Bristol Water supplies around 300 million litres of treated water every day of the year…this definitely sounds like a lot, but what does it compare to:
It's heavy
That's an understatement…remember first that 1000 litres equal one metric ton, so, a simple deduction shows that we move 300,000 tons of water a day around our network, the equivalent of 800 fully loaded Jumbo Jets. A strange analogy perhaps, but you get the picture.
Ok, now answer this:
What's the biggest production industry in the world?
Oil? |
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Coal? |
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Farming? |
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Steel? |
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Water? |
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In the whole of the UK somewhere in the region of 19,000 million litres of water is supplied daily.
Oil is the biggest of the others, and USA consumption of oil is about 500 million litres per day. That's the most intensive use of fuel in the world, and it's not that much more than the volume of water that Bristol Water produces and delivers every day on its own. Although we wouldn't recommend putting this in your petrol tank.
It speaks volumes to me
Our daily output would fill the Millennium dome in five days; not that we are suggesting this as a future use. In fact, the Dome is only 13 times bigger than our largest underground water storage tank, which is solid concrete, rather than a big tent.
Alternatively, if we wanted to stuff our weekly output into a 3" pipe (7.5cm) it would stretch from earth to the moon…since we can't think of a sensible reason for doing this you'll just have to take our word for it.
Pipes 'R' Us
It's not that we don't have enough pipes anyway. Our network extends to over 6500 kilometres, roughly 15 times the size of the London Underground.
Where does it all go?
Well, we supply over 1 million customers in an area of 2,400 square kilometres. This includes Bristol, Weston, Street, Wells, Frome, Thornbury and many points in-between.
A drop in the ocean
Let's not get carried away with our sterling work to treat 320 million litres a day. The amount of water on this planet is about 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres, and even running flat out, it would take us about 12,000,000,000 years to treat and supply this much water. Which is 3 times the age of the earth, so we would probably get quite bored if we tried.
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