Clean Water for Mississauga

I'll bet the city of Mississauga got its name on the theory that Canadians can have fun place-names, too. It's one of the three places that form the Region of Peel, along with Brampton and Caledon, and they're all part of the Greater Toronto Area. One of the functions of a region, it seems, is water treatment, and on Thursday we saw a state-of-the-art water treatment facility that serves the Region of Peel, actually the expansion of a more standard facility that relies on chlorination.

My grasp of the technicalities in this case is fairly weak. The plant sits near Lake Ontario and large underground pipes suck water from that body into the facility. Ozone is an important additive early in the process, but rather than remembering what it does to the water, I noted the ubiquitous warning signs -- If You Detect an Ozone Leak, Get the Hell Out NOW (I'm paraphrasing). Further along in the process, there were enormous square tanks full of mildly bubbling water.

Then we went to the forest-of-pipes room, a forest planted on a big concrete floor marked with little puddles here and there. Color-coded green and red and blue pipes, sporting various kinds of knobs and values and stenciled letters, bent this way and made their arcs. The room gurgled and hissed, but in a friendly way. This is where water goes to be cleaned, after all.

Actually, filters were the essential part of the process near this room, and they came arrayed in columns and rows, or maybe it was racks, but anyway there were a lot of them in vats; they're expensive; and they represented the state-of-the-art part of the equipment -- a greener alternative to chlorine. I believe it, but I'm taking it on faith. The guide obviously knew what he was talking about. And I'm really glad someone knows how to clean water on an industrial scale.