Pure Water Occasional, September 28, 2019 |
News reports about lead in municipal water prompted us to include three articles on the lead crisis in this issue.
The devastation and flooding caused by Hurricane Dorian and several other tropical storms was the leading water news event of the month. Tropical storm Imelda caused record flooding in parts of Texas. Also of note were Humberto, Kiko, Jerry, Mario, and Lorena. USA Today reported a record-tying six tropical storms going at once and said tropical storms are "forming like roaches."
Residents of West Point, Nebraska are being urged to use filtered or bottled water for drinking for the next few months until the city’s water plant is fitted with filters that can remove excess levels of manganese. One of the city's five wells is putting out water of 2,000 micrograms per liter (2 ppm). The acceptable level for manganese is less than 0.05 ppm.
Scientists relying on DNA evidence suggest that the elusive Loch Ness Monster is most likely a giant eel. Story.
Approximately 300 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year and up to 13 million tons of that is released into rivers and oceans, contributing to an accumulation of approximately 250 million tons of plastic by 2025. Since plastic materials are not generally degradable through weathering or ageing, this accumulation of plastic pollution in the aquatic environment creates a major concern. --Full Article.
The Trump administration's efforts to cancel the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulatory policy established under the Obama administration appear to be bearing fruit. The announced repeal of the 2015 ruling, stated in simple terms, restores the rights of corporate farmers, home builders, and real estate developers to pollute water on their own property although that pollution will eventually drain into streams, rivers, lakes, and drinking water reservoirs.
If drinking water on airline flights is important to you, Diet Detective has worked out an elaborate rating scheme and published the rankings of carriers. Their main message is that although some airlines do a better job of providing drinking water than others, the best policy is don't drink water on airplanes.
The non-profit Environmental Working Group released a study stating that "chemicals in the nation's drinking water could result in 100,000 cases of cancer in the U.S. over a lifetime." The group named disinfection by-products as the most dangerous cancer causers in tap water. Details.
An American man visiting Tanzania drowned while making a dramatic underwater marriage proposal. BBC for details.
In a classic bureaucratic blunder, the Portland, Oregon city council approved plans in 2017 for a $500 million water filtration plant only to learn two years later that the plant will cost at least $850 million because, believe it or not, the estimate did not include pipes to carry water to and from the plant. Apparently no one noticed.
The Arizona Elk Society has offered a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to arrest and conviction of vandals who poured gasoline into a catchment tank designed to provide drinking water for wildlife. The Arizona Game and Fish Department maintains about 3,000 water catchments statewide to provide water for wildlife.
President Trump vowed some unspecified punitive action against San Francisco because of waste pollution consisting of used needles flowing into the ocean via the city's storm sewers. No one knows what rules the city is accused of violating. LA Times.
It was announced that cleanup for the leaking ash ponds from a Montana coal mining operation is expected to last for decades and cost up to $700 million. Talen Energy, handling the cleanup, announced that it will need to add 27 new wells to the 100+ already in place to capture contaminated water in addition to 54 injection wells that would pump clean water into the underground reserves to help flush out contaminants. The leaking ash ponds have contaminated groundwater in the area with boron, sulfate and other potentially harmful materials. The cleanup will go on for decades though demand for coal is in sharp decline. Associated Press.
In Jakarta Indonesian police used water cannons against students protesting strict new laws against adultery, black magic, and insulting the president's dignity. Water cannons are serious weapons.
Las Vegas Water Hog of the Year Award goes to the Prince of Brunei. "The property that used the most water last year is a 15.9-acre compound owned by the family of Jefri Bolkiah, prince of Brunei. The ultra-luxurious, sprawling Spring Valley mansion, secondary buildings and pools on Spanish Gate Drive used over 12.4 million gallons of water. That’s 93 times what the average Las Vegas water district household consumed last year." Las Vegas Sun.
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Lead Service Lines Must Be Replaced
Lead service lines are a menace to public health. Millions of such pipes still feed Americans’ homes.
