“The Power of Water”

By Scott Hamilton

Last week I learned the hard way about the sheer power of water. I hope none of you suffered the same. Early Thursday morning we reached record low temperatures in our area. At my house in Edgar Springs, we reach minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a rapid drop in the temperature between four and six in the morning causing everything in the area to freeze, including the water lines in my well house. Not only did they freeze, but they showed the power of water, or in this case, ice.

Just to put things into perspective, the one inch schedule 80 PVC pipe in my well house is designed to withstand pressures up to 520 pounds per square inch. What this means is that the pipe is able to withstand 520 pounds against the side of the pipe over the surface of one inch. In other words, you can park your car on top of a piece of this pipe and not dent it. However, you take the same pipe, fill it with water and throw it in your deep freeze and it splits open like a watermelon dropped on the concrete.

What does this mean about the strength of water when it expands as it freezes? Well let’s just say scientists that have done detailed studies of this particular phenomenon have found that the pressure exerted by freezing water can exceed 30,000 pounds per square inch. This means that you could potentially lift a building by freezing water under it. In fact this is the primary reason you find foundations on older homes that have settled, leaving cracks in the walls and concrete floors. It is also the reason for most of the pot holes in the roads and highways.

The repeated process of freezing (expanding) and thawing (contracting) of water in small cracks in the concrete have caused the cracks to enlarge and form bigger and bigger holes. In the case of the settling house it has raised and lowered the foundation until it created cracks, causing the foundation to sink further into the ground. This is the reason why construction guidelines insist that a concrete foundation is poured below the frost line. In our area of Missouri the frost line is around 12 inches. The frost line is how deep into the soil water normally freezes. This depends heavily on the air temperature and the composition of the soil. This year, even during our record lows the frost depth in our area exceeded the normal 12 inch penetration to around 15 inches.

So what exactly does that mean for our region? If you followed the standards and buried your waterlines at the recommended 12 inches or deeper and decided to stop at the minimum 12 inches, you probably experienced frozen water lines underground this last week. I was thankful that my water line was buried closer to 36 inches deep, but I did find that the line was frozen under the well house down about eight inches, and the pressure build-up in the pipes looked like someone set off a bomb in my well house. There was plastic and ice everywhere.

That led me to question if water had other power besides just the ability to create extreme pressure by freezing? As it turns out water can be used as one of the most powerful cutting tools known today. There is a fascinating tool called the water-jet that uses narrow streams of high pressure water to cut some of the Earth’s strongest materials, faster than any other known method. Titanium is one of the hardest metals to cut and the first water-jets attempted to utilize titanium to create the high pressure nozzles that guide the water, unfortunately the high pressure water cut right through the titanium nozzles.

This shows us that not only can the freezing of water create very high pressure that can be used to crush, lift, and break strong materials, high pressure water can be used to cut and shape strong materials. So what about lower pressure water? You can see the evidence of low pressure water flow all along the banks of the rivers in Missouri. The simple flow of water down the river bed has cut deeper and deeper paths into limestone river beds. The steep cliffs on the river’s edge didn’t always exist; through the process of erosion over a period of thousands of years the water washed away layers of rock and soil, leaving the rivers flowing through deep valleys. The Grand Canyon was formed by the process of erosion, all brought about by the power of water.

If you want to see the process of erosion in a quick way, take a cookie sheet and fill it with sand. Create a slope by tilting one end of the cookie sheet up and then slowly drip water on the up-hill end of the cookie sheet. In a matter of a few minutes you will begin to see a river form through the sand and gradually get deeper, and then wider, until eventually all the sand will wash away from the sheet. Erosion in nature works the same way, but harder materials take longer to erode.

So the next time you decide to take a drink of water, remember the strength of the liquid in your glass. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.