Turbidity, schmurbidity

I'm picking on the local newspaper again. I'm not trying to, I'm really not. It's just hard to get through it sometimes. This time it's about our local water. Which I think is important enough to warrant a decent story. It seems that either the Delaware overran the water plant or some filter stopped functioning. Or both. The Bucks County Courier Times took three stabs at it, but apparently just parroted the guy who runs the plant. Here's the note I wrote to the reporter who did two out of three of the stories, followed by his astonishing reply.

Danny:

Your Friday story, "Authority lifts boil water advisory"
still doesn't answer the basic questions about the event, even though the Courier Times had four working days to figure it out. The word "turbidity" is used four times and is defined with the the parentheses: (cloudiness). But re-read this sentence in your story:

"Authority customers in Morrisville and parts of Falls and Lower Makefield were told Monday to boil their water before drinking because of unusually high levels of turbidity following heavy rain storms Sunday and a mechanical problem at the water plant."

I don't know whether you're an old-timer or a summer intern, but the Courier Times has been around long enough that someone there must have noticed that the Delaware River is a significant geographical and environmental feature of the region, and a couple times a year it does something newsworthy. How can the Courier Times not have the phone numbers of a couple of water experts to call to get a better explanation of its behavior, in this case, turbidity? While you were waiting for them to return your call, you could have looked at the U.S. Geological Survey's water data site. You would see turbidity spikes after every heavy rain, and on the week of June 13, it was as high as it was last week. So, you ask the water company, what's "unusual" if the same thing happened less than two months ago and there wasn't a boil water advisory?

You should have asked the water company: What mechanical failure? As opposed to the four turbidities, that was only mentioned once in the story, with not even a parenthetical attempt to explain. It would seem to any local reading the paper it must be the plant, not the river. Or was it?

Was it?

"Dana,

Thanks for the e-mail. The real issue here was not that the turbidity levels of the Delaware River were high, it was the fact that the water got into Morrisville Municipal Authority's public water system because of a mechanical failure with one of the lime feeders for about 12 hours (Sunday night into Monday morning.) Hope that helps."