The Big Thirst, page 13
In fact, before the place could get going again—in addition to the pumping, the vacuuming, the stringing of fresh electrical circuits, the sheer physical labor of removing whole trees—Galveston would have to coax the bacteria back into action.
IN THE FALL OF 2007, metropolitan Atlanta came within eighty-one days of running out of water. The potential for catastrophe was staggering— Atlantans use about 500 million gallons of water a day, about 21 million gallons of water an hour. Even supplying one-tenth that amount of water on an emergency basis—just 15 gallons of water per person—would have required five thousand tanker trucks a day.9 Leave aside where you could find a fleet like that—it’s hard to imagine where you could fill them with water, since the city itself would in fact be dry.
In response to the crisis, the state banned almost all outdoor water use for Atlanta and its surrounding counties, and public officials implored residents to cut back use voluntarily. Still, cities and counties routinely overshot their conservation targets, using between 10 and 20 percent more water than they pledged.
In fact, city, state, and federal officials had no plan for what to do if Atlanta actually did run dry. They were simply betting that it wouldn’t. In the midst of the drought, Major Daren Payne, a senior official for the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages Lake Lanier, offered this reassurance: “We’re so far away from [running out], nobody’s doing a contingency plan. Quite frankly, there’s enough water left to last for months.”10
On April 29, 2008, in the comparatively tiny town of Emlenton, Pennsylvania, the nine hundred residents, all customers of the Emlenton Water Company, were issued a boil-water order by the state—they weren’t to use their tap water for any potable purpose without boiling it first. The water coming to them from the Allegheny River, which runs alongside the town, wasn’t adequately cleaned by the Emlenton Water Company—the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection found intestinal parasites that the little utility’s filtration process wasn’t removing.
The utility, then owned by Jeff and Kathy Foley, who had purchased it from a previous couple a decade earlier, never did fix the problem. The state of Pennsylvania ultimately revoked the operating license of the owner of Emlenton Water Company, and forced its sale in order to get the water from the hundred-year-old plant properly treated. The boil order lasted until January 27, 2009—273 days of boiling water for the daily needs of cooking, washing fruits and vegetables, drinking, and toothbrushing, a period long enough to conceive and give birth to a full-term child.
And in January 2010, the city of Jackson, Mississippi, went without water for an entire week after a fourteen-day freezing spell fractured the city’s water mains. The unrelenting cold spell froze the Yazoo clay on which Jackson sits, fracturing the pipes, and the pipes themselves also froze.
Except for the Northridge, California, earthquake in 1993, it may be an event unprecedented in modern U.S. water history. In the space of roughly eighty hours, Jackson suffered 154 water-main breaks. Jackson is 107 square miles, meaning there was on average more than one water-main break in every square mile of the city. Not only were the city’s 175,000 residents put under a boil-water order, many of them literally had no water.11
What did no water mean in Jackson? Well, unlike Galveston, which was evacuated before Ike, everyone was home in Jackson.
Jackson’s schools were closed for a week, as were three universities, including Jackson State. Jackson is the capital of Mississippi, and state offices were also closed for the week. Police headquarters was temporarily relocated.
“If we had ice on the ground, people would be much more understanding,” Jackson mayor Harvey Johnson said. “We have a disaster. It’s just not one you can see.”12
Almost as remarkable as the scope of the water crisis in Jackson was the fact that it received literally no attention in the media. The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, NPR—none did a story on Jackson’s crippled water system. Indeed, not one news outlet of any kind outside Mississippi did a story on the capital city of a U.S. state whose water system completely shut down for a week. (Jackson’s water crisis started Monday, January 11; the devastating Haitian earthquake happened on Tuesday.)
It’s easy to be sympathetic with what happened to Galveston’s water system during Hurricane Ike, while silently shrugging. Our cities aren’t, in fact, likely to be overwhelmed by a twelve-foot, hurricane-driven storm surge.13 But while water system disasters, or even significant water system failures, remain remarkably rare, it’s important to take a lesson from how they play out.
Atlanta’s water crisis was really a function of twenty years of refusing to consider water as a limiting factor in growth. As Atlanta’s reservoir fell by one foot per week in the midst of the drought, Roy Barnes, who had been Georgia’s governor from 1999 to 2003, told reporters, “Los Angeles added 1 million people without increasing their water supply. And if Los Angeles can do it, I’ll tell you, Georgia can.”14 Meanwhile, with crisis staring them in the face, Atlanta and Georgia officials didn’t actually have a worst-case plan. They bet Atlanta wouldn’t run out of water, and in the end, this time, it didn’t. But what if the drought across the southern United States wasn’t a one-time event, but prelude to a permanent shift in rainfall?
Over the course of nine months, the state of Pennsylvania couldn’t manage to force a tiny water utility serving just nine hundred people to clean up its act. Pennsylvania literally had to wrest the utility from its owner and hand it off to another company to get the problem corrected.
And in Jackson, the problem wasn’t a hurricane, it was a freeze—but the result was the same. The system collapsed.
