Sarah (is clearing her shelves)'s Reviews > Slow River

Read for the 2017 POPSUGAR Challenge prompt Bestseller from a Genre You Don't Normally Read

6/2 - The main character in this book is a SEWERAGE TREATMENT PLANT SPECIALIST. How many other books can say that?! My dad designs and builds sewerage treatment plants (although he tells me that the industry refuses to use the word 'sewerage' in any way because it puts people off drinking the perfectly clean water that comes from a sewerage treatment plant, his title is Principal Engineer specialising in Water Treatment).

After realising what Lore's working background was I told my dad and tried to explain some of the details of the story (he has also never heard of a book with a main character who works in water treatment and was very excited when I told him about this character's unique career choice), unfortunately most of the technical details went over my head and just left me with glazed over eyes. In the end I stopped trying to explain exactly what Lore's job was and just read him large passages of the text. Most of the information was technically correct, but everything was highly exaggerated. You don't need anywhere near as many people working in a water treatment plant as Griffith has working at Hedon Road (and before anyone suggests that this book was written in 1995 and my dad is talking about how a plant is run in 2017, I asked exactly that question and he said that water treatment plants have been run this way with a staff of that size since the early 1900s, things have hardly changed in the last 20 years). Dad says that some of the plants that he's visited just have a single guy doing the monitoring on a bi-weekly rotation and simply check in at the plant for a few minutes before moving on to the next one on the schedule. The idea of having so many people working at the plant and the need for shifts is ridiculous and something only someone who's never actually visited a plant would assume (either that or Griffith wrote it that way to make everything more dramatic - higher possible body count = higher excitement). The other part of the plot that was over done to an even sillier extent was the possible consequences of a spill into the city water pipes. There's no way anyone would experience any immediate symptoms from drinking/bathing in water that's contaminated with anything. It's all very scary sounding, but you just couldn't get enough of the contaminant into the system to counteract how much it's diluted before it actually comes out of your taps. The only real fear of poisoning from your drinking water comes from long term exposure, for example if there is lead leaching into a city's water over 20 years. That would lead to some of the disastrous consequences that Griffith predicts, but nothing would happen immediately.

So, while I enjoyed the story of Lore and Spanner and her quest to find out what really happened to her and appreciated what might be the only water treatment plant specialist main character, I did find Griffith's exaggeration of the inner workings of water treatment plants irritating.