I am pleased to announce that it will now always be Infrastructure Week at Daily Kos (always).(1) The hope was to create a semi(2)-regular series on infrastructure, with a focus on how it relates to the progressive agenda, how progressives can effectively talk about infrastructure needs, the obstacles in our way, and connections between infrastructure and problems in American society at large. This stemmed from a series of diaries I wrote about High Speed Rail, never intending them to amount to anything larger. But people in the comments asked, so I can now say: be careful what you wish for...
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It’s primary season, and Sen. Klobuchar was the first of the 2020 candidates to propose a major infrastructure package.
The plan announced Thursday is the first policy proposal from the Minnesota senator since she joined the 2020 race with a snowy rally not far from where the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007.
Klobuchar speaks often on the campaign trail about the collapse, which killed 13 people, telling voters “a bridge just shouldn’t fall down in the middle of America.”
Nor should a City’s water distribution system poison its residents. Here’s more from Paul Waldman:
[Deteriorating Infrastructure] is, to be clear, an enormous problem. Compared with other highly developed countries in Europe or Asia, our infrastructure — roads, bridges, sewers, the electrical grid — is pathetic. For years we’ve been starving our infrastructure of needed repairs and upgrades, causing a drag on our economy and public health.
As the American Society of Civil Engineers wrote in 2016, the country was on track to spend $1.4 trillion less than what it should to meet our needs: “If this investment gap is not addressed throughout the nation’s infrastructure sectors by 2025, the economy is expected to lose almost $4 trillion in GDP, resulting in a loss of 2.5 million jobs in 2025.”
Those numbers don’t include additional work, like saving the Planet through a Green New Deal.
Why Revisit Flint?
Flint is a story(3) every progressive should know by heart until the day they die. Flint also takes all the big-picture challenges to upgrading infrastructure in the United States, namely:
- Devolution of Infrastructure Funding to the lowest levels of Government which cannot run deficits or print money like the Federal Government.
- Big businesses and industries that shunt all of the cost of infrastructure onto those local governments through tax breaks and special deals.
- Loss of institutional knowledge in local municipalities.
- Operating a municipality like a business, which is tantamount to criminal recklessness and depraved indifference to life(4)
- The lowest levels of Government are often the most vulnerable to economic cycles.
...and connects them with the theme that austerity, with respect to infrastructure, kills. And it should be stated at the outset that 12 people died in Flint, MI. This diary is the story of how that happened.
A Ticking Time Bomb
Flint, like many other American communities, used to buy its drinking water from a centralized location. The reason for centralized production is economy of scale. The volumes of water we use are enormous and, well, water is really heavy. Treating and moving around such large quantities of something heavy takes a lot of energy. And that’s expensive. So the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) withdrew water from Lake Huron, treated it to make it potable, and sold some of it to Flint. And this is how Flint, 80 miles away from Detroit, got its water since 1967.
Once the water arrived at Flint, it was distributed to homeowners through a branching network of pipes fanning out from the arrival point, not unlike like the arteries that deliver blood to our body. The water mains feed branches of smaller mains, which may in turn have even smaller branches, until those mains reach the point in the road in front of your house. There, a home service line connects to the water main under the road.
The water distribution network in Flint was installed between 1901 and 1920. Like most other municipalities at the time, Flint used cast iron water piping for the water mains. The problem was, cast iron wasn’t(5) practical for smaller diameter lines. Smaller diameter lines, like the home service lines that connect the house to the water main in the street, were typically made of lead, long before the toxicity of lead was well understood. Lead had the benefit of being relatively inexpensive and easy to work in small diameters. Of the 43,000 service lines in Flint, 3,500 are known to be of lead, with another 9,000 being of unknown status. This doesn’t even include the use of lead solder, which was only prohibited in 1986 by the Amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act.
But many homes have lead pipe and lead solder in their system, especially those in older cities. There are an estimated 6.5 to 10 million lead home service lines in the United States, that the EPA estimates will cost up to $80 billion to replace. This doesn’t even include the additional tens of millions of homes with lead solder. The good news is effective water treatment allows that lead to stay safely in the pipe or solder, and prevents that lead from leaching into the drinking water.
A Backup Ticking Time Bomb.
