[HN Gopher] Ancient water system uncovered at Roman Stabiae
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Ancient water system uncovered at Roman Stabiae
Author : redbell
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-11-06 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heritagedaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heritagedaily.com)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Looks almost modern.
|
| "Archaeologists suggest that the tank was likely visible in
| ancient times to allow access to the two stop keys, enabling the
| inhabitants to regulate the flow or shut off water distribution
| in order to carry out maintenance operations of the system."
|
| In other words, valves!
|
| The one less ideal thing is that it's made of lead of course.
| alex_young wrote:
| > The one less ideal thing is that it's made of lead of course.
|
| Unfortunately that's kind of modern too. Lead pipes are still
| used in every US state.
|
| https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and...
| orangepurple wrote:
| Everyone who is serious about their health and has the means
| should be invested in reverse osmosis filtration at home with
| KDF and carbon pre-filtration even if you have "good" water.
|
| Drinking huge volumes of water on the order of a gallon per
| day is important for general health and water is the main way
| most people ingest carcinogens due to sheer volume.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > Drinking huge volumes of water on the order of a gallon
| per day is important for general health
|
| I don't believe that is true, and excess water can be
| dangerous by causing hyponatremia.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Yeah nobody is getting hyponatremia from drinking a
| gallon of water over the course of a day. Especially if
| eating a typical American diet.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| OK, I read that over. It seems to be _entirely_ estimates and
| "could be." No one's dug up a service line and said, "Yep,
| there's lead in that."
|
| One GAO report says,
|
| _As we reported in 2017, based on the available data, the
| majority of the 68,000 water systems subject to the Lead and
| Copper Rule at the time of our review had not been required
| to replace lead service lines and therefore were not required
| to conduct complete inventories._
|
| In other words, no one knows.
|
| So while it's not _false_ to say that "Lead pipes are still
| used in every US state" it's also not provably true. Right?
|
| A good question would be, "why _aren 't_ they required to
| replace lead service lines?" This would be a health benefit
| beyond any possible doubt.
| appletrotter wrote:
| At the end of the day, it's how much lead is in the water
| coming out of your taps, right?
| ISL wrote:
| Yes, but if you don't have lead infrastructure in your
| water system, it is extremely difficult to have lead come
| out of your tap.
|
| If you do have lead pipes, however, it only takes a shift
| in pH to pull the lead into solution.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Right, and more to the point, it's much easier to check
| tap water for the presence of lead than to inventory the
| entire water system (which is also worth doing).
| gsk22 wrote:
| > So while it's not false to say that "Lead pipes are still
| used in every US state" it's also not provably true. Right?
|
| All you'd need to do to prove the statement is find one in-
| service lead pipe in each state. Not exactly a high bar.
| Not sure what the point of nitpicking this is?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Nitpicking? I'd call it "questioning hysteria."
|
| Finding one in-service lead pipe in each state IS a
| pretty high bar.
|
| A more rational approach would be to look at testing for
| lead levels in tap water, which we can assume probably
| does get done by the EPA and other agencies.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're choosing to go down this line if
| faulty reasoning, but the consist of municipal service
| lines is not completely mysterious. There's a difference
| between knowing the status of every pipe and knowing what
| the system is generally made up of.
|
| My spouse was on the leadership team of a municipal water
| district. They knew at the block level where lead (or even
| wood & lead) service were likely to be, and had prioritized
| inventories of infrastructure like valves, etc that
| required replacement. They weren't pioneers in this area,
| every water utility does this. As breaks were repaired or
| other ground work (sewer remediation, new storm drains,
| etc) they had a capital fund to make replacements. The main
| remaining place where lead is present is between the water
| main/service valve and people's homes. That pipe is usually
| the financial responsibility of the homeowner, and it's an
| expensive job - $5-15k.
|
| The other factor is that the lead issue, like asbestos, is
| overblown. As long as the civil engineers responsible for
| the infrastructure aren't bypassed by criminally negligent
| political leadership (aka what happened in Flint, MI),
| there's no meaningful risk. If you're using an untreated
| well, different story.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What's the "faulty reasoning?"
|
| OP's reference said that many states don't provide
| estimates. You said
|
| > There's a difference between knowing the status of
| every pipe and knowing what the system is generally made
| up of.
