With waters having turbidities of 0.20 upon this basis, the average period will be about 51 million gallons per acre between scrapings. This is about the average result obtained at the German works filtering river waters, and there is no serious difficulty in operating filters which require to be scraped with this frequency. With more turbid waters the period is decreased. With an average turbidity of 0.50 the average period is only 24 million gallons per acre between scrapings, a condition which means very difficult operation and a very high cost of cleaning. With much more turbid waters the difficulties are increased, and if the duration of turbid water should be long-continued, the operation of sand filters would clearly be impracticable, and the expense, also, would be prohibitive.
In applying these figures to actual cases it must be borne in mind that the turbidity is only one of the several factors which control the length of period; and that the turbidity of a water of a given stream is never constant, but fluctuates within wide limits; and that raw water can be applied to filters for a short time without injurious results, even though it is so turbid that its continued application would be fatal.
It is very likely also that the suspended matters in different streams differ in their natures to such an extent that equal turbidities would give quite different periods, although the Pittsburg results were so regular as to give confidence in their application to other conditions within reasonable limits, and when so applied they afford a most convenient method of computing the approximate cost of operation of filters for waters of known or estimated turbidities.
POWER OF SAND FILTERS TO PRODUCE CLEAR EFFLUENTS FROM MUDDY WATER.
When the turbidity of the applied water is not too great it is entirely removed in the course of filtration. With extremely muddy raw waters, however, turbid effluents are often produced with sand filters. The conditions which control the passage of the finest suspended matters through filters have been studied by Mr. Fuller at Cincinnati at considerable length. They are similar in a general way to the conditions which control the removal of bacteria. That is to say, the removal is more complete with fine filter sand than with coarse sand; with a deep sand layer than with a shallow sand layer; and with low rates of filtration than with high rates. The practicable limits to the size of sand grain, depth of sand layer, and rate of filtration are established by other conditions, and the question remains whether within these limits a clear effluent can be produced.
At Pittsburg the turbidity of the effluent from a sand filter operated as mentioned above, which received water which had passed through a sedimentation-basin holding about a 24-hours’ supply, but without taking any advantage of storage to avoid the use of muddy water, was nearly always less than 0.02, which may be taken as the admissible limit of turbidity in a public water-supply. This limit was exceeded on less than 20 days out of 365, these days being during the winter and spring freshets, and on these days the excess was not such as would be likely to be particularly objectionable. For the water of the Allegheny River, then, sand filtration with one day’s sedimentation is capable of yielding a water not absolutely clear, but sufficiently clear to be quite satisfactory for the purpose of municipal water-supply.
At Cincinnati, on the other hand, where the amount of suspended matters was five times as great as at Pittsburg, the effluents which could be obtained by sand filtration without recourse to the use of alum, even under most favorable conditions, were very much more turbid than those obtained at Pittsburg, and were, in fact, so turbid as to be seriously objectionable for the purpose of public water-supply.
With rivers no more turbid than the Allegheny River at Pittsburg, and rivers having floods of such short duration that the use of flood-flows can be avoided by the use of reservoirs, sand filters are adequate for clarification. For waters which are much muddier than the Allegheny, as, for instance, the Ohio at Cincinnati and at Louisville, sand filtration alone is inadequate. Mr. Fuller,[31] as a result of his Cincinnati experiments, has stated the case as follows:
“For the sake of explicitness it is desired to show, with the data of the fairly normal year of 1898, the proportion of the time when English filters (that is, sand filters) would be inapplicable in the purification of the unsubsided Ohio River water at Cincinnati. This necessitates fixing an average limit of permissible suspended matter in this river water, and is a difficult matter from present evidence.
“In part this is due to variations in the character and in the relative amounts of the suspended silt, clay, and organic matter; and in part it is due to different amounts of clay stored in the sand layer, which affects materially the capacity of the filter to retain the clay of the applied water. During these investigations the unsubsided river-water was not regularly applied to filters; and, with the exception of the results of tests for a few days only, it is necessary to depend upon general information obtained with reference to this point. So far as the information goes, it appears that an average of 125 parts per million is a conservative estimate of the amount of suspended matters in the unsubsided river-water, which could be regularly and satisfactorily handled by English filters. But at times this estimated average would be too low, and at other times too high....