Sept. 9, 2019
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Once more an American city faces a lead crisis, with thousands of residents unable to drink from their taps. Lines for bottled water have stretched into the hundreds. Politicians are scrambling to overhaul the water system — and fast. This time it’s happening in New Jersey’s largest city, Newark.
Like the fiasco in Flint, Michigan, the Newark lead crisis had its own unique causes, including mismanagement and political infighting. But the two debacles have one crucial thing in common: pipes. Specifically the lead pipes installed decades ago, by the millions all over the country, to connect mains to houses and businesses. Pipes that can shed invisible molecules of metal when water passes through.
These pipes, known as service lines, were made from lead until well into the 1980s (even though lead’s dangers have been known for centuries). When the government banned lead from new pipes in 1986, it did nothing about the hundreds of miles of pipe still underground. At least 6 million such pipes (and likely many more) are still in use, serving households in almost one-third of the country’s water districts.
Lead is a neurotoxin. Its effects on the brain are well-known: learning disabilities, behavioral problems, anxiety and depression. It can also trigger heart, liver and kidney disease. Growing children are especially vulnerable. There is no safe level of exposure.
Right now, the standard practice is to treat water with anti-corrosion chemicals before sending it to households. Sometimes this works, but not always — as Newark shows. The city’s long-established corrosion control practice appears to have stopped working after the city made an unrelated tweak to the water supply. As is often the case, nobody saw it coming. As long as there’s lead in the pipes, the risk remains.
Why not just replace the pipes? That’s what Newark is doing — albeit belatedly — and what more than half a dozen other cities have done. The National Drinking Water Advisory Council recommends this approach. Granted, full replacement is costly and complicated, not least because most service lines are partly privately owned. But success in cities such as Lansing, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, has shown that the legal and financial obstacles are surmountable. The state of Minnesota recently found that every dollar invested in lead-pipe replacement would yield $10 in savings.
Other cities have adopted more modest policies, such as replacing lines to day-care centers or requiring service lines be replaced when properties change hands. Whatever the approach, states can help by requiring home sellers to disclose the existence of lead service lines, for example — much like federal law requires sellers to disclose lead paint. States should also be more aggressive in tracking and publicizing the location of lines, and lay the legal groundwork to help communities fund replacement efforts. The federal government should provide grants to defray some of the cost.
It would be money well spent. Researchers at New York University say lead poisoning costs the U.S. $51 billion annually. And remediation works: Plans to phase out lead have proved to be spectacular public-health successes, though they were met with grumbles at the time.
In ancient times, people drank from lead vessels because they didn’t know any better. There’s no longer any excuse.
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Lead Pipes That Tainted Newark’s Water Are Found Across US
A drinking water crisis in New Jersey is bringing new attention to an old problem: Millions of homes across the U.S. get their water through lead pipes.
by David Porter and Mike Catalini
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Pure Water Gazette Editor’s Note: This AP article is the best we’ve seen on the massive lead pipe problem that American water systems are facing. We’ve added a couple of pictures. We ask you to read this article carefully. It is sobering.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A drinking water crisis in New Jersey’s biggest city is bringing new attention to an old problem: Millions of homes across the U.S. get their water through pipes made of toxic lead, which can leach out and poison children if the water isn’t treated with the right mix of chemicals.
Replacing those lead pipes is a daunting task for cities and public water systems because of the expense involved — and the difficulty of even finding out where all those pipes are. Only a handful of states have put together an inventory of the buried pipes, which connect homes to water mains and are often on private property.
Do you feel good about drinking water that came to your home through this pipe?
But after drinking water emergencies in Washington, D.C., Flint, Michigan and now Newark, some experts are calling again for a rethinking of the theory that treating the pipes with anti-corrosive agents is enough to keep the public out of danger. Instead, the lead lines should be replaced, they say.
“It’s hard to come up with an argument against it,” Manny Teodoro, a public policy researcher at Texas A&M, told New Jersey lawmakers this week.
“Look, lead service line replacement is expensive, but it’s also removing poison from the bodies of ourselves and our children. It’s difficult to think of many things that are more important.”
