The Big Thirst, page 12
And, of course, as Hurricane Ike was gathering itself into what would become a category 4 storm, Sarah Palin made her national political debut with a speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota (and it was revealed that her daughter Bristol was pregnant).1
In a quieter moment, Ike’s swath of destruction would have lodged itself in American consciousness the way Hurricane Andrew did, if not Katrina. Ike is one of the largest Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, in terms of diameter, ever. Hurricane-force winds stretched across 240 miles, the distance from Orlando to Miami. Sustained tropical storm winds—above 39 mph—spread 550 miles, making Ike a brutal giant whose winds would easily have filled the entire space from Atlanta to Detroit.2
Approaching the Texas coast the second week in September, Ike completely filled the Gulf of Mexico, and it inspired one of the most sharply worded warnings ever issued by the National Weather Service.
On Thursday, September 11, at eleven-thirty in the morning, twenty-four hours before Ike would make Galveston a difficult place to find shelter, the NWS issued an unvarnished “leave or die” hurricane warning for Galveston and the nearby coastal communities.
“Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”
That’s as blunt as a government weather warning gets.3
Approaching hurricanes do make you think about water—about driving rain and flooding, about what might happen to the inside of your home or business if a window is shattered or a door gives way, if the roof peels off or the storm surge starts pouring in over the windowsills. And people know hurricanes will bring down the electricity—they expect it. But as with so many other things involving water, ordinary people don’t even think about their water supply during a hurricane. We just expect those invisible water mains to keep working.
Eric Wilson wasn’t underestimating Ike. Wilson was then Galveston’s director of utilities—water and sewer were his main responsibilities—and like almost all of Galveston’s officials, he rode out the height of Hurricane Ike in what seems like an unlikely spot, the posh San Luis Resort, right on the beachfront, with its rooms broadside to the beach and to the storm’s wind. The San Luis, ten stories tall, is one of the safest places on Galveston Island in a storm. It is built in part on the remains of a retired U.S. military installation, Fort Crockett, and the belowground floors are elegantly appointed conference space that also happen to be a windowless concrete bunker, protected behind old gun emplacements.4
Wilson and the Galveston water staff prepared for the hurricane’s assault in ways both routine and unexpected. All utility vehicles were filled with fuel. Water service was valved off to the entire western end of Galveston Island, where homes and businesses sit right on the beach, and water mains are buried in three feet of barrier-island sand, unprotected by the city’s famous seventeen-foot-tall seawall. Beachside breaks could suck the pressure from the city’s mains during the storm. “I didn’t want to bleed to death,” Wilson says. He had a big electrical generator staged on the mainland, to provide power to run water pumps if they needed it.
And although all the city’s critical water valves had been pinned down with GPS coordinates, city workers went out before the storm and added a nondigital backup. They pounded metal street sign poles into the ground next to thirty-nine critical water valves. “We drove the poles four feet into the ground,” says Wilson. “So we wouldn’t lose the poles, or the valves.”
As Ike’s northern edge was coming ashore on Friday afternoon, Wilson drove the beachfront road for one last check before heading to the San Luis hotel. “I could barely get out there,” he says. “Water was already crossing the road. Waves were breaking on the truck.”
Hundreds of staff and recovery workers spent Friday night at the San Luis. The power failed at about 9:30 p.m., as did the water service. The eye of Ike passed directly over the resort sometime after midnight. Wilson was sharing a room with his boss, deputy city manager Brandon Wade. “We got used to the noise, and I fell asleep. I woke up to silence sometime after midnight. I remember thinking, Am I dead, or am I in the eye?”
As dawn broke Saturday morning, the winds across Galveston were still hurricane force or better, and the scenes of waterborne destruction and chaos stretched from the Interstate 45 causeway connecting the island to the mainland—with both north- and southbound lanes completely blocked by boats lying on their sides—to the far western end of the island, where whole blocks of houses were simply gone.
