With the Katrina aftermath, the water supply in the New Orleans area is extremely polluted. Is it possible to make the water potable? If so, what is the best method(s)?

I would guess that the solids and petroleum products would need to be filtered out first. Maybe by straining through sand then charcoal would do that? Would a water filter or chemical tabs work then? If these won’t work then what, if anything, would?

I am going back to my wilderness survival classes for this but that did not deal with the mass of contamination that is there.

Thanks

If you're talking about the water filling the streets, it's salt water and no amount of filtering can make it drinkable.

Drink fresh water that's being brought in by truck. There's more and more of it now, in insane 1/2 liter bottles. The Red Cross is getting thousands of these bottles and also thousands of 1 gallon and 2.5 gallon bottles. But they're only giving out the 1/2 liter ones, in order to keep you dependent on them, I guess. They're using the larger bottles to flush toilets with, according to a guy on CPF who visited one of their centers.

Would this solution have been effective in NO right now?

I think the water down there is not potable at all. And it's being dumped back into the canals...yipes. A raw sewerage/rotting flesh/petroleum cocktail..deadly combination.

All the desalinators I am familiar with, including these manual operated units, will not cope well with water polluted with industrial contaminants. In particular, petroleum products especially will destroy the RO membrane. So, they would probably not work well in NO.

Yikes. It soulds like the best bet would be to do a "solar-still" type contraption, even if you use a fire to evaporate the water.

And even that might not work well if some of the pollutants have a boiling point around that of water. If so, then you wind up evaporating and condensing the polution along with the water.

I wonder how this would work: First, ignite your water. i.e., burn off any floating combustable contaminants (would this work???) Then filter large junk with paper coffee filters or similar. Then filter smaller stuff with a hiking/backpacking type filter. Add some chlorine. Then get you one of those external aquarium cannister filters that contain a significantly sized carbon cartridge. Not the small ones that hang on top of an aquarium, but the bigger ones that pump several hundred gallons per hour. The one I use on my aquariums holds a good pound or two of carbon (that you buy seperately). Run the aquarium filter on your water in a bucket or something so that the water is recycled through the filter many times. You'll need minimal AC power to run the aquarium filter. A car battery and small inverter should do it. Then desalinate if you have one of those contraptions. Boil the result.

Holy cow! All that for a drink of water. And I don't even know if it would result in something potable.

...Or your could store water in gallon jugs at a cost of about .10 to .50 gallon. Plus filled buckets, hot water heater, tub, toilet tank and other home sources

Plan ahead.

The combustion byproduct will kill you quicker than the raw materials.

"Or your could store water in gallon jugs at a cost of about .10 to .50 gallon."

True, that would be much better. I was thinking of this more as a mental exercise of "How would you purify this stuff?" It would not be a trivial undertaking. Large scale desalination is tough enough on it's own, but add chemical pollution to the mix and the problem magnifies exponentially.