| This week will be the first of a two part tour of Hartford’s water and waste-water facilities. We begin with our water resources, the water the comes out of our taps every day. The Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) website has loads of background information that we should all be familiar with before touring the facilities. Access the site by clicking here: MDC – Water Supply & Pollution Control Under the What We Do drop down menu you can get some great info on the services the MDC provides.
Connecticut Public Television (CPTV) produced an excellent documentary on the history and process of the Hartford waterworks. This video should be watched before going on the field trip. It’s about 50 minutes long so give your self enough time to watch it. Water Works: Bringing Pure, Clean Water to Connecticut |
Questions:
What was Caleb Saville’s engineering feat to bring clean drinking water to Connecticut? (2 points)
What are the name of the two main reservoirs form which Hartford gets its drinking water? (4 points)
How does water move from the reservoirs to the distribution customers around Hartford and surrounding towns? (2 points)
How does the MDC generate additional revenues in a time when customers are conserving more water and therefore decreasing the revenues for the MDC? (2 points).
Additional Spring 2020 Question: Now that you are home and not drinking Hartford water, where does your water come from? Find out where and how your water is cleaned in your town/city. If you are drinking well water, do you know if any treatments are needed before it goes to your tap? How deep is your well? Maybe you can’t drink your tap water…why not?
This does not have to be a long answer but please be as detailed as you can to explain where your water comes from and how is it cleaned for consumption.
Organize all these answers on a Word document and upload to the Moodle site.
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EXTRA CREDIT (Spring 2020)
Watershed delineation
A basic skill in environmental science is to delineate a watershed. This is simply drawing a line the envelops every patch of ground that drains into a specified body of water. Smaller watersheds are included in larger regional watersheds. For example the Farmington River watershed (see handout maps #1 & #2) is part of a much larger Connecticut River watershed which dominates the western side of New England.
ASSIGNMENT: You are asked by the City of Hartford to delineate the watershed of the Nepaug Reservoir. They need to update their current land use maps and it is critical to know all of the streams and brooks that flow into one of the city’s drinking water reservoirs. Use map #3 of the map handouts to trace a line that represents the boundary of the watershed. Then lightly color the watershed with a colored pencil so that the topography still shows through. When you are done, everything within the shaded region drains to the reservoir and everything outside of the region does not. Make sure your watershed line does not cross any streams. A watershed divide is always going to be locally at the height of land. This requires you to read the topographic map carefully and know which way is uphill and which way is downhill.
Map #1 – Hartford_reservoirs
Map #2 – Hartford_water
Map #3 (post-lab assignment map) Nepaug_watershed
You will need to take an image of the delineation (scanned or quality phone image) and upload to the Moodle site.
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