Tag: Dave Irvin

A ‘Failure to Act,’ a 28% water loss

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

I was fast enough to secure one of 25 slots at this year’s Staunton Citizen University, which are parceled out on a first come-first serve basis and are in surprisingly high demand. Last year I waited until the early afternoon on the first day of registration, and by then all 25 had been snatched up. This time I called at 8:05 a.m. and was glad I did, as this is a really great opportunity for city residents to look behind the curtain and see what makes Staunton tick .

A 10-week program that meets for two hours (and sometimes longer!) once a week, Staunton U trots out a parade of elected officials and city employees and a welter of statistics and budget figures to explain how the various components of city government mesh together. Field trips take class participants to the water treatment plant, city parks, a fire house, the landfill and other key facilities. Questions are encouraged.

Revelations abound.

One of the most disturbing, especially in the context of the recent water main break, is the D-minus rating that municipal water infrastructures have received from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)—not just this year, but every year since at least 2009. That’s much more than a decade of being graded just a hair above failing, a track record succinctly summarized in the report’s title, “Failure to Act.” Any child with that kind of track record would be attending remedial classes, working with tutors and mourning the loss of their cellphone and internet access, but America’s cities have been blithely rolling along as if nothing is amiss.

Staunton is no exception—indeed, it may be worse than average, given the age of its system. The Aug. 14 water main break, which resulted in a multi-day “boil-water advisory,” a two-day public school closure and untold economic impact on local businesses, should have been a wake-up call. But any appropriate sense of alarm was undercut by self-congratulatory relief over the swiftness with which the rupture was repaired, which was understandable; and by the widely accepted explanation that this was, in essence, an act of God, which it wasn’t. As explained to city council members by public works director Dave Irvin, “It would be great if we could predict breaks like this. We can’t.” And with that, everyone seems to have moved on.

But as I wrote a few weeks ago, that dismissal of predictability is accurate only in the most technically narrow sense: whether a water main will break in this spot or that, on this date or another, is indeed unknowable. What is known, with a high degree of certainty, is that there will be more breaks—indeed, there already are, on average, 40 a year somewhere in the 160 miles of the city’s water distribution system. Most simply aren’t on the same scale as the Aug. 14 rupture, but that doesn’t mean we’ll avoid “the big one,” as the ASCE report should underscore.

Nor should we be oblivious to the cumulative impact of smaller losses. Staunton overall is experiencing an ongoing 28% loss in its distribution system, day in and day out, as measured by the difference between the amount pumped out of the water treatment plant and the total amount recorded by customers’ meters. The lowest loss he’s ever seen in Staunton, Irvin said, was 12%, and that was quite a few years ago. The national average loss is 15%. In other words, more than a quarter of all the water Staunton pulls out of its reservoir and pumps from Gardner Springs, an average total of 4 million gallons a day, simply disappears, at nearly double the national rate. That’s more than a million gallons a day that just goes poof.

To put that in perspective, the Aug. 14 break spilled perhaps a million gallons before the supply was cut off.

Where do those millions of gallons of water go? Some of it is legitimately unmetered use, as when firefighters hook up to a hydrant or the city waters its golf course. Some of it is stolen—often from those same fire hydrants, by unscrupulous developers or others, but also by people rigging systems to bypass their meters. But most of it spurts out undetected from a rotting distribution network considerably past its “sell by” date, then quickly disappears into a karst topography without leaving a surface clue to the loss.

This is the month in which the city begins its annual budget planning—a month in which, it should be noted, we also are under drought watch. Again. It remains to be seen if more than a decade of near-failing grades for our water system, a major pipeline break and an ongoing loss of 28% of our treated water will be enough to jolt city planners and political leadership into paying pertinent attention to the way they raise and allocate funds. That includes not just taxes but also water and sewer rates, which by all accounts are comparable to or lower than those set by similarly sized Virginia municipalities.

Nobody wants to pay higher prices for life’s essentials, but as any homeowner knows, deferred maintenance saves money only in the short-term and always, always exacts a higher price down the road.