Wilson was impatient to get out of the hotel Saturday morning and figure out what had happened to his water system. He was surprised that the water service to the San Luis had failed. Two of the three city water-pumping stations had backup engines powered by natural gas. Those natural gas engines—they look like ungainly motors pulled from 1965 farm tractors, and they roar like the sound of a hurricane itself—should have kept the water running right through the storm.
So at 9 a.m., with Hurricane Ike’s backside still slashing across Galveston at 70 to 80 mph (just stick your hand out the car window on the interstate sometime to see what a 70 mph wind feels like), Wilson stepped out into the storm. With one of his deputies, Dennis Stark, he walked out the rear entrance of the San Luis and climbed into a City of Galveston dump truck to visit whatever water facilities they could get to.
Wilson, who has a pilot’s license, took the wheel. His first goal was to get to the city’s hundred-year-old 30th Street Pump Station. It’s a handsome red-brick building with the proportions and styling of a nineteenth-century courthouse. It also has the distinction of being the nation’s second-oldest working water pump station. It would probably be the oldest, but it had to be rebuilt after Galveston’s catastrophic 1900 hurricane. The white granite cornerstone at 30th Street is inscribed “DESTROYED Sept 8 1900. REBUILT 1904.”
Thirtieth Street Station is about three miles from the San Luis, and Wilson drove slowly. “When we were coming down 30th Street, the water was four, four and a half feet deep,” he says. Imagine the condition your own home would be in if the street out front were cresting with four and a half feet of water. “A Cadillac was floating along, and as we drove past, the wake from the dump truck sent it floating into the side of an apartment building.”
What Wilson and Stark found when they climbed the stairs to 30th Street was discouraging. Except for the sound of the wind howling outside, the cathedral-like main room was silent. No motors running. The room is dominated by two large motor pits, each the size of a backyard swimming pool, with tall putty-colored walls to protect the four motors and pumps from flooding. Each pit had three or four feet of water in the bottom. Two small motors were submerged; two large motors crowned above the surface, as if floating. The natural gas backup motors were mounted higher, and were mostly dry, but the heavy-duty truck batteries used to start them were covered with seawater.
Wilson wasn’t immediately concerned with 30th Street’s regular motors—four high-speed electric motors sitting in pools of stagnant seawater aren’t going to be turning anytime soon. Nor did he stop to wonder how thousands of gallons of storm water had gotten inside the high-walled pits, in the otherwise sturdy, dry 30th Street Station.5
Wilson scrambled staff by radio to pull batteries out of city equipment to replace the waterlogged batteries, and to change out the contaminated oil in the natural gas motor. “I just thought, We gotta get these things running again.”
That Saturday, as he and city staffers worked to get the gas engines in 30th Street Station online, Wilson didn’t know how big the city’s water problems were, what it would take to get them solved, how long even temporary patches would take. But Saturday provided a flavor.
Eric Wilson is unflappable. He was forty-three when Ike arrived, and he knows water systems from the ground up—he got his start walking from house to house, reading water meters. He has tightly cropped hair, and his expression defaults to an open-faced smile, making him seem cheerful almost all the time. Up close, you can see some crow’s-feet that speak of a low-key seriousness and a steamroller determination. Wilson has a sense of humor about the bureaucracy, a wryness that includes an appreciation for the fact that he is the bureaucracy. He’s a large man, his weight ranging between 250 and 300 pounds.
Eric Wilson’s core utility operating philosophy is, in his words, “You gotta have a Plan B.” Which is his way of saying, to himself and everyone else, We’re in a no-excuses business. Things will go wrong, and I have to have a plan for how to keep the water flowing even when they go wrong. His Plan B typically has a Plan B of its own—Wilson thinks three or four failures out beyond Murphy’s Law. On a particularly trying day, asked how it’s going, he will chuckle and say, “I’m on Plan Z.”
On Saturday, the Plan B—two backup motors, already installed, with a power supply separate from the electrical grid—was all wet before Wilson could even turn the switch. He got the new batteries installed, he got the electronic controls fixed, he got the dirty oil swapped out, and in early afternoon, they started trying to fire up the gas motors. Galveston had been completely without water for fifteen hours.
