To drink or not to drink?

The cholera outbreak in Mariupol seems to be on the wane. Ac­cor­ding to the Donetsk Oblast Public Hy­giene Authority, out of the 15 recorded patients, five have been discharged from hospital after they comp­leted the treatment. Three others left after testing negative for cho­lera. One more is going to be discharged. Yet the outbreak in Do­netsk region has highlighted the problem of the unauthorized di­schar­ge of industrial effluents into open water reservoirs, and triggered a public debate on another very im­por­tant problem — the quality of potable wa­ter.

“A situation similar to the one in Mariupol may occur any time, at any place in Ukraine — from a large megalopolis to a small town or village,” Green Party leader Oleksandr Prohnymak says. “The public utility infrastructure is critically worn-out throughout the country. There is no full-fledged effluent purification system. Besides, the unauthorized dumping of household and industrial impurities into water bodies had assumed a catastrophic scale.”

According to Pavlo Kachur, ex-minister for housing and public uti­li­ties, the number of water networks and pipelines that need to be replaced or updated is always on the rise. There is a more or less normal situation in household water supply systems, he says, but urban water networks are in poor condition. It is difficult to replace obsolete pipes in cities because it is a precarious and expensive procedure. “They are almost 75 percent worn out, and the pipes’ service life is more than 25 years,” Kachur told The Day. He added that water purification stations are also raising questions.

Environmentalists say the potable water situation in Ukraine demands that immediate measures be taken. “We can see a critical situation: the number of the populated areas and people that have no access to high-quality potable water is increasing with every passing year,” says Tetiana Tymochko, chairperson of the All-Ukrainian Ecological League. In her words, about 1,300 cities and villages, accounting for about one million people, are using delivered drinking water. In her opinion, the main factor that wor­sens the quality of potable water is enhanced exposure to the environment and water ecosystems.

According to the All-Ukrainian Ecological League, in 2004-10, in spite of the economic crisis, the dumping of insufficiently purified or unpurified industrial effluents increased from 3.5 to 6 billion cubic meters. The ever-growing use of detergents by the populace has also radically changed the nature of pollution. To top it all, environmental pollution penalties have not been essentially revised in Ukraine over the past 10 years. In other words, culprits are not afraid to be punished in hryvnias. “Our law and standard-setting instruments do not encourage, administratively or economically, the reduction of water intake or of waste water pollution,” Tymochko emphasized.

Tymochko claims that the areas mostly affected by the quality of potable water are the Crimean cities and the industrial centers of Donetsk, Dnipro­petrovsk, Zaporizhia, Lu­hansk, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Khmelnytsky ob­lasts. The expert says that clean water can only be found in western Ukraine, especially in the mountains. “There used to be top-quality water in Poltava and Cherkasy oblasts, but their waters are also under threat now due to all kinds of construction and mining activity,” she added.

In her words, tap water is unfit for drinking throughout the country. “The worst situation is in the countryside. Villages are literally flooded with their own effluent waters. All that is a product of vital functions is getting into wells. A mere 25-26 percent of villagers have access to centralized water supplies. Rural water supplies are not equipped with purification or decontamination plants, nor is there any laboratory control of the drinking water quality,” Tymochko explained to The Day.

Government officials also admit that Ukrainians drink one of Europe’s worst waters. One can read this in the explanation to the national project Quality Water, drawn up by the State Agency for Investments and National Projects Ma­na­gement of Ukraine. For this reason, officials have decided to come to grips with this problem in the nearest future. The national project calls for building 23,000 potable water purification systems. But this is still on the drawing board. No real steps have been taken to put the plan into practice.

Meanwhile, some regions have begun to carry out their own water purification schemes. For instance, the Crimean Prime Minister Vasyl Dzharty recently ordered a project to be drawn up to build state-of-the-art drinking water purification facilities on the Crimea’s Southern Coast. “The Council of Ministers is prepared to fund the project report so that we can begin building these plants as soon as next year… Actually, the Crimea’s resources meet only 30 percent of the potable water requirements, the rest of the water coming through the North Crimean Canal. At present the losses of water are colossal and its quality is substandard,” he said. The Crimean prime minister explained that the pilot projects call for building purification facilities in Greater Yalta and Greater Alushta.

“The project is going to include purifying water from artesian wells, the North Crimean Canal, and even seawater,” says Volodymyr Ri­su­k­hin, representative of the company Natural Technologies involved in the Crimean project. On his part, My­khai­lo Zgurovsky, president of the Kyiv Polytechnic Research Park that will also take part in the project, said that the plan also included building small-size water purification facilities. “There is no need to build a gigantic plant because water will get polluted while running through pipelines,” he said, noting that the facilities will use the multilayer impurity removal technique.

At present the consumer receives water either from natural underground reservoirs or through pipe­lines from open water bodies. As the reserves of fresh underground (artesian, spring, etc.) waters are rather small, most Ukrainians consume water from open water bodies. Water treatment stations purify water through a chemical or non-chemical method. The chemical method implies using a special coagulant that helps clarify and decolorize water in sedimentation basins, where most of the suspensions, as well as microorganisms, precipitate. The non-chemical method prescribes that, after passing through sedimentation ba­sins, water is filtered in a layer of sand and fine anthracite coal and gets decontaminated by means of chlorine. Chlorine is in fact responsible for the unpleasant taste and smell of water. Chlorinating has been banned in Europe for 40 years, Tymochko told The Day. “The whole civilized world has long been using the biological purification of water, which is ozone-treated and filtered through a multistage method,” the expert concluded, “while Ukraine has yet to adopt up-to-date methods of water purification.”

There is no universal water treatment technology at present, Kachur says. As a rule, businesses are the first to implement the latest achievements in this field and the expert believes this should be taken into account. The Day was told at the Stirol plant about the application of one of the latest nanotechnologies of this kind. The enterprise is using the method of reverse osmosis, when water is filtered under pressure through semi-permeable membranes which let the solvent go and fully or partially inhibit the dissolved substances. Plant employees claim that this technique allows one to receive absolutely clean water, cleared of particles as tiny as a virus and reducing the concentration of water components by 96-99 percent. Besides, this technology has essentially cut the production costs of clean desalinated water: it takes 0.64 dol­lars to produce one cubic meter. Conversely, the cost of one liter of water in some cities of Ukraine exceeds this figure. The enterprise has assessed that the overall economic effect of this technology as being worth 2 million dollars a year, while the payback period is three years.

Experts think that, to avoid drinking water-induced health impairments, we must take a number of immediate measures: firstly, to audit sewerage and purification systems in the regions in order to find and eliminate the most hazardous impurity dumping sites in water bodies, Prohnymak says. Secondly, he adds, the government should adopt a sewerage modernization program and begin to fund it as early as in 2011. Thirdly, we should pass the laws that increase fines and penalties for those who pollute the environment and change the approach to the water management system, i.e., replace the territorial principle with the basin-based one, when the authorities are responsible for water policies not in a certain region but in the basin of a certain large body of water, Tymochko adds.

She believes that the problem of clean water consumption should be solved as soon as possible. The point is that using substandard water causes a high incidence of enteric infections — viral hepatitis, typhoid, and cholera, and increases the impact of carcinogenic and mutagenic factors on the human body.

TO THE POINT

In terms of fresh water reserves, Ukraine is at the bottom of Europe’s list — 1,000 cu. m. of water per re­­si­­dent. For comparison, this index is 2,500 cu. m. in Sweden, 5,000 in the UK, 3,500 in France, and 2,500 in Germany. Ukraine ranks 95th out of 122 countries in a UNESCO report on the rational use of water resources and water quality.