The Buzz
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
About The Buzz
We all know that man is not an island. Most of us don’t work inside a bubble, and so our professional responsibilities often bleed into places that are not officially “in our job description.” With that in mind, we’re introducing a new feature: The Buzz. As you may or may not know, Forester Media, Inc. (our parent company) publishes six national publications that focus on everything from stormwater management to municipal solid waste to energy efficiency. Because of the overlap that occurs between many of the industries served by our magazines, we often find that the insight provided by the editor or contributors of one publication is relevant to a wide swathe of our national audience. From time to time, we will highlight some of these crossover pieces in the pages of our magazine, and we hope that this industry “buzz” will give you some new outlooks, different perspectives, and even more access to the tools and information you need.
Economy and Environment
By Janice Kaspersen
(From our sister publication, Stormwater)
Last week, a former EPA administrator, William K. Reilly, published an editorial in the New York Times, marking the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. He notes the many successes under the act—in 1972 when it came into being, he says, two-thirds of the country’s waters were not “swimmable and fishable”—and, just as then-Administrator Carol Browner did in the very first issue of Stormwater magazine 11 years ago, he cites the notorious event that helped spur the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency itself: the 1969 fire on Ohio’s extremely polluted Cuyahoga River.
Reilly also notes the continued resistance to the act from big businesses, which have often tried to find ways around it, such as trying to limit its jurisdiction by claiming that certain water bodies aren’t really covered, that they aren’t actually waters of the United States because they don’t connect with interstate waters. He specifically mentions two Supreme Court decisions in the last decade that have made more ambiguous the question of which waters the act actually covers.
The larger question he drives at, though, has to do with the relationship between the economy and the environment. He writes, “The American economy has performed well over the past four decades: real per capita income has doubled since 1970 and pollution is down even with 50% more people. The choice between a healthy environment and a healthy economy is a false one.” Yet he acknowledges that when times are good, people feel better about enacting environmental protections, and when times are rough, many feel those same protections are a luxury we can dispense with. He warns that we should not “buy into the misguided notion that reducing protection of our waters will somehow ignite the economy.”
Janice Kaspersen is the editor of Stormwater and Erosion Control.
Directions From the Other Woman
By John Trotti
(From our sister publication, MSW Management)
Some years ago I found a wonderful piece of property near the town of Weed, CA, and following the dictates of my heart rather than my head, I went ahead and bought it with no certainty as to my ability to develop a secure source of water without drilling clear to China. After receiving the assurance of the two top engineering firms in the area that China might indeed be my best bet, I decided to suspend my natural skepticism toward what I assumed to be the world of the occult, and went to see a water witch of good renown throughout the region, known simply as “Old George.” After explaining his preference for the term “hydrogeologist,” George led off on a high-speed reconnaissance lap of the property, pausing just occasionally to kick some dirt, sniff the air, and listen to the wind. Then he’d be off again, intuitively coming to but never crossing the unmarked boundaries of the 640-acre section in what was for the most part lightly wooded rangeland.
At last he made his way to the top of a massive rock outcropping that commanded a view of the entire Siskiyou Valley and its magnificent Mount Shasta at the southern reach, where, seating himself comfortably, he pulled out a frayed notebook filled with strange squiggles and marks and proceeded to leaf through several pages with an occasional nod accompanied by the word, “Yup.” Finally, after gazing out over the valley for a period of about five minutes, he rose and walked straight to one of the spots he had kicked half an hour earlier, where he stood for a minute more before pronouncing without fanfare, “Here.”
A week later, he led Stu Donaldson’s drill rig to the spot, mentioned something about 60 feet and left. Two days more and Stu called to say that Old George was slipping. He’d had to go all the way to 68 feet to find water. “’Tain’t no gusher,” he admitted, “but it’s sweet as clover,” and “enough for household needs and a few head of cattle.”
Pleased as I was for the water, on the whole I was disturbed by the episode, since George’s performance went counter to my beliefs about witchcraft. It wasn’t until months later that my concerns were laid to rest, when Stu explained how George was well and away the most experienced hydrogeologist in the region, who in his younger days had developed much of the data for the US Geological Survey’s maps of the Shasta Valley by drilling, blasting, and making soundings in order to chart the complex geology of the area. “He knew where to find water on your property long before you hired him,” the drill operator chuckled at the vision of my being hoodwinked by the air-sniffing act. “Beneath all the rustic disguise, Old George is a real professional who makes use of the best tools available.”
Nearly a year later, I ran George to ground at what I prefer to call the Longest Bar in Montague (CA), plying him with several shots of his favorite whisky before confronting him with my familiarity with his deception.
“Some people love to believe in witchcraft,” he offered with a grin. “Keeps ’em from facing the fact that there’s no substitute for hard facts and knowledge. In my business, without accurate maps, you’ve got nothing.” Two more visits of the Famous Grouse and he began telling me of how his father, a mining engineer, taught him to survey in the mountains using a compass, transit, plumb bob, and chain. Sometimes it would take a week of brushing and scrambling around just to shoot lines and find the boundaries of a property the size of mine. “Nowadays [1972] a person with a laser rangefinder, compass, and an engineering calculator can do that in a day.” After a pause to toss back another drink, he went on to explain what the future held in store.
“One day soon, this will all be done using satellite-based position-finding gear in conjunction with an array of subsurface monitors. All the x, y, and z coordinates will be fed into a computer, and it will come up with maps you won’t believe.” For a while we both sat in silence, each trying to envision what magic lay behind such promise. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered fervently, “I’d give anything to be around to see where that leads.”
“So would I,” I thought.
