The Big Thirst, page 19
But by the time of the April 2005 prayer service, Toowoomba was already distressingly short of water—watering lawns was already forbidden, and the steep, normally submerged sides of its reservoirs were overgrown with grass. Toowoomba needed to find some water.
Rosemary Morley, a cheerful, matronly, lifelong Toowoomban, remembers precisely the moment when she learned that the city had, in fact, found a large, renewable source of water. It was the moment she began to view Toowoomba water with suspicion, and the moment when that suspicion took over her life.
“We had a ladies’ club,” says Morley. “We met once a month”—about forty women, ages fifty to seventy. For the May 2005 meeting, the speaker was Dianne Thorley, Toowoomba’s popular mayor. Mayor Di, as she was known, had just won a second term with 67 percent of the vote. Mayor Di is not exactly a women’s club–style politician. She looks like a female rugby coach, and she talks like the foreman of an Australian copper mine— punctuating her speech with “shit” rather than the watered-down “bloody.” A self-made woman—she started out cooking in pubs, eventually starting her own catering company in Toowoomba—Mayor Di has no college, but at one point in a varied work life she did work in an abattoir.9
That afternoon at the ladies’ club, Mayor Di talked with gusto about the amazing new source of water the city had discovered, the answer to the devastating lack of rain, a kind of perpetual fountain of renewable water. Toowoomba was going to recycle its wastewater back into drinking water, using advanced technology. Right there at the monthly meeting of her ladies’ club, Rosemary Morley learned that the best hope for Toowoomba’s water future was in her own toilet, as she flushed it.
It was Mayor Di’s first public discussion of the sophisticated recycling plan that she and the city’s water managers had been working on for six months. She talked with the enthusiasm of someone unveiling the solution for an intractable problem, a solution so obviously persuasive it will carry everyone along.
“She held forth for an hour,” says Morley. “She was so animated, she was so excited about it. ‘You’re all going to drink from the sewer!’”
The mayor made it clear the decision had been made: Recycled water was the future, the only way to refill Toowoomba’s reservoirs.
The reception among the women’s club? “The ladies in that room were dumbfounded,” says Morley. Herself included. Morley is a grand-motherly sort. She and her husband run a house-painting business (“I’m the office end of things”). She left school at age fourteen, but she was also the first woman to be elected president of Toowoomba’s chamber of commerce. Her approachable manner disguises an unyielding resolve, and a firmly held worldview. Rosemary Morley grew up drinking rainwater, and her house is set up so she and her husband can still do that if there is enough rain to fill her home’s water tanks. She is deeply suspicious of both government officials and scientists; drinking sewage sounded like an idea that could only come from a conspiracy of those two groups.
“I came home from that meeting and my reaction was, How can you go forward with a project like that without running it by people? I thought, This is such a sneaky thing. There must be something about it that’s funny.”
What was happening in Toowoomba—a steady disappearance of the water supply that had been unfailing for a century, a desperate search for a way to replace that water—was not only not unusual, it was typical. Water scarcity was turning into Australia’s most urgent issue, from Brisbane in the east to Perth in the west.
The change in Australia is both simple and startling.
Australia has built an entire way of life that assumes a certain availability of water—from the way homes are laid out and the way people spend their free time, to the way the nation raises its food and runs its cities. For a hundred years, those water levels, those water assumptions, were unthinkingly reliable. The Toowoomban economy requires that level of water, the Australian economy requires that level of water—the farmers and the factories, the backyard flower beds and the swimming pools. Every economy in the developed world, in fact, operates exactly the same way—that’s why both Atlanta and Las Vegas are so nervous about falling reservoir levels. Water is not simple to supply in the first place, but replacing the supply everyone has built their lives around is much more difficult.
