A lot of the posts here seem to be missing something important: permanganate is an EXTREMELY vividly colored ion in solution. The bright colors of the water in the pictures is about in line with what a 20 ppm permanganate solution looks like. Considering manganese is an essential trace mineral (although it is neurotoxic above a certain point, the amounts in the water are minimal), I doubt there is any real toxic effect caused by drinking the water. Permanganate is a very strong oxidizer, but it is not much stronger than the commonly used chlorine and chlorine dioxide to be of concern (and it's weaker than ozone anyways).
The whole reason permanganate is added in the first place is twofold: it oxidizes simple organics all the way to carbon dioxide (think nail polish remover, denatured alcohol), and it oxidizes soluble ferrous iron to insoluble ferric iron. The byproduct of the oxidation, manganese dioxide, is insoluble and if balanced correctly the treatment does not increase manganese levels in the water.
>The whole reason permanganate is added in the first place is twofold: it oxidizes simple organics all the way to carbon dioxide (think nail polish remover, denatured alcohol), and it oxidizes soluble ferrous iron to insoluble ferric iron. The byproduct of the oxidation, manganese dioxide, is insoluble and if balanced correctly the treatment does not increase manganese levels in the water.
Whenever I learn something like this, I always appreciate chemistry a little more. That is absolutely fascinating IMO.
The first thing that comes to mind is what the person who came up with the idea was doing at the time. Sometimes when we are intending to do one thing, we invent a solution to another problem, maybe one we didn't even know we had, along the way.
When I was a kid I was visiting my aunt who lived outside of Denver. I was walking around their property and on the other side of a fence was a stream which was exactly this color. I've always wondered what the deal was
We used permanganate when I was in grad school to clean glassware of organic residue. Concentrated it is extremely good at it. At such minimal concentration its not an issue.
It's also widely used (in chemistry labs) as a titration indicator. Because of its vivid color, you can very easily determine when you cross the boundaries of a specific reaction.
There is probably not "any real toxic effect" with a small dose taken over a few months in an isolated study.
But what about a small dose taken over years, and interacting with the thousands of small doses of synthetic chemicals we have in our body because of processed food, hygiene products, clothes, surface treatments and medicine ?
This we have no way to know.
There are already so many reasons to get in contact with synthetic chemicals. I think it's sane policy to limit them a much as we can when we can, especially in something as ubiquitous as water.
Yes having drinkable water is essential, but some cities manage to have it with much less additives. It should be the default goal for anything related to public health.
Anything can kill you. You can kill somebody with a piece of wood, a nuclear device, gaz, light, shock waves, a baby, a golden coin...
And any matter is a chemical. Using "synthetic" as a qualifier allow me to distinguish "fructose" from "paracetamol". You will less likely see important traces of cobra venom in the water.
It's not perfect, but I fail to find a better term.
We do have a way to know. It's called chemistry, and one of the primary goals of chemistry is to be able to predict what sort of reactions will occur in a mixture of molecules. Anyone who takes organic chemistry should be able to tell you how alkenes, alkynes, aldehydes, ketones, ketals, alcohols, aromatics, amines, amides, peroxides, ethers, esters, etc. are likely to react in various conditions, and hopefully what factors promote or retard such reactions.
It is a solved problem. A benign mistake happened at one sanitation plant. The city is working to resolve it. How does that make water quality a 'debate'?
>The town drained its water reservoir and all lines have been flushed, but there may be some residual colour in some systems, the mayor said, adding property owners may need to run their water for a few minutes to clear their service lines.
Why are you worrying about cumulative doses over years, when this problem literally existed for minutes?
I love potassium permanganate. Growing up in Soviet Union, we used to add potassium permanganate to bath, supposedly to clean your skin. But I love it for its oxidizing properties. Mix potassium permanganate with magnesium shavings, and you have a pretty powerful explosive mixture. Put a drop or two of glycerine into potassium permanganate and glycerine spontaneously burns. There are tons of interesting experiments you could do with potassium permanganate... So many wonderful memories...
Or make chlorine by mixing it with hydrochloric (muriatic) acid. Or mix it with glycerine to get a fire from "water" (it used to be a common trick performed by godmen). Pottasium permanganate is wonderful.
We used to gargle water mixed with potassium permanganate as children after cleaning our teeth to see if we did a good enough job. It would colour plaque pink, so it was very obvious if you hadn't cleaned properly!
