Can you tell us more about the water monitoring that Fluidion does?

In a nutshell, water is taken from rivers for drinking water. So, the quality of the water at the entry point is very important, because it needs to be at an acceptable water standard. The more water you have in a river, the more water there is to be treated and therefore the chances are higher that the final water quality may not be up to standard

Then the water goes into the distribution network, and you want to be able to monitor to know that the water will arrive safely at the tap without bacterial issues developing. This is why it is very important that good monitoring is possible.

On the drinking water side, we have chemical sensors that can be installed anywhere in the network. They are battery operated and send the data remotely, so all you need to do is connect it to a sample tap and the sensor will sample the water and sent the data. Then we get all the data onto a single platform that can monitor, map and help us understand issues and different phenomena.

One example is from our work in Los Angeles, where the city treats the water with chloramine, rather that chlorine, which reduces a disinfection byproduct which may be toxic or carcinogenic. However, chloramine is not very stable and in hot weather it can disassociate into chlorine and ammonia, which can result in a bacterial bloom in a water tank. We have developed specific technologies that can predict when that is going to happen and give an early warning to the drinking network.

A further requirement for drinking water quality is microbiological quality. You need to make sure that there are no harmful bacteria. One of these is E. coli, and the drinking water rules in the developed world say that you should have zero E. coli in drinking water. Mostly it is presence/absence tests that tell you if the water is compliant or not. If you find the presence of E. coli it needs to be treated, usually boiled, etc. And this is a big disruption. So, Fluidion makes microbiological analysers that can do this automatically.

 

How is the drinking water tested? From the intakes to a water plant, where are the water sensors placed and how do they work?

Firstly, if you know a river is highly polluted you might use a water reserve for a certain time and wait for the pollution to pass. However, we can also measure the pollution of the source water. Our microbiological sensors in this case could be installed semi-permanently in a river right at the intake of the drinking water plant. These sensors have cartridges, and each cartridge can take a microbiological measurement which can then be triggered, for instance in the case of a storm event. If you want to see if that storm event has created pollution that will affect your intakes, you can monitor just before, during and after the storm event, and this way you get what we call a pollutograph. This is a graph of pollution versus time which tells you exactly what the water quality was at every moment.

 

How do these water sensors help if there is an event? Is it a kind of early warning system?

It is an early warning system. If you're abstracting water from a river, you might want to have a couple of monitoring stations placed upstream on the river to give you a little bit of a buffer time. Then, when you see something happening three or four kilometers upstream, you want to be able to react. Therefore, we typically recommend having sensors upstream and then having sensors at the intake of a drinking water plant.
Obviously, if there are known sources of contamination nearby, for example stormwater outflows or possibly wastewater plant outflows that go in the river, then we recommend monitoring those as well, because those are potential sources of contamination.

As far as managing the data, typically a water network manager would get this data from an upstream station, that shows, for example, that there is high turbidity, wet measuring and high E. coli content. That's a pretty good sign that there is sewage contamination there. Then the manager may decide to stop abstracting water for a number of hours while they monitor at high frequency the upstream location. Once the pollution is gone, they can reopen the intake and restart treating water from the river. And in the meantime, they may switch to their reserve.

Typically, there is a volume of water that is a buffer that's held at the drinking water plant as a reserve in case something like this happens. This would allow that process to be much more automatic and would really protect the plant from getting very high pollution which can clog the filters and can require much more intensive treatment, like chemical disinfection. Additionally, you would have your process sensors that would be within the plant, which would allow you to get immediate information about what's happening at the plant.

 

How is this data represented in the water monitoring stations?

There are different ways to visualize this. We have a GPS-enabled interface that shows all the sensors at their geographical position and the data from those sensors. Each end user has a different need for displaying information in a specific way. In that case, we provide an Application Programming Interface (API) which allows each specific utility to download all the data to their dashboard and then they can display it as they want on their internal dashboard. It can be visualized in a way where you see the network, or at the different points, and then maybe you see a red light coming on at one of these sensing sites and that would allow you to react.

 

How has this type of technology been received at different water utilities?

What we have seen is that different countries and even different utilities within the same country, have very different strategies and very different levels of acceptance of new technologies.
We had the luck to be able to start working on the very first applications with the city of Los Angeles. In fact, we developed our first early warning station because they requested a way to monitor E. coli upstream of their first filtration plant.

Our very first location was in the Mulholland Aqueduct, right upstream of the very first filtration plant in Los Angeles. That was a utility very open to innovation. They had clearly identified this need, and we responded with a system that operated well.

The same thing happened in Paris where the need was a little bit different. The city had won the bid for the Olympics and was looking at ways to improve the water quality in the river. Obviously it's the microbiological water quality that was critical there. They weren't worried about the drinking water intakes as much as they were recreation in the surface waters. They adopted the same solution, and they started monitoring using our microbiological sensors.

 

Regarding the Paris Olympics, what role did Fluidion play in monitoring the Seine River's water quality during the Paris Olympics?

We had a major monitoring campaign that provided the only source of fully independent data that was streamed live before, during, and after the Olympic events. We started in early April and we monitored every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, the water quality at the Olympic site.

