Probably not, but this is weird:
Officials have urged residents in a small Colorado town not to consume their water after several wells tested positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
So far no illnesses have been linked to the water in Hugo — a town of around 700 people located roughly 100 miles southeast of Denver — according to officials.
The announcement comes after a local company was testing its own water and got a positive result. Local law enforcement was then notified and further testing in other locations took place, which revealed additional positive results, reports ABC Denver affiliate, KMGH.
Further investigation showed a “forced entry” at one well:
Yowell said Lincoln County officials conducted 10 other field tests, using two different types of test kits, on the town’s water and six came back positive. Authorities later isolated the positive results to a single well — well No. 1, about a mile south of Hugo’s small downtown. When sheriff’s deputies investigated, Yowell said, they found signs of forced entry at the well, though it is unclear when the damage may have occurred.
Subsequent testing came back negative for THC, which jibes with the insolubility of the fat-soluble molecule THC in water.
And yet, something was in that water which set off the field tests, it was only in water that originated at the one well, that well had experienced a “forced entry,” and there is no further testing to figure out exactly what it was that triggered the test.
More and more I realize that the upper echelons of power are a “might makes right” world, where you simply do what you want, and make sure you don’t get caught – especially among the left. I could easily see a Soros-like character finding a small town somewhere to test something like a water-soluble cannabinoid analog as an ideology-modifier.
Analyze voting histories, force entry to the well, and place the compound in the water. Then see if there was a change in the voting results two years later. Imagine if you could take a flask of liquid, flush it into a toilet near a water well supplying a town of Republicans, and over the next two years the Republicans amygdalae are shut off. As that happens, they become passive, cowardly, conflict-averse liberals, desperate for free dopamine and an escape from all the bad feels of evil, conflict-prone people.
I’ll guarantee you a liberal somewhere has the resources and the initiative to pull that off. All that is missing is the opportunity, if it hasn’t been tried already.
If it ever does happen, initial reports will look very much like this.
[…] Could Liberals Be Contaminating Ground Water In Colorado? […]
I’m not sure what the pumping capacity of the well in question is, but if we assume 10 cubic feet per second (about average for production wells in the Los Angeles city system) (and probably overkill for a 700-population town), that’s 20 acre-feet per day. An acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons, so we’re talking about 6.5 million gallons or 24.4 million liters per day.
THC turns out to be slightly soluble in water, saturating at about 2.8 mg/liter. To put a saturated concentration of the stuff in 6.5 million gallons would require some 150 pounds of pure THC.
I’m not sure what the detection limit for the kits may be, but if it’s 2.8 micrograms / liter, we’re still looking at a pound and a half of pure THC.
That’s for one day, which means in order for it to register, someone would have to have fed it in pretty much the same day the tests were run.
A well casing also holds a limited amount of water. An hour’s pumping is typically enough to effect two or three changes of water in the casing. You’d need a continuous feed.
I’d also want to know what kind of test was being run, what the detection level is, and what known interferences exist to give a false positive reading.
As for “forced entry”, we in Los Angeles have procedures for addressing anything that looks like forced entry. Sometimes the signs of forced entry are limited to a hole cut in a perimeter fence. We’ll take a sample of water from the tank and send it to the lab. Sometimes it’s a missing or cut padlock. Same thing, even though the missing padlock is usually the result of an absent-minded employee.
Rather more serious is a missing padlock on the access hatch or the sample tap. That results in sampling and an investigation to see who was last accessing the tank, and when. If the last access was the same day, we assume it was an absent minded employee.
If the lock on such an access point is cut, or if an opening has been forced, we isolate that part of the system and don’t open it up again until the lab results come back clean.
I don’t know what Colorado’s procedures for notification and action may be, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the officials there felt it was better to notify and have it be nothing than to not notify and have it be something.