How to Not Get Dysentery from your Rainwater
Tanks
A clean rainwater
tank is a safe rainwater tank
Collecting
and storing rainwater is an ancient practice. It is very common in rural
Australia where access to treated scheme water is not available. The common
belief is that rainwater is a safe source of pure water. This may be true as
the rain falls on your roof, but if you do not manage your rain water tank
correctly, you may well be drinking contaminated water. What is so pure and
clean about water that collects bird poo, dead frogs and chemical dust and
leaves and stores them all, slowly putrifying in a stagnant pool? The main
house rainwater tank at Morilla was an ancient concrete structure that did not
seal properly and the collection surface was the large shed - the gutters of
which were filled with debris. What it needed was to be replaced with a new
tank, but instead we decided to drink bottled water, fit an extremely high
quality water filter for cooking water and use the tank water only for
showering and flushing the toilet. The water surprisingly remained clean and
odour free while we lived there, and no doubt any other farmer would have drunk
it without a second thought. Maybe it was my nursing past life coming back to
haunt me, but I could never bring myself to just drink water straight from that old, unsafe tank. Farmers all around told us that rainwater tanks are ‘self cleaning’,
although how this could possibly occur still escapes me. How does a tank clean itself? The only rainwater tank I would
trust would be a brand new one I installed and maintained. Then I could be
assured of the quality and safety of the water contained within it.
Water
in rainwater tanks is not treated with chlorine as the water that comes from
the scheme water system is. This allows microbes to breed and thrive in tanks
that are not correctly maintained. What you effectively have is a collection of
stagnant untreated water that sits in a tank year after year. The tank will
collect debris from roofs and gutters including bird faeces and chemical dust
which can pass through a leaf net system, and if the tank is not fully sealed,
animals will find their way inside and drown. Over time a sludge will form on
the bottom of the tank and if this sludge rises to the outlet point, you will
be drinking water that contains some of this sludge material. If at any time
the water is not clear, odourless and tasteless, you have a problem with
contamination. You do not want to be drinking this contaminated water, and you
do not want to know what is in it that has lead to the contamination!
