Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir?

these are shade balls they're being dumped into this water reservoir in Los Angeles and contrary to what you may have heard their main purpose is not to reduce evaporation so what are they really for? To find out I am visiting the largest collection of these balls anywhere on Earth at L.A. reservoir 96 million shade balls. That's correct. 96 million it's very rare for you to see 96 million of anything This is your life vest which you are required to wear. Alright. Throw your leg over and climb on in anyway you can there you go. Thank you looking at this I had so many questions. Like why are they black? Are they safe to have in drinking water? How much do they cost? Do they actually reduce evaporation? And what is their real purpose? is it hard to drive in shade balls. It is very hard. Why is that? These are actually partially filled with water the reason they're filled with water is that in L.A reservoir we have some really high winds and so if we didn't put water in these things there'd be balls bouncing on the 5 freeways people would drive down they'd be all over the place so these keep the balls in the reservoir and if they do start to roll they kinda wobble because of water makes them uneven but that makes them significantly difficult to push out of the way especially when they form close-packed crystal like structures behind the boat the balls quickly come together in our wake and some close to the motor are pulled along with boat wow did you what did you think the first time they suggested doing this or when it first came in yeah it was a little out there. did you think they were nuts? No, not nuts it just like. It looks absurd It's like we're in the world's biggest ball pit yeah right that's what it looks like you can't tell by standing here that we're actually floating over I think it's probably 40 50 feet right here, 40 50 feet deep below us and you can't even see any water you'd think it was a joke. Right? if you didn't know. You'd would be like no you're not that's like a green screen or something alright yeah it's fake so like when i switch on my tap at home is the water coming from here? Yes. Sometimes, or always. Most of the times Most of the time the water is coming from here, absolutely nuts so why is LA reservoir covered in shade balls? the problem all started with Bromide Bromide is a naturally occurring substance associated with salt water and so normally places like the California aqueduct that comes down from the delta you get some salt water intrusions we have some bromide in the water bromide is harmless and it's almost impossible to remove and when you disinfect the water with ozone, that bromide becomes bromate and bromates are carcinogenic and so around year 2000 they wrote regulations regulating bromate and the regulations basically said if you have a treatment plant that uses ozone then you have to watch bromate to be careful not to form to much so the only place we ever measured bromate was in our filter plant and the results were always within 10 micrograms per liter limit set by regulators so they were confused when they got a call from one of their customers a beverage company in L.A they said we have some really high levels of bromate showing up are you aware of this? and we said well we don't show anything but between the filtration plant and the customer was the reservoir so they did some tests almost immediatly upon coming into this open reservoir the bromate levels jumped it turned that bromide with chlorine which is supposed to be safe in bright sunlight form bromate even more than ozone and so we made this unfortunate scientific discovery that actually wasn't a part of any regulatory scheme and so here we are at reservoir we have water source that's got bromide in it harmless we have chlorine, we have to have disinfected water, we have sunlight because it is open the only choice we have is to remove sunlight so we looked at all sorts of things we looked at floating tarps across the water and normally we put a floating cover on the water but that's a multi-year project and so we said can't we manufacture kind of trampoline with poly like PVC pipe they're just gonna become bird perches, it'll have a big water quality problem and so we knew we had high density polyethylene pipe which is used in the water industry and we know that it floats and we at one point thought about can we get to float a pile of pipe across the surface well that's hard to do and very expensive because it's a lot of material so maybe we could take some pipe and run it through a chipper and we can make a debris field across the surface like the back corner of a lake somewhere but in anyhow all this mushy warm water with plastic floating on the top that sounds like a petri dish and so lo and behold Dr Brian White did some research and he found the shade ball except they weren't called shade balls at the time this product existed and they were called bird balls and they'd use it on ponds that had mine tailings where they didn't want waterfowl to go in and get poisoned and also around airports where there were ponds and they wanted to keep the waterfowl off so that they didn't take off and get into the jet engines

Channel: Veritasium

Views: 36,779,426

Rating: 4.822083 out of 5

Keywords: veritasium, black balls, balls, ball pit, shade, reservoir, black, plastic, water, LA, los angeles, LA reservoir, LADWP, bromate, bromide, water quality, algae, evaporation, water supply, chlorine, sunlight, science, physics, carcinogen, carcinogenic

Id: uxPdPpi5W4o

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/stanley_leverlock]

That guy in the suit was born to be a metropolitan water supply manager.

Awesomely interesting video.

[u/Frankbalboni]

Christian Bale really sells out for his role as the water plant manager guy..

[u/rafferty85]

Why build the filter before the reservoir and not after?

[u/alreadyam]

huh, that is incredibly interesting.

[u/GqCSgfWt]

Shadesmar is leaking from r/Stormlight_Archive

[u/Torkon]

Man the cleanliness of what you see in your day to day life has really fucked with some people.

Things you do not see are much dirtier than you think. Your water, your pipes, your food. You probably eat trace amounts of shit on a regular basis.

[u/lolllolare]

30 cents a ball?

Holy fucking shit somebody is making bank.

[u/greeneyedguru]

So wait, they used to put the water through a filtration plant, treat it with Chlorine, and then dump it into an open reservoir, with birds shitting in it and over which they drive in a gas motor boat, before putting it in pipes to send to people's homes?

Do I have that right?

[u/Gigi14]

Their main purpose is NOT to reduce evaporation.