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| Sanderlings need clean water, too. |
I live in one of the older neighborhoods of Duluth, and my
house was the first built on our block, sometime between 1900 and 1910, long
before Peabody Street was paved, so it’s set closer to the road than any other
house on the block. The water and sewage lines in my neighborhood are quite
old, and little by little have been needing to be patched up and even replaced.
A few years after we moved in, Russ noticed that our water lines were lead—it
cost us thousands of dollars to replace them at a time when we were just
starting out, but it would have been even more had our house been set further
back like the other houses. In Duluth, lead can be found in the joints of the
old cast-iron water mains that still serve much of the city, and Duluth has
just shy of 2,000 lead pipes connecting mains to curbside valves — about 7
percent of its total connections. On top of that, the city has a large number
of older homes like ours with lead service lines or lead-laden plumbing. Fortunately,
Duluth draws water out of Lake Superior, not the Flint River, so the water
isn’t leaching all that much lead out of people’s pipes into their drinking water.
A few weeks ago, a valve down the block suddenly quit, and
the city had to turn our water off for several hours as they put in a new one.
While they were working on it, they discovered that the valve right across the
street from us was also reaching the end of its life, and so a week or so
later, they had to turn off our water again to fix it. They gave us plenty of
warning both times so we could time showers for before or after and fill water
bottles and the bathtub beforehand, and both times the water was turned back on
ahead of schedule. We suffered the bare minimum of inconvenience and our taps
were running again with Lake Superior’s wondrously clean water.
Well, it’s pretty darned clean. The entire Duluth water
system’s infrastructure is slowly crumbling, and not just the pipes that carry the
water to our homes. We had heavy rains in March—2.7 inches fell on March 15 and
16, the largest March rainfall on record here, and 5.7 million gallons of
wastewater, including untreated sewage, flowed into the lake. The 12.5 million
gallons of backup storage tanks that are usually empty were filled to capacity
with runoff from storm sewers, overflowing at four centers including one at
WLSSD. Duluth had just added capacity
after our last overflow incident in the July 2012 flood, which normally would
have been plenty, but the rains fell on already saturated soil. David Montgomery,
Duluth's chief administrative officer, was quoted in the Duluth News-Tribune
warning that with changing weather patterns due to climate change, these
150-year events could be happening much more frequently. I got horribly sick in
the 1990s when I was rehabbing and ended up with four sanderlings that had
become sick after one of these sewage events.
We Americans expect to be able to walk to any sink or tub,
turn a faucet, and have clean running water. The city water in Duluth is
remarkably clean despite people’s lead pipes and the occasional sewage
overflows, especially compared to water in other cities, but we can’t count on
it lasting forever unless we are proactive.
Ever since the 1980s, Americans have been acting like a
family that purchases a house way beyond their means and is both falling behind
on the payments and not bothering with proper maintenance. I’m bewildered how
we as a nation could have lowered taxes, especially on households earning more
than $200,000 a year, at the same time that we’re falling further and further
behind on basic infrastructure.
People in Flint have been drinking toxic water since April
2014—many children there have suffered irreparable damage to their brains. The water lines in the most damaged
neighborhoods were built between 1901 and 1920, exactly when my neighborhood
was built. Once the lead-infused water of Flint is flushed or washed down the
drain, that water ends up flowing into the sewage system, which can clean up a
lot of basic filth from household wastewater but can’t do much at all about
lead, which eventually pollutes natural water. Yet somehow politicians still endure
when their entire platform is to “shrink government and drown it in the bathtub.”
Even that bathtub requires a functioning public water system. Every one of us
humans and all the birds and other wildlife that drink from our lakes and
rivers depend on clean water for our health and wellbeing. Any politician who
doesn’t grasp that elemental fact should not be in office.