VITAL VALVES KEEP
WATER SYSTEMS FLOWING
BY JOHN PENSEC
In the United States, our ability to receive safe and clean drinking
water is basically an accepted fact. We
turn on faucets and use water for a
multitude of tasks, barely giving
thought to how it arrived at our fingertips. For those who do step back and
closely examine our drinking water
system, however, they see a remarkable and intricate process that takes
water from its initial sources through
the treatment process and delivers it to
our taps, toilets and showers.
It is a process that simply would not
be possible if not for the yeoman’s
effort of the valve.
As defined, a valve is a device that
controls or regulates the flow of a substance—whether that substance is gas,
oil, chemicals or—for the purposes of
our discussion—water. But this deceptively simple definition masks the enormous number and types of valves that
are used—and the role they each
play—to deliver the safe, clean drinking water we use every day.
As water first enters the drinking
water system into the pump station, it
passes through four potentially differ-
ent types of valves: ball, check, gate,
butterfly—the workhorse valves of the
entire system.
