
9 episodes

In Deep American Public Media
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- Science
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4.7 • 52 Ratings
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In Deep is a podcast about water, climate and environment from The Water Main at American Public Media. In Season 1, we tackled the strangely fascinating yet troubling world of clean water -- from tap to toilet. Season 2 shines a light on environmental equity with a rich journalistic portrait of a working-class city and its residents at a perilous moment in our planet's existence.
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Dirty Water
Throughout human history, cities have grappled with how to keep excrement separate from drinking water. In the Middle Ages, gong farmers excavated human waste from city dwellers and took it to the countryside to be used as fertilizer. In the 19th century, cities grew so big, this wasn’t possible anymore. So excrement went into rivers like the Thames, which is where London, a city of 2 million people in 1850, got its drinking water. At the same time, cholera was killing tens of thousands of people. Nearly everyone thought cholera was transmitted through the air. But John Snow, a London physician, discovered dirty water was the cause.
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Microbial Goo
Just how hard is it to keep wastewater out of our drinking water? Super hard. In this episode, we take a look at the lengths one great American city, Chicago, went to in order to keep the source of its drinking water clean. Reverse the flow of the river? Why not? Then we explore the origins of activated sludge — a century-old microbial goo that still cleans up our sewage today. We end with a scientist studying what a city’s wastewater can reveal about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Godzilla's Bathtub
Older American cities have a dirty problem — outdated sewer systems that use a single pipe to carry both sewage and stormwater to treatment facilities. As population growth and climate change have increased both sewage and stormwater, those pipes can get filled to capacity, and the untreated water sometimes ends up in waterways, where it wreaks havoc on the ecosystem. Chicago’s strategy for stopping the overflows has been to build massive reservoirs and a 109-mile-long system of tunnels hundreds of feet below ground. It’s a gargantuan holding tank for filthy water. Unfortunately, it may not be big enough.
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Poison Pipes
Clean water can get contaminated on its way to your faucet. In America, more than 9 million lead service lines connect city water to individual homes (and apartments), leaving millions of people vulnerable to potentially harmful doses of lead. Retired EPA scientist — and Flint whistleblower — Miguel Del Toral shows us lead pipes unearthed from his property in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood and explains why they're no longer considered safe. And we talk to a Milwaukee father, who stumbled upon this lesson with his young son.
→ Read APM Reports’ investigation → Read Del Toral’s memorandum on Flint
Guests:
Miguel Del Toral, EPA scientist (retired)
Rick Rabin, Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health
Tory Lowe, Milwaukee activist (and father of four)
Karen Baehler, scholar-in-residence at American University School of Public Affairs
Photo: Lauren Rosenthal | APM Reports -
Small Town, Big Struggles
Today we leave the big cities behind and ask: How does rural America manage its water infrastructure? After all, one in five U.S. households isn’t connected to a sewer system. We visit the rolling mountains of Letcher County, Kentucky. There, in the early 1900s, coal mining firms built company towns with little attention to long-term infrastructure. Decades later, local residents are dealing with the consequences. We hear from former coal miner Carroll Smith about his push in the 1990s to bring clean drinking water and safe wastewater disposal to communities across the county. And we learn where he ran into challenges.
Guests:
Upmanu Lall, Director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University
Carroll Smith, former Judge Executive of Letcher County, Kentucky
Allan Tuggle, retired miner
Edna McBee, Millstone resident
Mark Lewis, General Manager, Letcher County Water and Sewer District
Photo: Britta Greene -
Well, Well, Well
In the 1990s, lakes and wetlands dried up in Florida’s fast-growing Tampa Bay region. Some attributed the drastic change to drought; others to overpumping of an underground aquifer. A pitched legal battle, known as the Water Wars, played out. Some government-run utilities wanted to keep pumping from the aquifer; others wanted to look for new water sources. Eventually, they began to work together to find multiple sources of drinking water.
Guests:
Randy and Mark Barthle, Barthle Brothers Ranch owners
Honey Rand, Water Wars author
Eileen Hart, Tampa Bay resident and water rights activist
Ken Herd, Tampa Bay Water, chief science and technical officer
Radhika Fox, US Water Alliance, chief executive officer
Photo: Courtesy of Tampa Bay Water
Customer Reviews
Captivating!
I was able to binge In Deep after a recent major surgical procedure required a lot of rest and downtime. If you are at all interested in acquiring general knowledge and in and environmental concerns, this is the podcast for you! Provides interesting facts, nerd humor and expert interviews. Would be good to use as a source for school reports also.
Great water program
Great series. Many years ago our group at the university of south florida developed a similar programs for political leaders in the Tampa Bay Area of florida. We followed the same format. As a environmental engineer I feel at home with your series.
Good for the average listener, important information
But it comes across as a little too accessible (which is probably a good thing at the end of the day if the goal is to educate the masses). I’m fascinated by subjects like this and have a small mountain of esoteric interests. The podcast is good and hits on an extremely important subject (and I hate to be critical of someone’s creative effort) but this is not really for the engineering type or anyone who is already acquainted to the subject. I was hoping for some juicy, technical banter, but it frankly feels a bit spoon fed.