And Australia’s water has disappeared, with stunning speed and almost unbelievable thoroughness. In the last ten years, the rainfall that fills Australia’s rivers, its reservoirs, and its aquifers has simply not come. Australians refer to the last decade as the “Big Dry.”10
The change is so dramatic that the man in charge of supplying water to Toowoomba, Kevin Flanagan, knows every time it has rained for the last twenty years. “March 1999 was the last time our dams were full,” he says. “We’ve had just ten significant rain events in the last twenty years; they account for all the filling of the dams.” None of those rainfalls came between 1999 and 2009.
“The last ten years have been an absolute horror—nonstop downslope on the capacity of all three dams.”
Australia has had to remake habits and priorities to adjust to a new water reality. There’s no reason the same shifts in water availability can’t overtake anyplace on Earth.
That’s why understanding the experience of Toowoomba, and of Australia, is so important. They are a window to the future for the United States and the rest of the developed world.
Australians have had to do three things simultaneously—tackle the complicated engineering and public policy issue of replacing vital water that is suddenly absent, while persuading people to live with less water; and develop a politics of water, a way of making expensive, high-stakes decisions about a topic that has historically been left to engineers and water bureaucrats.
The complexity of the technical decisions makes the politics of water difficult; the politics of water has often frustrated leaders’ ability to make the water decisions they thought were best. The story of the effort to solve Toowoomba’s water scarcity problem perfectly illustrates that as challenging as the technical issues are, the politics of water is both more challenging and ultimately more important.
Because the politics of water involves two issues that most developed countries have little experience with, but that turn out to be highly emotional: who gets water, and what kind of water they get. Despite the utterly carefree attitude most people in the developed world have about their daily water, we turn out to have complicated feelings about water, and to hold fiercely to them.
Although Mayor Di didn’t realize it, the battle over Toowoomba’s water future, which would dominate the town for the next sixteen months, started at Rosemary Morley’s women’s club meeting, with the mayor’s cheerful enthusiasm for drinking recycled wastewater.
What Mayor Di didn’t appreciate that day in May 2005 was that she was introducing a whole new way of thinking about water. She wasn’t being “sneaky”—to use Morley’s word—in the least. But Mayor Di didn’t seem to grasp that people might have different attitudes about water, and about what kind of water is wholesome.
The months-long debate over Toowoomba’s water-rescue plan fractured the town, the way high-pressure groundwater fractures rock, unleashing anger, distrust, and contempt that haven’t faded four years later. And even in a country that now debates water policy as readily as economic policy, the water politics of Toowoomba became a national spectacle in Australia, entangling even the prime minister’s office.
Mention the town, and Australians smile and shake their heads—oh, those wacky Toowoombans. But there is no cartoony comfort in the story of Toowoomba, either for Australia or for the rest of us. It is a complicated cautionary tale that illustrates how water abundance can smooth over very different, often conflicting, views of water.
In retrospect, that was all evident at that first women’s club encounter—evident, if not obvious. Mayor Di’s rough-hewn glee at the prospect of using technological alchemy to turn dirty water into drinking water, running smack into the utter disbelief of a room of ordinary women, who couldn’t quite absorb the idea that their city would pump the sewage right back into the reservoir, no matter how many fancy filters it went through first.
Di Thorley went on from the women’s club to the formal announcement of what was called Toowoomba’s Water Futures project (“keep our future flowing”), officially unveiled July 1. The story in the next day’s Toowoomba Chronicle newspaper was headlined with stark simplicity: “The Plan to Save Our City.”11
Waterwise, things got grimmer in Toowoomba through mid-2005. Dam levels fell below 30 percent, water restrictions banning any use of outdoor hoses took hold, Bunnings—an Australian version of Home Depot—sold out of watering cans, and Toowoomba empowered four water cops to enter the backyards of residents, without warrants, if the cops suspected violations of water rules. The main worry seemed to be that Mayor Di’s recycling plan wouldn’t move fast enough. It wasn’t due to come online until 2009—four years away, with the dams down to a three-year supply of water.12
Rosemary Morley, meanwhile, was so appalled by the details she read from Mayor Di’s formal unveiling of the recycling project that she immediately set about organizing opposition, forming a group called CADS— Citizens Against Drinking Sewage (or Citizens Against Drinking Shit, depending on the audience). What especially aggravated Morley was Mayor Di’s insistence that the decision was made, that the city’s staff, scientists, and leadership had considered all the water options, and this was the only viable one.