A quarter of a century later, what had seemed so impossibly advanced is now almost quaint. GPS, GIS, sensors covering every spectrum imaginable are employed to reveal Earth’s most carefully guarded secrets. Their use in vehicles is so common, that many of us have come to recognize that voice from above the dashboard as that of “The Other Woman.” In our neck of the woods, after a rather slow start in the waste business—it took what seemed forever for Caterpillar to place its first CAES system at a landfill—GPS has become a staple in the industry, important not only in assessing compaction, but even moreso in making sure no airspace is lost through faulty lift placement.
Sad to say, Old George never got to see the realization of his vision—he died in 1974 after a brief illness—but all it would have done would be to have fired his imagination to project the next leap . . . and then the next.
John Trotti is the editor of MSW Management and Grading and Excavation Contractor.
Jobs and Water
By Janice Kaspersen
(From our sister publication, Stormwater)
A new report, released today by the organization Green for All, advocates investing in America’s water-related infrastructure. That’s nothing new—the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, among others, have long been urging the same thing. What’s different here is the effect the report predicts this investment would have on employment, and how those numbers were calculated.
The report Water Works: Rebuilding Infrastructure, Creating Jobs, Greening the Environment promotes the use of green infrastructure as a big part of the proposed investment. It first defines some common low-impact development or green infrastructure terms—rain garden, green roof, bioswale, permeable pavement, and so on—and offers examples of cities, like Chicago, IL; Milwaukee, WI; and Portland, OR, that are successfully putting them to use. It also identifies co-benefits of investment in water infrastructure, such as energy savings, economic development, and the reduced health risks that would result if we had fewer CSOs.
Produced by Green for All in partnership with American Rivers, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Pacific Institute, the report takes as a starting point EPA’s estimate of the investment needed to protect water quality and manage stormwater, which is $188.4 billion. If that money were spent over the next five years, say the report’s authors, it would create 1.9 million jobs and generate $265.6 billion in economic activity. The jobs would result from work on infrastructure projects themselves as well as from increased manufacturing to meet the projects’ needs and from increased hiring in other sectors as people working in infrastructure-building and manufacturing spend the money they’re earning.
Water Works includes state-by-state breakdown of the number of jobs that would potentially be created, as well as a list of specific jobs—pipelayers, cement masons, environmental engineers, and others—and the median wage and education required for each. Many require only a high school education and some additional training rather than a college degree.
The report argues that the cost of infrastructure investment is at a historic low because of current low interest rates—incentive to act now rather than wait until the economy recovers. You can read more about the methods the authors used to arrive at their conclusions and decide for yourself whether you agree, but it’s an unusually detailed analysis, and worth a look. The full report is available for download from Green for All’s website.
Janice Kaspersen is the editor of Stormwater and Erosion Control.
Rumblings From the Underworld
By John Trotti
(From our sister publication, Grading and Excavation)
As the age of municipal plumbing systems pass the century mark, planners find themselves faced with the thorny issue of whether to replace, renovate, or go to Plan C, whatever that might be. No matter what the choice, the chances are that it involves excavation work of some sort as part of the process.
Two of Grading & Excavation Contractor’s sister publications—Stormwater and Water Efficiency—are directly involved with the situation, and another—Erosion Control—is involved, if only tangentially. All three recognize the critical situation in which our nation finds itself as we proceed through the second decade of the 21st century, forced to face the painful fact that we can no longer ignore the inadequate state of much of our basic (mostly underground) infrastructure. Age, of course, accounts for a lot of the problem, but there are other—equally fundamental—issues as well:
Population growth over the last 100 years has pushed many systems beyond their design limits. In 1900, the US population was 76 million, only one-third of which (25 million) lived in an urban setting. We were for the most part an agrarian society.
Today, the US population is 300 million—a 400% increase—two-thirds of which (200 million) is now urban. That’s an eightfold increase in the demand for basic utility services, huge by any standards, but there’s more.
Over the past 100 years, urban per capita water consumption has trebled, rising from 60 gpd to 180 gpd. This means that at the very least our urban water consumption has risen from 1.5 to 360 billion gpd over the period. I’d be the first to concede that all such figures are suspect, but I offer them not for accuracy’s sake, but to put into perspective what’s at stake over the next several decades.
Coming to Grips With Crumbling Infrastructure
In the past, I’ve gone with an estimated cost range of from $15 and $30 trillion that will be needed between now and 2050 to deal with the entire range of infrastructure shortfalls—transportation and electrical transmission included—but that range is based on what it might take to restore things to an adequate level based on past demands. This brings into focus two antithetical situations: (1) tomorrow’s needs are bound to be greater than today’s, and (2) with all the competing needs for public funds, it’s highly unlikely those kinds of monies will be set aside for infrastructural repair or upgrade in anything approaching a proactive manner.
If past actions can be viewed as prolog, we will wait until failures pose such an undeniable threat to public health, safety, and commerce that we are forced beyond finger-in-the-dike solutions. One of the biggest hurdles we will have to overcome is the institutionalization of systems vital to the conduct of our daily lives. One example is centralization, which made sense during the installation and initial build-out of our water, electric, and gas systems, and in many situations it still does. Then, too, there are deeply rooted aspects of ownership, jurisdiction, and entitlement that compound the challenges associated with change. But as our urban centers have matured, spread, eroded, and given way to suburbanization, we have to ask ourselves and those who manage these institutions whether it makes sense to continue along traditional lines or seek new solutions.
These are challenges that the stewards of our vital municipal services as well as our elected officials must face. In a more immediate way, however, it is we upon whom the burden of accomplishing the multitude of the tasks will fall. The challenge will be great, but the opportunities even greater for those willing to develop the skills and fine-tune the processes necessary to the complete tasks that lie ahead.
John Trotti is the editor of MSW Management and Grading and Excavation Contractor.
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