Done correctly, chemical treatment should be enough to keep water in line with federal regulations, according to Peg Gallos, executive director of the Association of Environmental Authorities, a group representing water utilities. But in cases where the chemicals fail, pipe replacement becomes an option, she said.
People in about 15,000 households in Newark were told to drink only bottled water last month after the Environmental Protection Agency warned the city’s efforts to control lead contamination weren’t working. Since then, residents in the largely poor, mostly black and Hispanic city have had to line up in summer heat for cases of free water distributed by government agencies.
The crisis has unfolded over several years, with city officials insisting until recently that everything was under control.
Numerous city schools switched to bottled water because of lead contamination in 2016. Tests in 2017 found that 1 in 10 Newark homes had nearly twice as much lead in their water as allowed by the federal government. The state Department of Environmental Protection issued a warning to the city and public health advocacy groups complained, but Mayor Ras Baraka defended the safety of the city’s water by sending residents a brochure condemning what he said were “outrageously false” claims about lead contamination.
Later, consultants concluded the city’s corrosion control treatment for one of its main water supplies wasn’t working. New chemicals were introduced this spring, but it will be months before their effectiveness can be accurately gauged. The city handed out filters beginning last fall, but then the EPA warned that they might not be working.
Newark’s water crisis shares some similarities to the ones in Flint and Washington, D.C.
Flint’s lead levels spiked in 2014 after the city switched its water source from Lake Huron, which was being treated with the anti-corrosive orthophosphate, to the Flint River, which was not treated. Washington’s high levels between 2000 and 2003 resulted from the city’s switching anti-corrosion chemicals from chlorine to chloramine.
Lead Pipe from Newark
Experts estimate there could be as many as 10 million lead service lines nationwide but only five states require inventories or maps of their locations, according to the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators. A handful of other states have set up voluntary reporting.
That leaves dozens of states with incomplete knowledge of where and how much of the toxic plumbing they have.
“The biggest problem we face is we don’t know where these lead pipes are,” said Marc Edwards, an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech University. “In Flint, ultimately we had to dig up every single yard to find out what pipe was there because the records were so bad.”
Newark is now racing to try and replace all of its roughly 18,000 lead service lines, with the help of a county-backed, $120 million loan.
While cost is a factor — in Newark, it will cost about $10,000 per home to replace the pipes — so is the diffuse nature of water utilities. Teodoro estimated there are about 50,000 water systems in the U.S., many of them small systems. And in many cases the location of pipes isn’t even written down, Mary-Anna Holden, a commissioner on New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities, told lawmakers recently.
“I asked the superintendent ‘Where’s the map of the system?’ He’s pointing to his head. Like his grandfather and great-grandfather had started the water system so he knew where every valve was,” Holden said.
The most common source of lead in water comes from pipes, faucets and fixtures, rather than from water sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress banned the use of lead in water pipes in 1986, citing lead’s harmful effects on children’s nervous systems. In 1991, federal regulators began requiring water systems to monitor lead levels in drinking water and established a limit of 15 parts per billion.
Since the Flint water crisis, some states have gone farther. Michigan last year lowered its threshold to 12 parts per billion. Experts say no amount of lead is safe for children.
Kim Gaddy, 55, works as an environmental justice advocate for Clean Water Action. She’s a renter in Newark and had her lead service lines replaced by the city shortly before the two positive lead tests led to the city handing out bottled water.
She says she thinks it’s time for state and federal officials to require replacing lead service lines, no matter what the cost might be.
“My message would be let’s protect the health of (residents) and provide them with safe, affordable drinking water from the taps,” Gaddy said.
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Common Sense About Lead in Drinking Water
by Gene Franks |
In ancient times, people drank from lead vessels because they didn’t know any better. There’s no longer any excuse.–Bloomberg News Editorial.
Lead’s toxicity has been known for centuries, but lead remained a popular choice for water service lines installed up to the 1980s. It’s more flexible and durable than iron. About 6 million lead service lines are still in use today, connecting households to water mains. Prior to 1986, copper pipes inside a person’s home could also be joined with lead solder. —Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.
