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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.
Looking askance 