|
| So the states don't bother asking the cities, or refuse
| to aggregate and estimate it, or what?
|
| Your last paragraph also doesn't jibe with the second. If
| it's the homeowners' responsibility, then where does the
| "criminally negligent political leadership" come in?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The OP is trying to link a general statement made by an
| advocacy group to a GAO audit. They have nothing to do
| with each other. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of
| the problem domain knows that any water installation
| before a certain date is a lead line. States and the EPA
| mandate and audit representative testing of public water
| supplies.
|
| The criminal negligence in Flint was that, to save money,
| the state appointed leadership of the City water system
| knowingly obtained water from an alternate source whose
| water chemistry caused the lead pipes in Flint to leach
| out and expose people to the lead in the water. Had they
| treated the water appropriately, or not changed the water
| supply, the oxidation in the pipes would have prevented
| the leaching of lead into the water, as it had for a
| century.
|
| All of this is well documented.
| throwthere wrote:
| I'm not saying it's not a problem but after a few minutes of
| research I think some context is useful.
|
| The current source of lead seems mostly (maybe almost
| entirely?) from "lead service lines," which is the pipe
| between the street and the home. And, new installations of
| those lines has been illegal since 1986 in the US.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > new installations of those lines has been illegal since
| 1986 in the US
|
| News to me. Do you have a citation for that?
|
| In the San Jose area we get junk mail almost monthly
| imploring us to buy insurance against the cost of replacing
| our water lines, because of their age. So I would have
| assumed that they _all_ get replaced every 50 years or so.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I assume they mean "installation of service lines made of
| Lead"
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Good point. That's a better wording.
| lazide wrote:
| Copper is usually fine up to 75-100 years old, but a lot
| of houses have galvanized pipe, which rusts pretty
| severely over time. It's not uncommon for them to rust
| almost closed within 25 years.
|
| PVC can get brittle, and PE pipe has notorious problems
| with connectors corroding/failing.
|
| A lot of older sewer lines are clay or cast iron, and
| they also crack or rust through.
|
| Like wiring, eventually it makes sense to replace them.
| wazoox wrote:
| Lead piping was still pretty common in the 20th century almost
| everywhere.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| It does look like the valves themselves (with tube stubs) were
| vendor-supplied. Could be two different vendors at two
| different times.
|
| Those look like modern forged tapered-stem stopcock valves,
| probably hand fabricated to arrive at a product not much
| different than a machine shop would make today.
|
| The manifold/tank could have been made from hammered and welded
| sheet with end(s) somewhat removable for occasional
| maintenance. Looks like maybe places for a couple more taps to
| the right of the two that are in there now.
|
| Like today, the plumbers were the ones who put the parts
| together and ran the pipes to the points-of-use.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The tank in the picture strikes me as a water hammer arrestor.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Surely it isn't a tank (it would make no sense to have a small,
| 5 or 10 liters or so tank), but it is also not a hammer
| arrestor, as it is not vertical, and there is no way it could
| provide the air cushion needed.
|
| Very likely it is simply a sort of distribution manifold.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It might not always have been horizontal.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Abandoned houses in modern society get stripped of copper so
| imagine how rare this is, and how much we've lost. But thanks to
| that good old volcano we actually already knew the Romans had
| lead taps and water pipes.
| novalis78 wrote:
| One of my precious teenage memories is visiting a friend whose
| parents had a good library and set of Roman bilingual writings
| (similar to the Loeb Classics series). I picked Pliny's letters
| and read the entire thing in one gulp. I was blown away how
| modern the thoughts and problems and considerations were. The
| thousand years of Darkness after the fall of the Roman Empire
| were no joke. If we all can contribute just a little bit to keep
| civilization thriving for centuries to come, we have done our
| part.
| thom wrote:
| I experienced the exact same thing reading Cicero's letters. If
| you'd told me he had chronic anxiety and spent far too long on
| Twitter I'd have half believed you.