Some sobering information has surfaced because of the attention focused on the out-of-control lead contamination problems of Flint and Newark. We learn, for example, the nation’s drinking water infrastructure has so many lead-emitting metal pipes that we can’t begin to count them, and, what is worse, we don’t even know where they are.
Here are some points to ponder:
- Lead in water supplies is not a new problem. It is mainly public awareness of the problem that is new.
- The strategy for protecting the public from lead in water pipes, apart from vague, yet-to-be-funded proposals to replace the pipes, has been chemical treatment aimed at keeping pH high and adding sequestering chemicals. This seems to work most of the time, but the result isn’t predictable. Water treatment is complicated, and success can depend on variables like temperature, flow rate, and other chemicals present. Pipes and conditions in your home may be completely different from those where the supplier’s test was taken. Success of this strategy is also heavily dependent on the skill and dedication of the local technicians maintaining the system.
- Testing required by federal regulators is sporadic. Tens of millions of gallons of water pass through the pipes between mandated tests. Finding no lead at a test site on Elm Street doesn’t mean there isn’t lead in a home on Maple Street. I used to say that the way testing is conducted is like checking one passenger at the airport and if he doesn’t have a bomb, you assume that the next ten million passengers are also bomb free. Actually, with lead it’s worse that that: it’s more like testing one passenger and assuming that the next ten million passengers as well as the passengers at the airports of surrounding cities are bomb free. The odds that you are protected from lead by a test done five miles from your home six weeks ago are pretty bad.
- The message we get from water suppliers seems to be: Be patient. We’ll get this fixed. You can count on us. Be sure to run your tap five to fifteen minutes before you drink the water. When things are really bad, they give free bottled water or provide a cheap pour-through water filter.
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Conclusions
To protect yourself from lead, you could drink nothing but bottled water. That isn’t a bad solution. Or, you could a) write letters to city officials demanding action, b) wait for all the lead water pipes to be replaced, c) keep drinking tap water and hope for the best, or, d) get yourself a good water filter. If you choose a through c, good luck. If you choose d, I have some advice.
First, lead is a drinking water issue. While whole house lead solutions are available, it is usually more practical to treat drinking water only. For lead-free drinking water, you have some good choices: a steam distiller, reverse osmosis, or a substantial carbon filter with lead removal resin added. Of the three, reverse osmosis is the most practical. Reverse osmosis removes lead by its nature, without the need for special cartridges. Reverse osmosis, of course, has the advantage of treating not only lead but virtually all contaminants that can be found in city water.
Lead reduction cartridge filters vary in quality, but any reasonably-sized undersink or countertop filter from a trusted filter maker will provide excellent, lead-free water. I underline “reasonably sized.” The pitcher filters provided free by cities don’t really qualify as water filters. They are novelty items made for pick up sales in discount stores. The early tests done on the city-provided filters in Newark that lead to a blanket “filters don’t work” warning were done with city-provided pitcher filters with only enough lead capacity for 30 gallons of water. They have a warning light for cartridge replacement that is there to inspire confidence. You really don’t need a warning light: you need more resin.
A full-sized drinking water cartridge with lead removal rating of 2500 gallons from a reputable filter maker actually costs considerably less to operate than the tiny novelty systems.
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Global Warming: Rising Sea Levels Threaten Egypt’s Alexandria
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Flooding is now commonplace in Alexandria, and it continues to get worse.
Alexander the Great established the city more than 2,000 years ago. In that time, it has survived invasions, fires and earthquakes. But, Alexandria now faces severe flooding from rising waters blamed on climate change.
Alexandria is Egypt’s second largest city, with more than 5 million people. It is also an important port and home to about 40 percent of Egypt’s industrial activity. The city is surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean Sea and sits next to a lake. Officials have built concrete barriers in the sea in an effort to reduce the force of waves. A severe storm in 2015 flooded large parts of the city. At least six people were killed in the flooding, which also caused the collapse of many homes.
