Water for Nordhorn

You probably washed yourself this morning. You had something to drink, your trousers were in the washing machine yesterday, your mom watered her flowers, and you need to use the toilet from time to time. We humans need water for all these things—in fact, lots of it. Where does this water come from? What happens before it gushes out of our taps?

That’s how it works in Nordhorn, a town in Lower Saxony, for example: Just over 56,000 people live here. They use about 8 million liters of drinking water every day. That adds up to about 3 billion liters a year.

A waterworks supplies people with drinking water. It operates several wells in two suburbs called Hesepe and Klausheide. There are nine deep wells there, from which water is pumped. Nordhorn’s drinking water comes from groundwater. It’s a good thing it sometimes rains heavily in Klausheide and Hesepe, because without rain there would be no groundwater.

The wells are up to 91 metres deep. Powerful pumps draw water from the ground. The pumping equipment is housed in “well houses.” Their purpose is not immediately obvious. They are small wooden buildings surrounded by a tall fence. Water is pumped from Klausheide and Hesepe to the waterworks. The pipeline to Nordhorn is 12 kilometres long, and the pipes are 50 to 60 centimetres in diameter.

The pumps are controlled from the waterworks, where the water is treated. It contains iron and manganese, which must be removed. Iron would turn laundry brown, and manganese can make people ill. That’s why both substances are filtered out. The quality of the drinking water is constantly checked in a laboratory.

After the iron and manganese have been removed, the water is pumped to homes. Because it is pressurized, it also comes out of the tap in homes many meters above ground level. That’s a good thing, because otherwise each resident would have to carry an average of 147 liters into their home every day. But most people would probably use much less water. We should perhaps also remember that water costs money. In Nordhorn, 1,000 liters of water cost €1.33. That means a toilet flush using 10 liters of water costs about 1.3 cents. There are also wastewater charges, which are just as much, bringing the total to about 2.7 cents.