‘Unknown causes?’ Give me a break!

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

It took me a while to check out the explanation given to Staunton City Council about the August 14 water-main break (viewable here), but it’s still worth watching, if only to see a notable example of a kicking-the-can-down-the-road approach to municipal governance.

The presentation August 28 by public works director Dave Irvin included a detailed timeline, lots of numbers and appropriate praise for his department’s “all hands on deck” rapid response and hard work. The 16-inch cast-iron pipe that ruptured was at least 80 years old, shattering with such force that it blew itself apart and “self-excavated,” with water rushing out of the trench it created at a rate of 16 million gallons a day—four times its normal flow. Thanks to the department’s quick action, with valve closures starting within an hour of the estimated break, perhaps a million gallons were discharged into the surrounding neighborhood.

But what caused the break? “We don’t know,” Irvin said, contending that “the possible causes are many.”  The extensive damage, he added, made a postmortem impossible. A council member chimed in with a helpful metaphor: drive a car long enough, and sooner or later you can expect a flat tire—you just won’t know when, or which tire will go, until it happens.

It all was, the consensus appeared to be, an act of God. Something you just have to roll with.

But here’s the thing: the August 14 incident was Staunton’s second flat tire over the past couple of decades. A 2007 break in Cherry Hill also ruptured a 16-inch main, also one of cast iron, and also described as the result of “unknown causes.” That break took more than 12 hours to shut off and resulted in a slew of state-issued regulatory changes, directly contributing to the quick resolution this time around. That’s the good outcome. The bad outcome is that we’re still accepting the excuse that such breaks are because of “unknown causes.”

We know the cause. Cast-iron pipes, which were standard issue when much of Staunton’s water works were built, are brittle. The industry standard is a 100-year life span. Nearly half of the city’s water is supplied by the North River Reservoir, which is tapped by a 20-inch cast-iron pipe threaded through a 6-foot tunnel burrowed through Lookout Mountain, then connected to a 14-mile cast-iron pipeline that runs to the city. Next year will mark the centennial of that project—100 years since a system with a 100-year life span was completed.  Miles more of cast-iron pipes of varying vintage and various diameters, including 16- 14- and 12-inch, run throughout the city.

Moreover, the karst topography that underlies our region is not kind to brittle systems. The 6-foot tunnel that once buffered the 20-inch main is no more, gradually settling around the pipe over the past 10 decades. That much was publicly known at least a decade ago, when Nancy Sorrells wrote about it in an apparent response to proposed fracking in the George Washington National Forest that alarmed city officials because of its threat to a crucial water supply. The fracking threat retreated, but the land continues to shift and settle nonetheless, putting more stress on a water distribution system that is hurtling toward its past-due date.

The flat-tire metaphor may be reassuring when all four tires are brand-new. In this case, that’s hardly the case. These tires have been hitting the road for many, many decades, and we’ve now had two flats. Every bit of Lincoln’s head—and then some—rides above a non-existent tread on the other two.

Why do people drive on bald tires? Usually because they can’t afford new ones, which may be why Staunton’s city council has been unwilling to take a closer look at an increasingly untenable situation. Although a city council member asked Irvin how much cast-iron pipe is out there, he didn’t get an answer—quite possibly because an exact number is unknown. But what is known is that replacing cast-iron mains with more flexible ductile-iron pipe is expensive. Hugely expensive. The Richmond Avenue project, for example, will replace less than two miles of a 6-inch cast-iron main and a 10-inch cast-iron main—because of their frequent breaks—with a single 16-inch ductile-iron main; that project is budgeted at $13 million. The city overall has more than 150 miles of pipeline.

Faced with such an imponderable financial overhang, council members have been only too willing to avoid asking the hard questions. And Irvin made it easier for them, announcing at the outset, “It would be great if we could predict breaks like this. We can’t.” Narrowly speaking, he’s correct.

But what we can predict, as we drive down the road on our well-worn slicks, is that more breaks are coming. They’ll come more frequently and sooner than we expect. And we really won’t be able to continue insisting that their causes are unknown.