The main question: why the break?

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Last Wednesday I posted about the million-gallon water tank that’s being erected alongside I-81, principally to provide an adequate amount of water and pressure to supply a proposed data center at Staunton Crossing. In that column I questioned the wisdom of chasing after such a resource-hogging industry, contrasting the $10 million+ cost of the tank and its associated plumbing with the $40 million+ cost of replacing a century-old pipeline that supplies Staunton with most of its drinking water.

The next day, an unexplained break in a 16-inch water main above Stocker Street left the city and parts of Augusta County without potable water. As I write this the city has just lifted a four-day-long “boil water advisory,” which required boiling any water we could end up ingesting, as in preparing meals, adding ice cubes to our drinks or brushing our teeth. The effects of this break were significant. Schools were closed for two days, disrupting the lives of working parents. Restaurants either closed or significantly reduced service—half of Cranberry’s was in the dark Sunday morning, which was rather eerie—and businesses generally took a hit.   

The city’s response to all this was admirable, as it issued frequent advisories via email, its website, Facebook and other social media, and it quickly provided free bottled water at three dispersed locations in the city. The break was repaired within hours, and much of the subsequent disruption  was due to flushing the system and mandated repeat tests of the water for residual chlorine and bacteria. I’m sure that the response was an all-hands-on-deck affair, leaving little time or resources to address less immediate concerns.

But now that the worst of this incident is behind us, we really need to get a description of what actually happened. Nowhere in the city’s communications has there been any attempt to explain why a major water main suffered such a disastrous break—in the middle of the summer, not in the winter, when freezing often accounts for such mishaps. Was this the result of a tree uprooting? A karst topography-related ground collapse? A heavy truck rolling over an inadequately buried pipe?

Or was this a critical-point failure?

If the root cause (no pun intended) was a one-off incident, such as those I just listed, okay. Regrettable, to be sure, but also fitting squarely within the “stuff happens” matrix. But if it was the latter, if this was the inevitable result of aging infrastructure and the predictable collapse of a system long past its due date, then the implication is that this sort of thing can—and will—happen again. The only things we don’t know for sure in that case are when, and where.

As with the unanticipated but equally predictable closure of parts of the Wharf parking lot because of an eroded system of pipes and tunnels, the power of water to overwhelm our attempts to funnel, channel and exploit it requires constant attention and care. Without it, we court disaster. Yet because those attempts are largely buried underground, and therefore unseen, and because they’re so frickin’ expensive to maintain and upgrade as needed, it’s easy to devote what money we have to the next shiny thing rather than to spend it on something we already have that seems to be working just fine. Until it isn’t.

We can’t say we haven’t been warned. Staunton’s capital improvement budget, approved just a few months ago, quite explicitly listed 13.4 miles of 16-inch and 20-inch pipeline that should be replaced, at an estimated cost of $41.5 million, but the budget neither scheduled nor funded such a project. Similar unfunded nods to the necessity of such an undertaking have been made for at least the past five years, the price tag growing larger with each iteration, yet with no apparent follow-through.

It’s unclear at this date whether last week’s pipeline break lies within this stretch, although its comparable size suggests it is. But if that’s not the case, the even more troubling implication is that there’s much more work to be done than the city has acknowledged to date.

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On a related but equally timely note, I want to call attention to today’s substack post by Paul Krugman, who despite being an astute economist has an extraordinarily accessible writing style.

While my focus last week on the resource-sucking depredations of data centers was on their thirst for water, Paul today writes about their vampire-like need for ever more electricity. Thanks to the enormous and exponentially increasing power needs of  “the cloud,” artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, none of which are in huge demand from the general public, the electric grid and the power plants that support it face a rapid build-out that will be underwritten by, yes, the general public.

That means much higher electricity rates for homeowners and small business owners, who won’t see any return on that investment. Just one more reason, it seems, to revisit the Staunton Crossing master plan and ask ourselves just what we’re trying to achieve with it.