| Archelaos wrote:
| "Thousand years of darkness" represents a view of the Middle
| Age that was widespread among historians of the past, most
| famous Edward Gibbon and his: "The History of the Decline and
| Fall of the Roman Empire" (1776-1789), but is seen in a _much
| more_ differentiated way today. For a recent introduction into
| the debate of the "fall" of Rome (in the West) see Bret
| Devereaux's three part series "Rome: Decline and Fall?"[1] In
| his conclusions at the end of the series Devereaux states:
|
| "The 'nitwit' of our duel - the notion that the Middle Ages was
| some general collapse of 'progress' which delayed the course of
| human development - doesn't accord with the evidence. The
| popular perception is that many Roman technologies were lost,
| but in fact these were fairly few, the most notable being Roman
| concrete. As noted, what is remarkable about Greek and Roman
| literature and learning is not how much of it was lost, but how
| much of it survives to the present. Moreover, the Roman economy
| was not the durable foundation for a lost early industrial
| revolution; instead it was a delicate clockwork mechanism which
| could, for a time, haul itself modestly - and only modestly -
| above pre-modern agrarian norms. When the gears broke, the
| clockwork stopped and it fell back down.
|
| At the same time, 'falling back down' is not the only story of
| the Middle Ages. I cannot stress this enough, the European
| Middle Ages were not a stagnant time in Europe or anywhere
| else. Older scholars, like Rostovtzeff and Gibbon supposed that
| Europe only reached a Roman level of prosperity in the early
| modern period, perhaps in the 1500s or 1600s, reasoning from
| the grandeur of Roman buildings and literature. But a fair look
| at the economic and demographic history suggests, I think,
| quite clearly that the 'crossover' point is much earlier, well
| into the Middle Ages. My own rough estimate would be generally
| around 1100 in most places; state capacity remains lower for
| longer because the states of Europe were small and fragmented,
| but one can argue that was a good thing for their long-term
| development. Moreover, not everything between 476 and 1100 was
| just 'recovery' - some things were new! Speaking of my own
| expertise, medieval steel-making, especially at its upper end,
| tends to be quite a bit better than Roman steel-making. Water-
| mills (which the Romans had) and windmills (which they didn't)
| were, by 1100 apparently far more common in Europe than they
| had been under the Romans.
|
| The collapse of Roman political authority doesn't represent any
| sort of clear break in anything we might call 'Roman
| civilization' [...] Latin persisted; Christianity persisted;
| Roman literature persisted; Roman law persisted; the Roman
| Empire itself persisted in the East. The claims of Frankish and
| Gothic kings to be heirs to the legacy of Rome was not an empty
| one from a cultural standpoint - if Gallo-Romans or Greek-
| speaking Eastern Romans could be heirs of Rome, why not Latin-
| speaking Franko-Romans?
|
| At the same time, what we might call the 'strong' form of the
| 'change and continuity' position - that essentially nothing of
| value was lost as the Roman Empire crumbled in the west -
| doesn't seem sustainable in light of the evidence either. [...]
| it is quite clear that, on the one hand, the collapse of the
| Roman Empire in the West represented a substantial decline in
| state capacity [...]
|
| At the same time, it seems fairly clear from the evidence that
| the collapse of Roman connectedness took a slow economic
| decline and turned it into a collapse. [...] my focus is drawn
| to the living conditions of the people in a society. From that
| perspective, the fall of Rome was an unmitigated disaster, a
| clear (but not total) break with the economic patterns of
| antiquity which had enabled a measure of prosperity in the
| Mediterranean world."
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-
| and-f...
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
| artificial wrote:
| Isn't that period when Europe pulled ahead technologically in
| every way from antiquity? For example many civilizations
| pursued alchemy and why only in Europe did it turn into
| chemistry? Same with astrology into astronomy. Wind power,
| metallurgy, ship building, farming, stirrups (using the weight
| of the horse with the rider) with spears, cathedral building,
| the university system etc. The eastern empire thrived until the
| Ottomans overthrew in the 14th. It has to do with reason and
| progress and the systems that drove those. I think a larger
| part was the translation from Greek to latin between 1125-1200.
| qwytw wrote:
| The eastern empire was essentially destroyed by Venice in
| 1204. While they regained Constatinolpe, some territory in
| the Balkans and Anatolia, the empire never truly recovered.