What's the concentration of that vs the concentration here. Note that we also use chlorine to treat drinking water (e.g. on canoe trips), but you don't want to be drinking that unless it's very low concentration.
A quick google search suggests that they are used to "improve water clarity" [0], so at a guess you don't use enough of it to turn the water pink.
There's also the fact that they think it's concentrated enough that you should avoid bathing in it if you have sensitive skin. That certainly doesn't inspire confidence that you should drink it (exposing some very important skin, that's usually more sensitive).
If the pictures are true to the situation, the concentrations are tiny. You can look up videos of people putting less than a teaspoon into water to get the same result.
IIRC, PP can be a precursor to chlorine. But, you're comparing two different chemicals here and what applies to one likely doesn't apply to another.
There is a chance your skin will feel like it's burning if it's not fully dissolved in water. I wouldn't advise touching the dry powder. The shards will embed into your skin and it will feel like an open wound filled with Tabasco for a long time.
Fun-fact: If you mix it with glycerol it combusts, so don't use any lotions with it if you get some on your skin.
ETA: I don't know what's going on, but there's a lot of low-effort responses in this thread. Is it the hours?
Converting KMnO₄ to Cl¯ would require a nuclear reaction. Chlorides are generally soluble, so it's not going to cause an insoluble salt to slowly dissolve as a permanganate salt precipitates instead. It does appear to be a stronger oxidizing agent than Cl₂ (and Cl¯ and ClO¯ and ClO₂¯), but there are likely better reducing agents in most water than dissolved chlorine ions.
For what it's worth, permanganate is an extremely strong oxidizer (probably the second strongest stable solid oxidant known, after persulfate), but at neutral pH it is unable to oxidize chloride to hypochlorite and beyond. (The electrode potentials are too close, and anyways the maganese dioxide byproduct turns hypochlorite to chloride and oxygen.) Instead of reacting with a reducing agent in water, (the main possibilities are simple organics and ferrous iron, and these turn to carbon dioxide or insoluble ferric oxide [sidenote: this is why permanganate is added to water in the first place]) permanganate tends to break down to oxygen and manganese dioxide, which settles out.
I wish I knew enough about chemistry to know if you are providing valuable commentary or pulling our collective leg. I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
The allegation is that KMnO₄ is undergoing a redox reaction with HCl to produce Cl₂ gas (which is a plausible redox reaction, given the half-reaction potentials).
But yeah, in practice you're going to disinfect with Cl₂ gas or NaClO. The water plant I worked at switched from Cl₂ to ClO¯ as primary disinfectant, and the operators were all for it. No more need to manually switch out Cl₂ tanks, no more Cl₂ venting issues (spilling NaClO is nowhere near as bad a Cl₂ leak). (The plant also used O₃ for bonus disinfection as well. The operators hated it at first, but now would throw a conniption fit were it broken).
The chlorine in water will evaporate into the air if left in an open container; Pour yourself a glass of water, and let it stand for 30-60 minutes. It should then taste a LOT less Chlorine-y. Even in a sealed container you shouldn't be able to taste it after about 3 days. This is why water from a mains pipe tastes of chlorine, but the same water pumped into a water tank (for heating etc), doesn't.
The water is completely fine here. I'd not blame anyone for using a brita filter or something to save the kettle - but you're just throwing away water and energy on bottled water...
YM2: Our water is so hard, it beats up little old ladies for their grocery money.
YM3: Our water is so hard, it beats up the cops that come 'round to take the report from the little old lady.
YM4: Our water is so hard, I once got arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, by a bunch of beaten-up cops, for holdin' a hose in me own garden.
YM1: I used to carry a chisel round in my pocket, in case I got thirsty.
YM2: I once forgot my chisel, had a drink anyway, and broke all my teeth off.
YM3: We only 'ad one chisel for all of us, and we had to trade it off between the kitchen faucet, and breaking up the toilet water into pieces small enough to flush.
YM4: We had to rent our chisel, and on days when we couldn't afford it, we had to follow cops around and drink their broken-off teeth when they got beaten up.
I used to live in Leeds and used the water for a few gardening projects were the PH of the water was very important so was also testing it, it was always perfect, never had to modify.
Having lived in London most of my life, and spent a few years in the US (MI), I can tell you we've got it good. I used to use bottled water in the US as I didn't enjoy drinking chlorine flavour/smelling water...
Bad drinking water IS the end of the world. Nonchalant cliches like this make the right to drink clean and clear water seem like something that is mostly fairly applied throughout the world.
