ecosystem.
"Mr.
Dorp, would Chicago water be purer if they had a desalination plant?
It sounds like that would keep all the germs out of the water.”
"What
you have said is true, but desalination plants are expensive to build
and maintain. Water costs more from a desalination
plant like Carlsbad than from a water purification plant like the Chicago facility.”
“Israel
gets 40% of their water from reverse osmosis plants like the one you
see here. They can make millions of gallons of water a day at these
places, but again, the cost to the consumer is higher because the
process and the equipment is expensive. That’s why humans need to
take shorter showers, fix their dripping faucets and quit watering
their lawns so much. That is an adequate overview of desalination.”
“Oh,
then can we go back to my house and see what luxuries my parents are
reveling in while I am gone?
I thought I was going on vacation from
them. It’s like they’ve gone on vacation from me. How rude!”
“Cut
your folks some slack, Sam. They just got home from taking you to the
airport.
“We’ve
been gone for months! It must be almost Christmas by now.”
“No
Sam. You are in a time warp. I just gave you this glimpse of your
family. Your plane is still over Nevada right now.
While you are
gone, your parents are giving Abby some special time. Being the
oldest, you were once an only child and got all their attention. Abby
never was an only child. Don’t begrudge her the special attention.
This is something humans seem to need, though I admit that as a dorp,
I don’t know what it means to be alone or incompatible without my
own kind.
Dorps have cohesion. Many humans lack that.”
“Besides,
we need to talk about salt-based water softeners. San Diego and other
California cities are beginning to ban such water softeners. People
cannot install them in new construction nor replace existing units
when they wear out. It seems that these water softeners are adding
unwanted chemicals to the local rivers and upsetting the ecology.
There are options to this type of system; carbon filtering and
smaller reverse osmosis equipment.”
“I
didn’t know all this was happening here in San Diego, Mr. Dorp.”
“San
Diego and her neighbors in many ways are on the front line of water
innovation because they are first on the frontline of water scarcity.
Necessity is the mother of invention."
"Well, we’re done Sam. Are you
ready to see your grandparents?”
“Are
you kidding, Mr. Dorp? Really?
“We’re
done,” said Dorp. “While dorps feel neither sadness nor
happiness, I have found our time together quite
satisfying. Goodbye, Sam.”
Suddenly, with a slurrrpy ‘snap’, Sam was back in his boy-body. It took him a few moments to re-orient himself to his location and even to his own body. He stood up and made his way to the rear of the airplane and used the restroom, just to prove he could propel himself as he wished. He appreciated this freedom.
As he flushed the airplane toilet, he
wondered what happened to the water; did it go into a tank or just
drop out somewhere? (Readers; it goes into a holding tank and is
emptied at the airport by a special truck.
Sam
wondered if this had all been a dream. He promised himself he would
never again eat an anchovy log for breakfast.
An anchovy log is a
celery stick, with anchovies laid in the groove, and peanut butter or
mayonnaise over the top to keep the anchovies from falling out.
Time
was on the move again. He looked down on the landscape where he had
landed as a water molecule with Dorp.
He saw a herd of horses down
there and thought they looked pretty…from a distance. The plane
flew on to Salt Lake City, Utah where an attendant helped him get a
bite to eat (with lots of mustard) at the food court, and then handed him off to another
attendant who helped him get on the plane to Omaha.
The
flight from Salt Lake City took off. Sam had seen many water-related
things on his trip. He looked out the window and saw irrigation
canals in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska. Sam was still tired
from everything he had done with Dorp but was afraid to fall asleep.
Eventually, the pilot spoke over the intercom and announced their
approach to Omaha.
Sam straightened his seat and waited to land.
He
could see the Missouri River near the landing strip. The plane
touched down and Sam could feel the reverse thrust of the engine as
the engine acted as the main brake for the plane, opposing the Law of
Inertia.
They taxied to the terminal, and he waited his turn to
deplane.