“They just wouldn’t fire,” says Wilson. “Finally I said, Let’s break a gas connection and see if we have gas. That’s when we came to the stark realization that somebody had turned off the gas supply.”
So much for Plan C.
As much drama as water creates—crashing ocean waves, towering waterfalls, great rivers, monumental dams, floods, blizzards, hurricanes— there is nothing quite so lackluster, even disappointing, as a modern water pump station. The Roman aqueduct system inspires awe, and tourism, two thousand years after its creation; no one will be visiting twentieth-century municipal pump houses in a hundred years.
The Airport Pump Station of the city of Galveston is a perfect example of the modern state of the art. It’s an austere, well-lit room, about the size of a suburban home’s garage. On one long wall, four fat pipes emerge at about head height. The pipes take an elbow-turn down, and exit into the concrete floor. The pipes are aqua. Each pipe, in its brief course through the room, has a motor and a pump built into its length.
There are flow and pressure gauges with needles that are rock steady. There are electronic controls. Because the Airport Pump Station is relatively new, the room is quiet except for the low hum of modern motors.
There is no sign of water. There is no sound of water. There is not only no drama, there doesn’t appear to be anything going on; if you wait around for fifteen minutes, you can imagine that nothing will happen in the room. Ever.
But the appearance is deceiving in at least two important ways. First, of course, this is exactly the kind of place where you do not want drama. You can stand looking at an electrical substation for hours and never see any electricity. If you do, it’s bad news.
The utilitarian, even pedestrian, nature of most water facilities isn’t great for creating public pride and appreciation, in the way the drama of the arched Roman aqueducts did.
But trying to understand a modern water system by looking at a key facility like a pump house is like trying to understand the Internet by looking at a rack of servers. You can gaze as long as you want at the servers, from any angle, but you will never get any inkling of either the workings of the Internet or its usefulness and charisma. But try tapping the Internet’s usefulness and fun without the racks of servers.
Today’s water facilities aren’t dramatic; they aren’t particularly pretty. But in the developed world, they are part of a system that is so seamlessly integrated into daily life that they have come to seem part of the landscape, almost organic. And, in fact, city water systems do substitute for natural systems—the pipes tame the river or the lake or the well, domesticate it, bring it right inside the house. The product is the same as it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. But we are completely removed from the source of the water and the work required to deliver it.
In some ways, the systems’ very reliability undermines both public awareness and public support. The pipes are in the ground. The water comes from the pipes. Just like in the pump room, nothing ever happens. What’s the problem?
In Galveston, the problem turned out to be a slow-motion catastrophe—the natural water system overwhelmed the man-made water system in a way that was both offhand and humbling. Quite simply, the tide came in, and it came in high, crested by waves. One railroad bridge connects Galveston to mainland Texas, and Galveston’s water supply comes across the same bridge, in a thirty-six-inch pipe alongside the rails. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks—rails and ties—were lifted and shoved over five or six inches toward the water main by Ike’s storm surge and the waves crashing atop it, leaving the rails wriggling across the bridge like so much overcooked pasta. The railroad bed is seventeen feet above the bay below.
If you don’t count the water main itself—which was undamaged— Galveston has four major water facilities, and water completely overwhelmed three of them; it came within just six inches of overwhelming the fourth. What was left when Ike passed was mud and silence.
Galveston’s 59th Street Pump Station is a two-story stucco building, long and narrow. Built in 1950, it has a sturdy, tropical air. The building’s most distinctive feature takes a moment to dawn on you: There is no access on the first floor. The building’s doors are all on the second floor—the door for people is accessible by a flight of metal stairs bolted to the outside wall, and there are service doors on one end, the size of barn doors, only useful if you have a tall ladder or a forklift. This design was made with water in mind. Galveston Bay is four-tenths of a mile from the stucco building, in two different directions.
