The Microbes Have Us Outnumbered 20 To 1: Should We Be Worried?

A lot has changed over the past 15 years. Back in the early 2000s, many utilities weren’t interested in understanding what was in their water beyond the contaminant and disinfection byproduct levels they were regulated to comply with. But as Pat Whalen, President and CEO of LuminUltra, explains in this ACE 2018 Water Talk interview, a steady stream of ongoing education and the modern data storage and analytics that cloud computing provides, has developed some rabid fans eager to explore the microbiology of their water systems.

“The interesting thing is we’ve only identified about .001 percent of microorganisms that we know,” explains Whalen. “We can call something E. coli or legionella or coliforms. There’s a whole bunch of dark matter out there that nobody really knows what it is yet and what it actually does in terms of health risks or infrastructure risks.”

Whalen discusses the Company’s fifth generation platform called LuminUltra Cloud, built around artificial intelligence and machine learning infrastructure, likening it to a “microbiologist in a box.” To learn more, listen here: