pH/PHED

While you guys were in church last Sunday, I learned a bit about our drinking water from Tlawng. Of course, after a nice, regular natural steam bath via R. Tlawng, they put me in a nice AC room and fed me tangy sweet fruit salad and I forgot my notebook there. Now this notebook cannot fall into the wrong hands. It contains state secrets. No, it doesn’t. I'm kidding. But it does contain a lot of what I've learned over the past few months. Esp w.r.t. RD. I learn by writing. That’s just how it goes. If I don’t write something down, chances are I will forget it. So I really can’t afford to lose the notebook.

Anyhoo. I nodded wisely and listened to talks about pH and alum... I'll even reproduce it for you!

1. Pump the water.

2. Control the sediment using alum. (I don’t remember the real chemical name; maybe ask a PHED officer if you want to know?)

3. Separate the water from the sediment; now the water is highly acidic

4. Control the pH level

5. Purify the water and make it safe for drinking

6. Supply it to homes

PHED is for health. It’s in the name: Public Health Engineering Department. But honestly, water distributor, amirite? No, I kid. There's a lot that goes into PHED – sanitation concerns being an easy top pick of PHED works. Provision of safe drinking water is, I suppose, technically, only a branch of their workload. Sometimes I think the rural population understands PHED better than the urban one but that might just be me.

Aside from all these lessons, I was impressed by the damage that water could cause. I’ve gone on a long soliloquy over water (check out an earlier blog here, very on-the-nose title, "Water") but I am nowhere close to being done with it. I checked the water level at the pump tower and I was easily submerged. I am a short girl, I reached my adult height of 5’2” aged 12. But even then, I think it is most impressive for water level to have climbed so high at the pumping stations that I could be buried under it. Even if I stood at 6’4” I would still have been fully immersed is how high the water level climbed. The pumping station at its ground level is already at 55ft from the river bed. The water really climbed up to the pumping tower and drowned the motors there at I think safely 10ft off from the tower floor. Scary.

So now PHED can’t pump/distribute the amount of water they once could. First off, that had never been enough, per capita. But now it’s only a fraction of what they once could. It seems so paradoxical that because there’s excess water, we are not getting enough water. The difference between flood water and safe water. It’s the same as an entire world covered in water but only 3% of it is fresh water and only 1.2% of it is accessible. Water planet and all that, but ya.

All of this got me thinking although that thinking got me nowhere. Until last night I was checking out IG reels and someone said: the p in pH doesn’t stand for anything! Or at least we don’t know. In 1909 when Søren Sørenson came up with a way to measure acidity, apparently he just said: we’ll use something called pH to measure acidity, 0 through 14, lower numbers more acidic, higher numbers more basic and the H in pH will stand for Hydrogen. End of lesson.

Apparently the top two hypotheses in the chemist world for the p in pH is potential or power. But we (they, I suppose) don’t know.

Maybe the p is silent in pH. As long as the P in PHED is not silent, we are good.