“No consultation, no debate,” says Morley. “That’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
THE SPEED WITH WHICH Toowoomba’s water problems came upon it is almost hard to grasp—its reservoirs overflowed in March 1999 and were still 80 percent full at the end of 2001. Less than four years later, the city was praying for rain. Its vulnerability is all the more striking because it seemed relatively invulnerable—with regular rain, and three reservoirs scaled to hold ample supply.
Toowoomba has an unusual water challenge. Because it sits at the top of a mountain ridge, all of its water runs away from it. The city, in fact, sits at the headwaters of Australia’s great river, the Murray. There is an aquifer beneath Toowoomba, but the aquifer is falling and use by cities is sharply regulated. Although it’s relatively small, Toowoomba owns all its own waterworks—the reservoirs, pumping stations, and water treatment plants.
Starting in 2006, after the dams fell below 20 percent full and level 5 restrictions were triggered, it was forbidden in Toowoomba to use city water to do any outside watering—even sprinkling an urn of flowers with a watering can.
In the office of Kevin Flanagan, Toowoomba’s director of water and wastewater services, there is a tall potted umbrella plant, its stems and leaves dried brown and crackly. The plant’s big plastic pot bears a handwritten sign: “Level 5 water restrictions are in force in this office. Walking the talk.”
“That plant’s been dead almost ten years,” Flanagan says with just a trace of a smile. He figures to get a new one when it’s once again legal to water your lawn with city water.
Kev Flanagan is smart and a bit impatient, a technocrat. At fifty-six, he’s youthful and energetic. A bluff Irish Catholic—one of seven children, married father of four, grandfather of three—Flanagan is an engineer, a pipes-and-pumps man. He’s been in the water business thirty years, and he knows how to watch the rain, the reservoirs, the aquifers. His job as director of water services for Toowoomba is rarely a position of public renown.
Whatever his critics think of him—the opponents of drinking recycled water took to referring to Flanagan derisively as “Kevvie”—Flanagan conveys a visceral sense that it is his responsibility to make sure water always flows when Toowoombans turn on the kitchen tap.
“I invented the idea of bringing recycling to Toowoomba,” says Flanagan. Given the level of scorn that the plan, and Flanagan personally, have been subjected to in the last four years, insisting that the idea is his is a small act of courage.
“It was November 2004. There hadn’t been any significant rain for five years. I was talking to a coal mine about supplying them water. They wanted water from our wastewater treatment plant. I thought, Shit, we have nine thousand megaliters coming from the wastewater treatment plant [a year]—if we can clean it up for the coal mine, why can’t we clean it up for us?
“At that moment, our supply was grim. I was worried. The options were very limited.”13
Of course, cleaning water so it can be used to wash coal is very different from cleaning water so it can be used to rinse your toothbrush. Flanagan envisioned taking the city’s wastewater—everything collected by the sewers—through a series of filtration and disinfection steps similar to those used, for instance, by the folks at IBM’s Burlington microchip plant.
The water would go through Toowoomba’s regular wastewater treatment plant, Wetalla. The effluent from Wetalla—which now goes into a creek, and eventually to the Murray River, where farmers use it for irrigation—would instead be routed to a new advanced wastewater treatment plant (AWTP).
It would go through ultrafiltration, which takes out particles and bacteria; it would then go through reverse osmosis, the process by which seawater is turned into drinking water around the world. Reverse osmosis removes almost everything else—viruses, pharmaceutical residues, salts, and minerals. The water would have been blasted with UV radiation for a final dose of disinfection. Toowoomba’s water purification factory would then have pumped its product, what is called “six-star water” in Australia, on to Cooby Dam. Six-star water is so clean it actually has to have some minerals added back at the end of the process so it doesn’t leach nutrients from the bodies of people who drink it.