Through the second-story door, you step into a long, narrow room that looks and feels like an engine room. You are on a balcony, and over the railing is a deep floor, several feet below ground level. Four big motors, with pumps attached, are lined up on the floor, surrounded by water pipes. The wall opposite the balcony is covered with electrical conduits and boxes; a set of steps leads down from the balcony into the motor pit.
What happened at 59th Street is as simple as it is astonishing: The building filled up with Ike’s storm water. Faintly visible encircling the outside is the scum line Ike left behind. A scum line is, simply, a bathtub ring. It’s the level to which the water rose, and where it lingered, leaving behind a line of dirt and debris when it started to drain away.
The scum line on the outside of Galveston’s 59th Street Pump Station is nine feet off the ground—108 inches up. A typical U.S. doorway, for comparison, is 80 inches high. Ike’s storm surge completely enveloped the little stucco pump house, and cascaded into the building from the second story, pouring in around both the people door and the service doors.
When you stand on the road and look at the pump station, it’s hard to take in. Fifty-ninth Street became a new inlet of Galveston Bay that was, however briefly, at least ten feet deep. Inside the pump house, standing on the gallery overlooking the pumps, the water would have been pouring in across the balcony, around your feet, and over the edge into the pump bay below. It would have come in from the side, around the service bay doors. No one was inside 59th Street during Ike, but the experience would have been both terrifying and surreal. During the height of Ike, almost 100,000 gallons of water may have poured into 59th Street.6
Hurricane Ike quite simply killed 59th Street Pump Station. All four motors were dead; every foot of electrical wire was fried. And the repairs would begin in the hazy window-light that didn’t reach too far into the motor pit, because the building’s own electricity was also gone.
Eric Wilson didn’t try to reach 59th Street that Saturday morning as Ike headed north. “I knew I was looking at needing a boat to get there,” he says.
Galveston’s wastewater treatment plant is completely different from the pump stations—an open expanse of grassy land, sitting right on Galveston Bay, with a dozen open-topped tanks of all shapes and sizes buried in the ground. In the tanks, a combination of aeration, gunk-eating bacteria, gravity, and a smattering of chemicals routinely turns raw incoming sewage into water clean enough to be released directly into Galveston Bay, at about 4,500 gallons a minute. Wastewater, for the record, is almost all water—at least to look at it. If you think about what leaves your own home from the drain and sewer pipes, well, most of it is soapy or dirty water. Just 1 percent of the waste arriving at Galveston’s plant is solids.
But the wastewater treatment plant—while a completely different kind of place than a pump station—was in exactly the same condition as 59th Street and 30th Street. Seven or eight feet of water had washed across the place—the waves easily topped the plant’s six-foot fence—leaving behind everything from uprooted trees to navigation lights from a boat. A mobile home used for office space was torn from its anchors and pitched on its side against the back fence. Tons of sand and mud lined the bottom of the treatment tanks. The motors, the pumps, the spidery skimmer arms, the electrical controls—all drowned. Even the happy bacteria that eat the waste had been washed away.
The best symbol of the wastewater treatment plant’s condition was the simplest: If you needed to go to the bathroom, you had to use the Porta-Potty that had been delivered. Not even at the sewage treatment plant could you use the toilet.
The missing bacteria were a reminder that a wastewater treatment plant, any wastewater treatment plant, is both uniquely human and, like the water supply system, an imperfect effort to duplicate a natural system. Squirrels and seagulls, hippos and salmon all produce copious waste, but none have resorted to creating waste treatment facilities. And even people, despite the density of our civilization, have had a lot of faith in nature’s recycling system until recently. Memphis, Tennessee, was the last major city in the United States without a wastewater treatment plant. Until 1975, three years after passage of the federal Clean Water Act, it simply piped its untreated sewage into the Mississippi River.7 But even in a sophisticated wastewater treatment plant, most of the treatment is coming from the ciliates and metazoans—from the bugs, that is, from nature.8