He's not suggesting people buy potassium permangranate to purify their water. He's saying that the substance that is making the water pink is what people use all the time to purify water. That makes the assertion by the local government that the water is safe much more believable.
Too high doses of manganese are clearly linked to Parkinsonism. (If you want, I can list the sources.)
That however pertains to acute intake, not chronic.
To get manganese ions, you'd have to acidify the water somehow too.
Jeez, its not like they have to live with it from now on. The treatment facility made a mistake, one as harmless as putting food coloring in the water. As soon as there's new water in the system it'll run clear again. It's a fuckup, its inconvenient, and people may choose to use bottled water for a few days, but it doesn't mean that the government is made of tyrannical despots.
You are correct. I had only read a bit of the article before coming to the comments.
I should have been more diligent and usually am.
I was projecting other feelings from previous arguments and this isn't the place for it and I deserve those down votes as it clearly wasn't a super helpful addition to the discussion.
The "pink" amount appears to be in the range of 1-3mg/L. So the LD50 for an 80kg man would be ~30,000 liters orally. That would certainly be lethal. The rule of thumb for this stuff is also "If it's pink, it's safe to drink"[1], as in pink is the minimum concentration to ensure safety. The only reason to avoid higher concentrations is that it will stain heavily.
Not sure if you misunderstood the poster you replied to. People don't want pseudoscientific rationalizations for why their preferences don't matter, they want the basic as-pure-as-possible H2O that they paid for.
Trying to understand what you're saying -- I believe when you say "their preferences" you mean that people want "basic as-pure-as-possible H2O that they paid for". However, all water that we drink is purified by a wealth of processes. That's not pseudoscientific, that's real science. Our purification is the reason we don't get cholera, for example.
If you mean that people want non-pink water, I think that's reasonable. But I also think it's reasonable that the reason the pink color is explained by the actual purifying process. I too concede that the water controlling authorities screwed up by using too much of the chemical, but it seems not in a dangerous amount, and they did well to communicate exactly why, and they also conducted tests to ensure safety of the water, thus effectively following up and checking the potential problems with their screw-up.
As far as government mistakes go, I think this one was relatively mild and handled in an adequate manner.
randomdrake didn't read the article, and saw the top comment was "you can buy tablets to purify water". He assumed, completely incorrectly, that the commenter was suggesting that people should just buy tablets to purify their water. randomdrake was not trying to comment on how essential services should always be held to exacting standards and that any failure. They weren't trying to say that it is unacceptable for water supplies to have even harmless, temporary inconveniences. They just didn't read the article.
(the post you replied to is pointing out that the potassium permanganate that turned the water pink is not especially dangerous, not arguing that the people should be given more potassium permanganate)
They said "adding property owners may need to run their water for a few minutes to clear their service lines." I would think that their hot water tank got some of the pink water into it and unlike the cold line the pink will slowly dissipate.
Piggybacking on this a bit: does anyone have a good recommendation for learning more about home water distillers and RO systems? Both for just certain faucets and maybe even the whole household? I know filtering all the water at home is likely overkill (in most places!), but I'm curious.
Under sink RO is not a big deal, you can buy a system for relatively cheap at Sams or probably Costco, and there's not much that you have to know, just change the prefilters when you are supposed to. Depending on the bladder and how much usage the RO system gets, it can take a while to fill a glass, 15-20s maybe? Filling a pot of water is infuriatingly slow.
RO systems waste water as that is how they work, expect your water usage to go up (how much depends on a lot of factors, for us it did not impact our water bill).
Whole house RO systems are probably a non-starter, keeping the water pressure up high enough seems like it would be very expensive.
From your link: "These incidents only result in damage to the vagina from the corrosive action of the chemical, since potassium permanganate was proven to be ineffective in producing abortions."
"Don't try to flush out your vagina with potassium permanganate" is...very specific education. And horrific folk remedies like this show up all the time where abortion isn't legalized - "educating" would be a game of whack-a-mole.
Desperate people are going to do desperate things, things that they know are bad or won't work. Especially if the only option that does work is taken away.
The whole reason permanganate is added in the first place is twofold: it oxidizes simple organics all the way to carbon dioxide (think nail polish remover, denatured alcohol), and it oxidizes soluble ferrous iron to insoluble ferric iron. The byproduct of the oxidation, manganese dioxide, is insoluble and if balanced correctly the treatment does not increase manganese levels in the water.