 

How was the Seine River's water quality tested during the event, and what specific findings did Fluidion provide?

We have worked with the city of Paris for seven years in a row, monitoring every single year, so we know a lot about this river and about how it reacts to weather events especially. For the Olympics we intensified our monitoring, measuring not just standard E. coli measurements but using our own method that provides something called a comprehensive count of E. Coli, i.e. E. coli that are free-floating, or planktonic. Then there is the issue of faecal particles in the water. In an urban river which is impacted by untreated sewage it's natural to find faecal particles of different sizes, it’s a natural byproduct of the disintegration of the faecal matter.
The problem we have is that the standard methods that are used to meet the current regulations are unable to count bacteria attached to these particles. They count each particle as a single unit, which is one bacterium, even if they carry hundreds of bacteria. Furthermore, these particles protect their content. They come directly from the faecal matter, so they're loaded with all the pathogens, all the viruses, and they have a big infectious potential.

So, there is a really major underestimation of risk in these conditions by the standard methods used today. This can be illustrated with an example. We can imagine the river is a busy road coming into a city. If we want to know exactly how many people are coming into the city on that road we will need to count them. If a policeman flies above the traffic in a helicopter to get a better view, he will not see how many people are in each car and bus. In his eyes, a car is one person, and a bus is one person, regardless of how many people are actually on the bus. A second policeman sitting in the intersection, stopping every car and bus, and counting every single person in them, gets a much more accurate count of how many people are coming into the city. This is how bacteria and faecal matter can carry many pathogens and E. coli can be undetected by standard testing methods.

The new methodology that we have developed is able to measure bacteria on the particles. We can provide both the planktonic, or free-floating count, and also the comprehensive count, which includes all the bacteria. And we also measure using the standard methods. Therefore, in Paris we had three type of measurements that we performed on every single sample.
And that turned out to be an extremely valuable experience, because the risk associated with these particles is really big and can be five, six times larger than the free-floating bacteria, which are measured by the standard laboratory techniques. This means that there is an underestimation of the risk by the standard method, sometimes by a major factor.

 

Are there many variations in the pollution levels in the Seine?

The biggest factor accounting for this variability is rainfall. The city of Paris has a 50,000 cubic meters tank, which is like a buffer. So now instead of water overflowing in the river during periods of heavy rainfall, all these sewage networks overflow into, and fill up, this tank.

If the rain event is small enough, this tank should not overflow. However, during the Olympics there were multiple rain events which caused this tank to overflow. In addition to that, we also have a lot of pollution that comes from cities upstream where we don't have this retention tank.

Therefore, we monitor to understand what the input from the rivers is as they join at the entrance of Paris. And we have had some really interesting results. We have seen that the sewage infrastructure in Paris has overflown a few times during the Olympics, but we've also seen that sometimes the pollution comes from upstream.

 

What are the current limitations with water testing? Do the acceptable pollutions limits need to be tightened?

Well, the real problem is not where you set the limit. The real problem is that you're not measuring the right thing by today’s standard methods. However you set the limit, you're not going to be right if the starting point is wrong. When you have these faecal particles, they represent a major risk which is completely missed. With a standard method, you may measure values that are below 900 or 1000, but when you actually account for these faecal particles, you actually have values that can be at 5,000. In that case, what do you do? The standard methods don't see these.

The methods in themselves, are methods that were developed 30, even 50 years ago. Some of them were developed by Pasteur which tells you how old they are. At the time, it was the best technology available, and all the regulations were built on that. However, they were based on really a very few epidemiological studies, perhaps involving only a couple of thousand people done in the 80s. And the World Health Organization then had to adopt a standard. Consequently, they adopted a standard based on the wrong methods and applied on a very small number of people which were then intrinsically adopted by the European Union.

The United States took a completely different path. They did their own epidemiology studies, mostly around the Great Lakes. Then they developed their own standards, and they came up with very different numbers. This means that the United States are a little bit ahead of the European Union in the fact that they started to use DNA-based methods, which are a comprehensive method. A DNA-based method will measure the DNA from all the bacteria present, including those on a particle. It is a comprehensive method, like the method Fluidion has developed, which looks at culture of the bacteria.

 

Is Europe lagging behind countries like the USA in adopting advanced water monitoring techniques?

There are new methods which some countries have adopted, and now we're building regulations based on these new methods. In Europe, we're sort of stuck with some old methods, and that’s why the current bathing water directive is under revision. The problem until very recently was that there were no methods that were able to measure all these bacteria. And all the microbiology community used the standard methods just because they didn't have anything better.

 

And are water utilities open to changing their monitoring methodologies?

There is a lot of political pressure right now to change standards. We're working, for example, with the United Kingdom Environment Agency, the UKEA, and they are becoming aware of these issues. In the end, science will prevail. It's useless to go against science and what we're trying to do is to provide the best possible scientific proof of the situation. We're trying to get other people involved that do the same kind of studies, so the available data increases.

 

Does Fluidion have any data publicly available?

Yes. The data from the Paris Olympics is available on our website along with explanations and comments on water quality.