In the late 1940s and 50s, Alexandria was a popular place for writers and artists from Egypt and other countries. Today, more than 60 kilometers of waterfront make Alexandria a top summer vacation spot. However, many of the city’s most famous beaches are already showing signs of damage.
The United Nations has warned that worldwide sea levels could rise by 0.98 meters by 2100, with “serious implications for coastal cities, deltas and low-lying states.”
Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation said the sea level rose by an average of 1.8 millimeters each year until 1993. Over the next 20 years, it rose by 2.1 millimeters a year. Since 2012, however, the rate became 3.2 millimeters each year.
Measurements show that the land on which Alexandria is built is also sinking at about the same rate. This is expected to increase the risk of dangerous flooding.
A 2018 research study predicted that up to 734 square kilometers of the Nile Delta could be under water by 2050. People living in low-lying areas are already experiencing problems.
A 52-year-old resident of the Shatby neighborhood, Abu Randa, said he has repaired his three-story home twice since the 2015 floods. “We know it is risky. We know that the entire area will be underwater, but we have no alternative,” he told The Associated Press.
Sayed Khalil is a 67-year-old fisherman living in the el-Max neighborhood, where hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes after the flooding in 2015. He said homes have flooded with seawater every winter in recent years. “It is hard to imagine that el-Max will be here in a few decades,” Khalil said. “All these houses might vanish. The area you see now will be an underwater museum.”
The government built sea defenses to protect the neighborhood, but people who live there say it has not made a big difference. “Every year the waves are much stronger than the previous year,” said Abdel-Nabi el-Sayad, a 39-year-old fisherman. “We did not see any improvement. They just forced people to leave.”
Some of the city’s archaeological treasures are also threatened. Among them is the citadel of Qaitbay, a fortress built in the Middle Ages on the ruins of the ancient Pharos lighthouse in the central harbor.
Ashour Abdel-Karim is head of Egypt’s General Authority for Shores Protection. He said the citadel is especially at risk. Powerful waves continue to push against the structure’s foundation. Officials were forced to build a long line of concrete sea barriers that can be seen from the downtown waterfront area known as the Corniche.
The Egyptian government has put aside more than $120 million for the barriers and other protective measures along the shore, Abdel-Karim said. He added that without barriers, parts of the Corniche and other buildings near the shore would be damaged. If that happens, he said, repairs could cost nearly $25 billion.
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The Gazette’s Famous Water Picture Series: The World’s Tallest Waterfall
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Pictured above is Venezuela’s Angel Falls, which is usually considered the tallest waterfall in the world.
Angel Falls boasts a drop of 3,212 feet. The main plunge is an impressive 2,648 feet–a spectacular sight.
However, there is a dispute over whether or not Angel Falls is actually the tallest waterfall in the world.
Tugela Falls in South Africa: The Tallest Waterfall in the World?
The “tallest waterfall” title is disputed by fans of Tugela Falls in South Africa. The “taller than thou” dispute centers around accuracy of measurement. As you may imagine, waterfall measuring is not an exact science. Most believe that Angel Falls is probably shorter than its official 1949 measurement shows and that Tugela Falls is likely taller than its official measurements indicate. Officially, Tugela is 3,110 feet tall, but some argue that its true height falls between 3,255 and 3,320 feet.
Not only is Angel Falls likely shorter than initially measured in 1949, but Tugela Falls is likely taller than its measurements indicate. So rather than 3,110 feet as usually stated (which makes it a bit shorter than the possibly erroneously stated 3,212 feet of Angel Falls) Tugela Falls may more likely be somewhere between 3,255 feet and 3,320 feet in height.
If the two waterfalls are remeasured with more accuracy, we just may see the title for world’s tallest waterfall change hands. In the meantime, life goes on.
