Marking a century of disinfection

Source: AWWA Mainstream Staff

One hundred years ago this week, the residents of Jersey City, N.J., became the first customers in the United States to get chlorinated water from their taps.

To meet the obligations of its contract with the city, the Jersey City Water Co. began chlorinating water from its Boonton Reservoir on Sept. 26, 1908. This “full-scale and continuous implementation of disinfection ignited a disinfection revolution in the United States that reverberated around the world,” wrote Michael J. McGuire in a March 2006 Journal AWWA article.

Within 10 years, more than 1,000 US cities were chlorinating their water; by 1941, 85% of US water treatment systems used chlorine disinfection.

Chlorination has been recognized as a major barrier to the spread of infectious disease, changing the health of a nation in the early decades of the twentieth century. Today, contamination of drinking water presents the greatest health risk after such natural disasters as hurricanes or cyclones, earthquakes, and storm surges.

To celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the use of chlorine as a drinking water disinfectant, the American Chemical Council has developed an extensive Web site, Chlorine Chemistry: 100 Years of Safer Lives, with a timeline, a quiz, a graph illustrating the dramatic decline in waterborne disease in the United States, and a series of articles related to disinfection.

The Web site also notes the role of AWWA and its members in promoting disinfection of drinking water:

“In a national gathering of water professionals at the 1909 annual meeting of the American Water Works Association, the argument for chemical disinfection was elevated to a level of prominence. Here, beyond the realm of local politics, [John L.] Leal and his associates from New York, George Warren Fuller and George A. Johnson, presented data that supported the effectiveness and low cost of chlorination. The men showed that small applications of chlorine could significantly reduce bacterial levels in drinking water. Johnson revealed the cost of chlorine treatment to be just 14 cents per million gallons, a mere $5.60 per day for Jersey City’s 40 million gallon daily usage.”

The ACC is joining with Jersey City and United Water, which operates the Jersey City water system, to host a celebration September 24 to commemorate the anniversary. They will be joined by state officials and representatives from AWWA, the Centers for Disease Control, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Association of Water Companies.

According to Jersey City Mayor Jeremiah Healy, the city was also the first major US city to establish a public - private partnership for the management and operation of its water supply, treatment, and distribution system. Today United Water is the private half of that partnership.