| During the last 250 years of its existence it was a mere
| shadow of its former self. It never regained its status as
| the preeminent cultural and political power in the Christian
| world.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Europe pulled ahead technologically in every way from
| antiquity only after 1500, i.e. after the introduction of the
| movable-type printing press (whose first effect was that most
| writings preserved from antiquity became easily accessible
| for a large number of people, constituting a base for the
| later scientific and technical progresses) and after the
| discovery of the maritime ways to Asia and America.
|
| The transition from alchemy and astrology to chemistry and
| astronomy and the improvements in metallurgy happened later.
| The improvements in ship building had begun a little earlier,
| but the greatest progress was mostly later.
|
| Only the progresses in cathedral building had already
| happened many centuries earlier and the progress in firearms
| a couple of centuries earlier.
|
| In my opinion, the answer to the question "Why only in Europe
| did alchemy turn into chemistry?" is because only in Europe
| the printed books were available for making known to
| everybody the earlier alchemical works (e.g. by translations
| from Arabic) and then the progresses in alchemical
| experiments, until the 18th century during which the modern
| chemistry was created by the interchange of information
| between Swedish, French, British, German, Spanish etc.
| chemists.
|
| Without such an international network of scientists who were
| able to read very soon the printed results of the chemical
| research performed by their colleagues from other countries
| and then they could devise improved experiments for chemical
| investigations, the modern chemistry could not be created.
|
| If, instead of publishing immediately the results of their
| experiments, the 18th century chemists would have kept them
| secret, like most of the early alchemists, the modern
| chemistry could not have appeared.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You should read "The Invention of Science", by David
| Wootton, which touches on these issues (and many others).
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Science-History-
| Scientific-...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Well, Isaac Newton was also a dedicated alchemist who spent
| some time and energy on a search for the philosopher's stone
| (which in no way denigrates his other work on gravity,
| calculus, optics, etc.). That was pretty common thinking up
| through the late 18th century, when people like Lavoisier and
| Priestly revolutionized everything via careful quantitative
| measurements (and open publication, i.e. not keeping their
| work secret).
|
| Again, this was an area where Islamic civilization preservend
| and advanced on Roman-Greek knowledge during the European
| Dark Ages. There's also some interesting history regarding
| the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who apparently made a
| determined effort to wipe out the alchemists in the Empire
| because he believed they'd actually managed to make gold, and
| feared debasement of the currency or the funding of rebel
| armies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy_in_the_medieval_Islami.
| ..
|
| I think this is a legitimate YT channel, here's a clip on the
| Diocletian persecution:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG9Po7dlgUo
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's always worth remembering that Roman and Greek ideas
| (themselves partially built on Egyptian notions) in mathematics
| and science continued to be developed in North Africa, the
| Middle East and India during those 'thousand years of
| Darkness', and that store of knowledge was itself critical in
| turn to the following European explosion of knowledge beginning
| in the Renaissance. For example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Agricultural_Revolution#I...
|
| > "A 13th century observer claimed there were "5000"
| waterwheels along the Guadalquivir in Islamic Spain; even
| allowing for medieval exaggeration, irrigation systems were
| certainly extensive in the region at that time. The supply of
| water was sufficient for cities as well as agriculture: the
| Roman aqueduct network into the city of Cordoba was repaired in
| the Umayyad period, and extended."
| qwytw wrote:
| It's interesting that most people seem to forget or ignore
| the Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire for some reason. No state
| contributed more to preserving ancient knowledge and
| Constantinople was absolutely central to that. e.g. if it had
| fallen to the Arabs in the the late 600's the dark ages would
| have been a lot darker an possibly would have never ended
| (e.g. the collapse of Roman-Hellenic civilization would have
| been a lot more similar to the bronze age collapse.
|
| Also the downfall of the (Eastern) Roman Empire mostly
| coincided with the high middle ages and early renaissance.
| And contact with the empire arguably was much more important
| for kickstarting the renaissance than that with North Africa
| or the middle east.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The Byzantines sit in an uncomfortable middle for a modern
| intellectual. Too European to be exotic and "diverse" in
| the contemporary shallow meaning of the word, but at the
| same time too Orthodox to be culturally comprehensible to
| modern Westerners. Speaking an Indo-European language that
| is nevertheless very distant from all the current major
| Indo-European language groups and uses its own hard-to-read
| script.
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