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The much celebrated and much hated Waters of the United States rule, aka WOTUS, appears to be dead. The Trump EPA along with the Army Corps of Engineers have, after a prolonged effort, finally killed it. The 2015 addition to the Clean Water Act was controversial from its inception because it lies on the sensitive line between individual rights and common good. The ownership of water is really the same issue as the apparently unsolvable questions like gun ownership, abortion, and vaccination. It asks the question does water belong to everyone or to the individual who owns the land where it is found at the moment. In other words, can the farmer whose drainage stream is pictured above dump his leftover fertilizer or the refuse from his hog lot into the tiny stream on his property without concern for where it will eventually end up? Repeal of the Waters of the United States rule says essentially that no one can tell him what he can or can’t put into “his own stream.”
The Dr. Seuss classic story of McElligot’s Pool should have laid to rest any question about the connectedness of all water. Apparently not.
Our feeling is that we’re all in this together. We need strict rules on water protection, even when these rules are an inconvenience to home builders, factory managers, and farmers. The Nixon-Era Clean Water Act has brought us a long way since the Cuyahoga River caught fire. It’s sad to see years of environmental progress reversed for the sake of political expediency.
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Lowering the pH of Water in the Home
by Gene Franks
Stenner Peristaltic Pump
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High pH in home water is treated far less frequently than low pH. In general, there are few negatives to high pH, but it can produce a soda taste and even cause corrosion in piping and fixtures made with metals such as brass, copper, zinc, aluminum and iron. Very high pH can also cause chlorination to be ineffective.
High pH can be reduced with specialized ion exchange media, but the most common treatment is to inject a mild acid into the water line. It is normally a “point-of-entry” treatment.
With wells, the normal place to inject the acid is just before the pressure tank.
To inject you need a chemical feed pump made of materials that resist corrosion (plastic, in other words) and a solution tank to hold the acid. The most commonly used acid for pH reduction is acetic acid, which is plain old supermarket grade white vinegar. It is safe, effective, economical, and readily available. Acetic acid is usually injected in about a five percent solution. Other popular weak acids available to residential users are citric acid, a bit stronger than vinegar, which is fed in a one percent solution, sodium bisulfate (potable water grade), fed at one percent, and alum, fed in a two-percent solution.
Hydrochloric and sulfuric acids are usually used only with industrial applications and in cases where alkalinity is extremely high.
As with most treatments in which a solution is fed into a water line, pH reduction will involve some trial and error. I suggest that you start with the solution strengths given above, set your pump at its medium setting, and give it a try. Check the pH downstream of the feed (but before any water treatment equipment) after a couple of days and adjust your solution strength or pump setting as needed.
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Water and the Plight of Women in Ethiopia
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Renowned Ethiopian artist Aida Muluneh has taken a series of striking images to depict the harsh life of many women in rural areas of Ethiopia–especially their daily efforts to obtain clean water for their families.
Aida Muluneh’s Water Life series, which was commissioned by the charity WaterAid, is on display at London’s Somerset House beginning in late September of 2019. Muluneh shot some of the photos in a studio while others were staged in the extreme landscape of one of the hottest and driest places on earth, Ethiopia’s northern Afar region.
“We cannot refute that it is mainly women who bear responsibility for collecting water, a burden that has great consequences for our future and the development of our nation,” Muluneh said. The jerry cans are tied to a rope to reflect the shackles of carrying water.
Almost 40% of Ethiopians do not have clean water close to their homes, compared to the global average of 10%, according to Water Aid.
More symbolically complex, this shot focuses on girls and how the lack of water and bathrooms in schools affects their education. “The fact that most girls don’t attend school when they are menstruating is a major hindrance on the progress of women in our society,” Muluneh says.
In this piece, the moon represents a woman’s monthly cycle The red wings illustrate her freedom and strength but also the fact that she cannot achieve her full potential because she is shackled by the natural occurrence of menstruation.
“In a sense, it is like a caged bird that cannot fly but is grounded. The striped floor is symbolic of the road to destiny in which our path to success is in front of us but we must take the step forward,” Muluneh says.
More images from the Water Life Series can be seen on the BBC website.
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Places to visit for additional information:
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Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the next Occasional!
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