Flint also has its own treatment plant. In fact, it had to, in case there was a problem with the transmission line from Detroit(6). Built in the 1950’s, during the heydays of General Motors, this plant was desperately in need of an upgrade by the time of the crisis. But the population of Flint had shrunk from 250,000 at the time the plant was built, down to just 90,000 by the time of the crisis. And so in kind dwindled the taxbase for those repairs. About 45% of Flint residents live below the poverty line, and one in six houses are abandoned.
Under normal operation, the Flint water treatment plant could be considered a sort of pass through for already treated Detroit water taken from Lake Huron and treated. But in an emergency, the Flint Water Treatment Plant can draw its water from the Flint River. And while these are both surface water bodies, and to the lay person, may seem like the same water, they are, in fact very different from a water treatment perspective. The Flint river is naturally high in chlorides, which require more careful treatment. Rivers are also naturally higher in organic matter.
Municipalities looking to switch water sources from lakes to rivers on a permanent basis would normally hire engineering firms to conduct detailed studies and conduct pilot studies to evaluate various water treatment process options before choosing a treatment approach.
A Foundation Undermined
It wasn’t just that the population of Flint had shrunk. The Water Treatment Plant and distribution network were now oversized, having been built for a larger population and much more industrial use. Wrong-sizing(7) of the entire City water supply system made it disproportionately expensive.
"So Flint today has less than half the number of residents as it had in the 1960s. The infrastructure did not shrink along with the population. So it has far fewer and poorer people, who are expected to pay to support a water system meant to serve twice as many — and not just residents, but also all those huge industrial plants. The pipes were built with large circumferences to support all the water that they needed. So this directly relates to how unaffordable the water was for residents. It directly relates to how this infrastructure was disintegrating, and it also meant that the folks who lived in areas where there was a lot of vacancy, they had water that was much riskier to drink, because the water sits stagnant longer, and pipes that go over stretches of vacant land in these large pipes, it has more time to absorb the corroding lead and iron and other contaminants from the pipes."
And boy was it expensive. Flint residents already paid the Nation’s highest water rates at the time of the crisis.
A wrong-sized water distribution system is also naturally prone to health hazards. The velocity of water through a pipe (the mean time it takes a particle of water to travel from point A to point B), is based on the flow rate divided by the cross-sectional area. The area of the pipe installed at the turn of the Century doesn’t change, but the flow rate has gone way down because there’s less demand. This means the water is moving slower through the pipe. And that means the water is sitting in the distribution system longer. Disinfectants like chlorine have a half-life in a treatment system following first order decay kinetics. So either more disinfectants needed to be added up front to last, or water was being received at the end user with too little disinfectant.
A good treatment plant operator would know this. But City workforces have been slashed around the Country. I don’t know the qualifications of the personnel at the time of the tragedy, but that the tragedy happened in the first place leads me to suspect many of the experienced staff were no longer present, and any staff remaining were too few and too inexperienced.
The Tea Party Lays the Fuse
Public pressure to find an alternative was already building before the Great Recession hit.
And as we know, 2010 brought the Tea Party backlash, and 2011 saw the resultant Inauguration of Republican and self-identified mean nerd Rick Snyder as Governor.
The City of Flint at this point was facing a $25 million budgetary shortfall. Rick Snyder thankfully had a background in business. And as we all know, governing is just like running the business of... *checks Internet* personal computers???
It’d have to do.
In keeping with conservative philosophy(8), Rick Snyder’s response to a local problem was for Big Government™ to take emergency control of the City. So from 2011 on, the State of Michigan was micromanaging Flint’s finances. If the idea of taking a local problem with a readily identifiable cause (i.e., the populace doesn’t have enough money to pay for water) and attempting to fix it by imposing a centralized top-down solution that will only exacerbate the problem sounds crazy to you, congratulations, you’re not a Republican.
The original idea was for Flint to buy from another authority that was building a new pipeline to Lake Huron. This pipeline wasn’t ready on time.
Neoliberalism Pulls The Trigger
The story of Flint reminds me of this rhyme from the Great Depression:
Mellon pulled the whistle
Hoover rang the bell
Wall Street gave the signal
And the country went to hell
Unable to withstand the pressure to cut water bills at all cost, the City of Flint threw off the shackles of Big Detroit Water and went Galt, taking matters into its own hands. Read the chilling first hand account of the dramatic announcement of the City's switch to Flint River water source, sounding like something out of Atlas Shrugged.