Indeed, all four of these water failures—Galveston, Atlanta, Emlenton, Jackson—are the result of a man-made water system colliding with a natural system, and crumpling, or coming close. Especially in Atlanta and Emlenton, the problems were magnified by a refusal to see our relationship to water clearly, and by a refusal to pay attention to how the water supply itself is changing—in terms of climate change, and in terms of what’s in our water.
Modern municipal water systems in the developed world are an unlikely combination: They are so reliable and so apparently robust they seem to have become almost part of the natural system itself, easily taken for granted in both their complexity and their cost. And they are oddly brittle—when something overwhelming happens, the water systems have no resilience. There was nothing to do in Jackson, Mississippi, but dig up every single one of 154 water-main breaks, jump down into the water- and mud-filled holes, and fix the pipes.
In Galveston, even Brandon Wade, then the deputy city manager and Eric Wilson’s boss, was stunned by what happened to the waterworks.
In an interview nine months after the hurricane, he said, “I’ll tell you that the most horrifying thing I heard during the entire storm was, as the sun was coming up and the storm was trying to pass, someone coming to tell me that we had no water pressure in the place that we were staying.
“It was shocking to me, and to be quite honest with you, I was briefly in denial. I was wondering what it was that the hotel had done to cause them to lose water, because I just really didn’t expect that we would have lost water.”15
It turned out that natural gas, the backup energy supply everyone had relied on—the city’s newspaper, too, had a natural-gas-fired emergency generator—was the wrong choice. Along Galveston’s waterfront, the Balinese Room, a famous nightclub that once hosted Frank Sinatra, along with the Hooters restaurant, had been washed away, leaving large natural gas lines torn open. The utility had no choice but to cut off service until it could close off individual gas leaks.
Wilson managed to get a diesel generator onto the island on Sunday, which allowed him to fire up two motors and pumps at the dry Airport Pump Station. That brought water back to the San Luis Resort on Sunday night, forty-eight hours after Ike knocked it out.
Five days later—a week after Ike arrived—you could drive the cleared streets of the city, you could shop at the oceanfront Kroger (which had its own water purification system—something the level 1 trauma hospital did not); you could shop at the oceanfront Wal-Mart, which had been flooded from front to back and sanitized from front to back before reopening; you could kick back with drinks, surrounded by recovery workers, at the San Luis Resort’s pool bar, the H2O lounge.
But Galveston’s H2O system was still a wreck, and it was, in fact, the main problem preventing city officials from reopening Galveston, which had literally been closed to residents since the hurricane, with checkpoints staffed by state troopers, allowing in only recovery workers. Impatient, angry residents had begun to sneak back to their festering homes using boats.
The pressure to get the water flowing again wasn’t just intense, it was quite blunt. At an all-hands city staff meeting of about seventy-five people at the San Luis Resort on Saturday morning—one week to the hour from when Wilson headed out into the storm in his dump truck—city manager Steve LeBlanc turned to Wilson and said, “Eric, man, I need you to come through. Whatever parts you need to get those pump stations working, let’s call the president. … We’ve got to make sure that our water and wastewater work when people come back. That is the central element.
“And you’ve got that message loud and clear, Eric.”
It wasn’t a question, actually. It was a decree.
As LeBlanc moved on to talk about an emergency no-burning ordinance, Wilson slipped out of the banquet room. Although he and the city utility staff of seventy had been working twenty-one-hour days for the previous week, tangible progress was mighty thin.
Thirtieth Street’s backup motors—the natural gas ones—were running, helping supply limited water pressure to the seawall hotels and businesses.
And that was it. No sewage was being treated—whatever made it to the plant spilled through several settling tanks and out into the bay.
The eight drowned water pump motors—four at 30th Street, four at 59th Street—were all still bolted to their concrete pads, their shafts frozen in place. Thirtieth Street Station had been cleaned up; 59th Street had been pumped, but the motors still sat in a four-inch layer of pudding-like mud.
The residents would return in ninety-four hours, and Wilson would need every minute.
DESPITE THE TICKING CLOCK, despite the pressing needs of human biology, despite the list of major and minor-but-urgent things that need to get done—find motors, find connector parts, get old motors winched out, get new motors winched in, get new wiring, find electricity to make it all go, get a sewage pump truck waved through the checkpoint where an overzealous state trooper is holding it—there are few moments of high drama in the struggle to bring Galveston’s water system back to life.
In fact, the really striking thing, hour after hour, is how almost nothing works right, no effort is rewarded the first time, but everyone simply pushes ahead.
One bit of good news is that right inside 30th Street Station are a pair of beautiful, brand-new electric motors with pumps attached. They are fire-engine red, and a crew from a construction company arrives in early afternoon to pick them up and trailer them to 59th Street, where it is hoped they can be installed as is.
The motors are tucked behind a locked chain-link fence, inside a storage area, inside the building. No one has a clue who has the key to the lock. This doesn’t slow the guys from Boyer Construction down for a moment— they simply take a wrench and disassemble the hinges on the locked gate.
The gleaming motors do not come out to the loading dock easily, but after 45 minutes of sweaty, noisy, backbreaking work with crowbars, chains, and a forklift, the motors are on a trailer.
