Health. What water do people drink in Tashkent?

Mountain water of snow-ice origin comes to Tashkent and it is brought to the city by Chirchik River - the right confluent of Syr-Darya River originating at the western spurs of Tyan-Shan. Tashkent would not exist if it were not for Chirchik. Over two thousand years is the age of our city, and the inhabitants drink water from Chirchik River for two thousand years because there is simply no other drinking water in the capital.

Drinking water comes to Tashkent from Boz-Su surface canal. The portion of water coming from this canal makes up 70%, the rest is underflowing, underground water of Chirchik, which comes from wells. Eight powerful waterworks give us drinking water twenty-four hours a day from various regions of the suburb: Boz-Su, Kadirya, Kibray, Southern Kara-Su, Sergeli, Bektemir, Kuylyuk. The oldest waterworks, from which the water pipe of Tashkent originates, is Boz-Su introduced in 1931. Pump houses give Boz-Su water, clarified and chlorinated in two horizontal precipitation tanks to 12 filters (area - 420 square meters). Water passes through the sieve of silica sand, crushed anthracite and haydite and goes through pipes to the reservoirs of pure water. Before this, water passes repeated chlorination (just half an hour) and only then the pumps of second lifting bring it up to Tashkent. The pumps are able to hoist water to the height of 40 meters. Here, at the way out to the city, the clarified and filtrated water is finally tested again by instruments and equipment, which do not stop working for a minute: hourly residual chloride analysis, there times a day - a brief chemical analysis and determination of the radioactivity background, daily - bacteriological analysis. Of course, water is priceless, if it is regarded as the elevated philosophical categories. But it has a price, dictated by the economy and the market. You can learn what the price can be from the following example.

A few years ago in the region of the Chimgan mountains, near the Humsan resort a landslide came off unexpectedly which blocked the sole water supplier of Tashkent - Chirchik river. The good river water, having been drawn on the soil, which got into the river, reached the precipitation tanks of the water pipe headwork being very drossy. In order to improve the situation, which can be referred to as state of emergency, the reserve stock of coagulant (alumina) was put to use. If for achieving the standard clarity of water (provided by the state standards according to 20 indices of quality of drinking water) usually 30 tons of alumina and over 2 tons of chlorine is used daily, during those days alumina diminished at the rate of 80-90 tons per day. Alumina is bought by the Republic for currency. Although water, polluted by the mudslide, was completely disinfected, it was not entirely "cured" from turbidity, despite all the efforts of the workers of the system. Now you can calculate how much pure water cost the city. Now imagine the entire route of water to your tap. Do you want to drink water, which passed through anthracite and haydite? Yes, it is clean but is it suitable for consuming inside? What harm to your health can this type of water bring?

Water, which can be bought in each shop in convenient plastic bottles, is widely spread in the West. In Uzbekistan also the number of those who wish to consume "pure" water has grown in the last 2-3 years. Many methods of purifying water were invented. These include filtration, UV-irradiation, and ozone treatment. The first two methods are quite familiar to us from the school physics syllabus, ozone treatment on the other hand has been brought up only in the last decade although this method is known for over 100 years.