It was really celebrated. I mean, media was there, they had this ceremony at the water treatment plant, with a countdown and cheers and toasts with the river water and a lot of folks are really celebrating that, 'This is us getting back to our roots, and returning to some self-determination, self sovereignty.'...
The Snyder-installed emergency manager of Flint decided drawing water from the Flint River until the new pipeline was completed would save the City $5 million over 2 years. The annual budget of Flint is on the order of $165 million.
"It was huge. In Flint, they had an emergency manager appointed in 2011, and a series of them were in place consecutively up and through April 2015. So essentially through the entirety of this crisis, and all the decisions that were made here. Two of these officials ended up being indicted...
A Catastrophic Chain Reaction
And thus began a chain reaction of devastation on the order of Cernobyl:
The Flint River is naturally high in corrosive chloride. Therefore, iron pipes in the water distribution system began corroding immediately after the initial switch from Detroit water. The iron that was released from the corroding pipes reacted with residual chlorine that is added to kill microorganisms, making it unavailable to function as a disinfectant.
Because chlorine, which reacted with the iron pipes, could not act as as disinfectant, bacteria levels spiked. When coliform bacteria were detected in distribution system water samples, water utility managers were obliged by law to increase the levels of chlorine. The higher levels of chlorine, while reducing coliform counts, led to the formation of more trihalomethanes
Trihalomethanes are a carcinogen. All municipalities must test for their presence in drinking water. They were also a clear indicator that tragedy lay ahead.
Triahalomethanes result from the reaction of the chlorine used for disinfection with natural organic material present in the source water. Rivers like the Flint River are much higher in organic matter than Lake Huron, as previously noted. Flint responded to the presence of trihalomethanes by making the problem even worse.
...To reduce levels of trihalomethanes that formed, the plant removed organic matter from the water by adding ferric chloride, which coagulates organic matter, making it easier to filter out. Even though the treatment took care of the trihalomethanes problem, it increased the water’s chloride levels [further still].
And all that chloride was now ready and willing to react with the lead in the pipes.
This diary is still an oversimplification of the actual chemical processes. But this wasn’t as much a chemical tragedy but an economic and a human one.
Pennywise and Pound Foolish
Flint, of course, could have added a corrosion inhibitor.
By not adding a corrosion inhibitor, Flint was going to save about $140 per day. But the inestimable costs of the errors made in Flint will reverberate through the community for a long time and their magnitude will dwarf the original planned savings.
$140 a day? Thank goodness Michigan had a businessman as governor during the crisis!
Replacement of Flint’s lead service lines, which is the only permanent solution to address its lead vulnerability, is estimated to cost up to $1.5 billion, according to Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver.
The cost of the Flint Crisis so far has been about $350 million, mostly for distributing bottled water to residents served by what was once a fully functional municipal drinking water system. The lead concentration in the water, while still high, has now fallen below the regulatory action level. Residents still express doubt.
Austerity Can Kill
Often forgotten were the 90 people were sickened and 12 people that died as a result of Legionnaire’s Disease during the crisis, most likely a direct result of unavailable chlorine disinfectant in the system. There are likely more fatalities yet unattributed to the crisis. There were a horrifyingly large number of fetal deaths during the crisis. And there is no cost yet associated with the long term trauma and psychological impacts.
A number of commentators framed the tragedy as the end result of austerity measures and given priority over human life. Jacob Lederman of In These Times argued the crisis can be directly attributed to neoliberal economic reforms. They are right.
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(1) If any of you wiseacres with graphics skills can make a banner for Daily Kos Infrastructure Week, it would be most appreciated.
(2) Emphasis on the ‘semi-’
(3) As with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
(4) A business’s objective is profit on the bottom line, whereas a municipality’s objective is the public welfare. These do not completely overlap.
(5) Cast iron pipe was superseded by ductile iron pipe decades ago.
(6) This is a bit of an oversimplification, as any number of issues could have interrupted transmission from Detroit, like drought, the need to service the transmission line, etc.
(7) This means the infrastructure is not sized correctly for its intended use.
(8) Conservative philosophy isn’t so much a coherent logic but a decision tree based on that which brings Republicans money and power and punishes people they don’t like