The blend of Cooby Dam and recycled water would eventually have been pumped to Toowoomba’s Mount Kynoch drinking water plant, where it would be put through conventional drinking water treatment, including another set of filters and chlorination. The whole cycle is called indirect potable reuse (IPR)—cleaning the wastewater back to drinking-water cleanliness, then mixing it with the routine water supply.
The purified water would have been far cleaner than the reservoir it was pumped into. Cooby’s surface area is 750 acres when it’s full, and it drains an area of sixty square miles, the size of Washington, DC. Every kangaroo or koala that pees or poops in the forest around Cooby has its waste washed into the reservoir, assuming it rains. The debris from every decomposing possum carcass is eventually flushed into either the ground or the reservoir. Cooby is simply a lake, open to every bird flying overhead, every insect (dead or alive), every cascade of leaves from trees, everything washing off lawns and farm fields and nearby roads, from sheep dung and pesticides to leaking motor oil and the tiny particles as car tires wear away.
More remarkable still, the recycled sewer water coming out of the new water factory would have been cleaner than the water coming out of Toowoomba’s taps—simply because the technology at Mount Kynoch wasn’t designed to turn koala pee into ultra-pure water, as the proposed AWTP would. People who were nervous about the recycled water should have been really nervous about their routine Toowoomba tap water.
Kev Flanagan knew all that, of course. Water professionals know the good news about water: You can’t really hurt it. These days, you can take water that is as dirty as you could possibly imagine, and clean it to whatever level of purity desired. There are no technical issues, just questions of effort, energy use, and expense.
Convincing people that the water really is clean is much more difficult, and much less scientific. This is the “toilet to tap” conundrum.
The condoms flushed away, the stagnant water from the vase of roses that stayed too long, the washing machine water from the dog’s bath towels, the sour milk poured down the kitchen drain, the deceased goldfish given a toilet-bowl funeral—you can clean all that out of the water, no problem. But no matter how crystalline the water itself, you can’t filter away the images of where it comes from.
As with many other things in modern society, we are more comfortable in ignorance. We don’t really want a vivid picture of where our hamburger comes from, we don’t want to meet the Bangladeshi who made our cheap blue-jean skirt.
We want a comforting mental and physical distance between the last time our water was dirty and the moment we use it to stir up a pitcher of iced tea. It’s easy for water professionals who live every day of their careers with the reality that while there is plenty of pure water, there is no fresh water—our water was Tyrannosaurus rex pee and dirty snow at some point, because there is no other water. For ordinary people, though, our consciousness of water doesn’t even include a willful forgetting about its source, as it does with the hamburger. We really don’t know where our water comes from, just that it needs to be “fresh” when we fill the ice cube trays.
Flanagan says now that he understood this: “I was fully aware of the issue [for residents] of the safety of the water, and of the need to handle that right.”
Even Mayor Di, who would ultimately lead the recycling campaign with unvarnished enthusiasm, started out skeptical of Flanagan’s solution.
“She wasn’t negative,” says Flanagan. “She was cognizant of the fact we live on top of a mountain. Any water source to come to Toowoomba is very difficult to get, so if you’ve got your own water here already, why not recycle it and reuse it? She was skeptical of it. We had to prove it to her.”
No one in Australia was then using the kind of water recycling system Flanagan envisioned. So Flanagan and Thorley together visited cities in the United States with experience recycling water. They went to Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, where treated effluent has been flowing into the Occoquan Reservoir, and back into the water supply of one million people, for thirty years. They visited Orange County, California, where the world’s largest wastewater recycling system was then under construction—Orange County’s plant now produces 70 million gallons of highly purified, recycled water every day, ten times Toowoomba’s total daily use.