In what seems like a moment of some significance for the drowned city, the motors head off to the stucco blockhouse of 59th Street through the streets of Galveston in a slow parade of three vehicles. The Boyer Construction guys—they were on contract to Galveston when Ike struck, in the process of building a brand-new 30th Street Pump Station, just a block from the old one—back the trailer with the motors up to the side of 59th Street Station along a gravel driveway. They laid the driveway the previous day in the saturated mud around the pump station, to provide a place for heavy equipment. They used gravel from a nearby concrete company, which said they could take it, since it had been soaked in seawater and rendered useless for making concrete.
As soon as the motor-pump combos are sitting outside the building, something unfortunate becomes clear: The water pumps have extensions to allow them to connect to the water pipes they are pumping. The new pumps have flanges 34½ inches long. Fifty-ninth Street’s pumps have flanges 46½ inches long. The new pumps are one foot of steel pipe from being able to connect to the pipes they need to pump.
A few phone calls. No pipe extensions that match can be quickly found.
This is exactly what happens, right along, hour after hour, at every waterworks location. A plan of action is tackled, an unexpected problem derails it, the plan is reconfigured, and work pushes forward.
No pump extensions? No matter. A crew sets to work unbolting the red motors from the red pumps. They won’t replace the pumps—they’ll just replace the motors.
Inside 59th Street, a second crew of men wades into the mud and starts unbolting two of the drowned motors from the pumps, and from their concrete mounting pads.
It takes the rest of the day to winch the old motors out—each weighs hundreds of pounds—and winch the new motors in, using chains and manual winches. The good news: The new motors have mounting holes that match the old motors perfectly.
The next day, Sunday, back at 30th Street Station, the navy arrives, without fanfare but with an unmistakable air of determined competence. A Humvee, a flatbed truck, and a nifty self-propelled crane wheel into the yard, along with a half-dozen Seabees. While Ike was still in the Gulf of Mexico, President Bush dispatched the USS Nassau from Virginia to be on station to provide recovery help as soon as the storm passed. The Nassau is an amphibious assault ship that looks like a small aircraft carrier and carries both attack jets and helicopters. It is anchored eight miles off Galveston—you can see it on the horizon—sending heavy equipment and a hundred sailors and Seabees to the beach each day to do whatever is most urgent.
Two brand-new motors—dull turquoise—have been delivered to the loading dock at 30th Street. The mission is for James Wooten, a Seabee mechanic, to use the X-Boom self-propelled crane to get the motors into place in the motor pits inside the big motor room.
The X-Boom has the nimbleness of a crane you might find in a video game. It sits on four oversize tires, and the whole body of the crane can tilt left and right, giving it a kind of joystick maneuverability.
Wooten gingerly lifts the first motor off the loading dock. The motor is going into a motor pit that is right through the front door of 30th Street Station. So Wooten rolls the X-Boom crane, with the motor swinging from the boom, around the front, lines up with the main door, and takes it right up the stately front stairs, rolling up one stair at a time like a creature from a Bionicle movie. The X-Boom’s tires are taller than the balustrades, and Wooten uses a sure, smooth touch. He has two inches of clearance on either side.
He needs a spotter to get the motor in, and over the wall of the motor pit, without the boom taking out the top of the doorframe. The metal handrail mounted in the concrete wall around the motor pit has been cut away in anticipation.
Once the motor is hanging over the pit, a small problem is evident. The motor is two feet to the right of the mounting pad it needs to go on. But Wooten can’t jockey the boom sideways without destroying 30th Street’s stairs and main entrance. Some consultation, some radio calls. The Galveston city staff summons an A-frame—simply a big metal stand with a winch—that can support the motor. Wooten lowers it to the floor. The city crew will use the A-frame to wrestle the big motor the last two feet into its proper spot.
The navy has offered another critical service. Motors and pumps don’t connect to each other directly—they need custom-fit connector plates, which allow all kinds of motors to drive all kinds of pumps. The connector plates for the new motors are different from those for the drowned motors—and the navy has sent ashore two machinists to take measurements, helicopter back to the Nassau, cut the plates in the big ship’s machine shop, and chopper the connectors back to 30th Street.
About a dozen sailors spend the afternoon working alongside city crews to get the motors in place and hooked to the electrical supply. On the Nassau, the machinists cut the new connectors. At 59th Street, meanwhile, the Boyer staff starts stringing new electrical service—starting with an enormous electrical panel drilled into a wall—so the new red motors can be fired up.
“Things are coming together quite nicely,” says Wilson. “If we get power, we’ll be in nice shape.”
Indeed, the small motors Wooten lowered into place in 30th Street are hooked up (with the help of one of Galveston’s traffic signal electricians), their connector plates fit perfectly, and they start water spinning into the system Tuesday morning, twenty-four hours before the people return.
They help, but even with the pumps at the Airport station, Wilson needs his big motors at both 30th Street and 59th Street to provide pressure when a whole city of people starts turning on faucets.
At the wastewater treatment plant, teams of men with squeegees, rakes, shovels, and huge vacuum hoses get the layers of black sand off the bottom of the tanks at the sewage treatment plant, and with twelve hours to go, it, too, is limping back into service.
