Resolve

Here we are, the beginning of 2014.  We have another blank slate, another fresh start!  I take water seriously so I wanted to think about what I would resolve to do in 2014 for water.  There is much to be done and sometimes it may seem overwhelming for one person.  I broke it down to a few promises I want to make to water.

Personally
1) Always set the load setting appropriately on my clothes washer. 
2) Check my toilets for leaks twice  a year, when I set the clocks back and forward.  It is just a little food coloring.
3) Replace my husband's shower head with an EPA WaterSense Labeled one.  This will be the trickiest one.
4) Complete a home leak survey and plumbing check annually.

Community
1) Implement the Green Cities Program in Cobb County and retrofit apartments and townhome and condo communities with Ultra High Efficiency Fixtures, saving millions of gallons of water.
2) Develop a new water savers course to help citizens understand our water challenges and provide them equipment and info to help meet the challenges.
3) Expand our programs to commercial customers.
4) Expand our offerings on irrigation and proper planting to increase water quantity and quality best practices.

Globally
1) Raise awareness about the work of Water For People by strengthening our committee and brining a presentation to the Annual Georgia Association of Water Professionals' Conference.
2) Donate to charities focused on bringing water and sanitation solutions to those without access.
3) Do one six mile run a month wearing my water for the world shirt and make a "race entry" donation to a water charity.
4) Continue to develop curriculum and education material that incorporates the global challenges faced by much of the world to obtain what we take for granted.

Maybe these aren't earth shattering resolutions but think if everyone resolved to treat water with a little more reverence and respect. Happy New Year!!

FOG

It is not what you might think.  Bet you did not know FOG is costing you millions of dollars.  It is the number one cause of sewer blockages.  That's right FOG is Fats, Oils, and Grease and this is the biggest season of the year for FOG!  FOG is clogging sewers and people erroneously believe that rinsing it down with really hot water or putting it down the garbage disposal adequately breaks up grease.  That is not true.  Here is a video some wastewater staff from Thames created to educate their citizens.

Things flushed or dumped down the drain are not out of sight or out of mind.

Instead this is what is typically found in municipal wastewater systems.  That liquid grease sent down the drain solidifies in the conveyance system.  Why is this a big deal?  Sewer pipes are sized to carry a certain flow of wastewater.  At best their carrying capacity is greatly reduced increasing the chance of back ups during high flow times.

At worst the blockage is complete and the wastewater has know where to go except back out the pipe and into the environment or your home.  Neither is a holiday experience you want to share with your family. 

What are you to do?  No one is suggesting you forgo Thanksgiving and holiday meals.  I am suggesting you use one or a combination of these options.

1) Wipe it - if we are only talking about a small mount of grease wipe the pan out with a disposable rag and throw it in the trash.  This will keep FOG from going down the drain when you clean the pan.

2) Scrape it - if there is more grease you can wait for it to cool and solidify and scrape it into the trash. 

3) Contain it - you can keep a coffee can or any container with a lid.  After cooking dispose of the grease in the container.  Place the lid allow the grease to cool and solidify and then dispose of it in a trash receptacle.

It may seem like more work and what difference will it make if it is just your FOG down the drain?  Like most things, making a difference starts with one person and builds.  Start protecting our sewers this holiday season then keep it going.  It will be the easiest New Year Resolution you ever made.

Toilets

Yesterday was a holiday.  You may have missed it.  It was World Toilet Day.  May sound pretty odd to you and you may even wonder why would there be a day to bring attention to the toilet?  In the US we do our best to avoid talking about toilets.  I still remember my young obsession with bathroom humor, foreshadowing my future career maybe.  I also remember my mother saying we don't talk about that in polite company.  She was right.  We don't talk about toilets and that makes it easy to forget that for 2.5 billion people they would gladly give up what little they have to be able to not talk or think about toilets. 

No I don't intend to use my blog to share bathroom humor.  I have grown past that.  Instead I will say that I celebrate all the toilet has meant to us and would mean to the rest of the world.  I hope after you read this you won't shy away from talking about toilets, but instead will roil against the situations that keep them from 1/3 of the world's population.  You may ask, from your comfortable home or even your bathroom, I don't judge where you read.  How in this day and age, where everyone has a cell phone and the internet, can 1/3 of the population be without sanitation?

Why I thank the toilet?

Thanks for letting me go to school and then to college.  For women without  access to sanitation they begin to miss school as soon as they hit puberty.  The poor conditions are compounded and often lead to illnesses that make concentrating on school work impossible and then inevitably they drop out.  In India alone 23% of girls drop out of school as soon as they hit puberty.  Thanks to the toilet I never had to think about this.  I had all the awkward concerns teenage girls have when they reach puberty, but  I never had to let that determine my educational opportunities.

Thanks for my health.  Improved control of infectious disease is listed as one of the10 greatest advances in public health.  And sanitation and clean drinking water are credited for the gain.  I don't have to worry about Cholera and a host of other diseases that routinely took the lives of people.  I may live to be 80, the current life expectancy in the US, because of the toilet.  Wow! makes you feel like giving it a good cleaning and a little pampering this week doesn't it?

Thanks for my way of life.  Because of the toilet I was able to get an education and then a job, that lets me blog about the role of the toilet in our privileged lives.  

Thanks for my safety.  Without the toilet women and girls have to venture far from home to find a suitable place to defecate.  In the middle of this already degrading process they are often raped and killed. 

Thanks for letting me enjoy nature.  I love to run along the rivers and lakes and I can because they are beautiful and clean.  I can breathe clean fresh air.  It would be a different experience if these same rivers and lakes were also an open channel for raw sewage. 

So my mother was right?  We don't talk about these things in polite company.  We don't talk about them at all.  We don't want to know these things.  As if knowing them is the difficult and painful part.  What about living them.  So I don't want you to talk about this just in polite company.  I want you to talk about it in the line at Starbucks.  I want you to casually ask the person in front of you at the grocery store buying toilet paper if they know that 2.5 billion people in the world don't have a toilet and that diarrhea is still the number one killer of children world-wide.  Then when you are done talking about it find out how to change it.  They can't wait anymore.

Loss

Yep I am taking about water loss.  Whether it be in a municipal drinking water system or an individual property or business.  It happens, every single day, a lot.  You get it.  Now let me say I am a water provider.  I understand water loss is unavoidable.  Let me share the analogy I use.  because I know some people just read that comment and can't believe my cavalier attitude. 

Delivering water to people is hard!  I mean really hard.  It is not at all like delivering a different beloved liquid, like say beer.  Now if we load 25 cases of beer at the warehouse and we send it over to the local bar and 22 cases arrive that is irresponsible.  I think maybe sometimes when we say we lost 4 million gallons of water people are envisioning a giant truck with gallon jugs just falling off the back out of an open door.  Not at all what is going on there.  We don't deliver water like we deliver beer. In fact if we do, there is a huge problem! 

Instead we deliver water through thousands of miles of pipe that decrease incrementally in size as the water is pushed through under enormous pressure.  Oh yea, also that pipe is buried sometimes in your yard, sometimes under a road.  It isn't like we just dig it up and replace it every year.  Yes some lost water is inevitable and yes 4 million gallons sounds like a lot and it is, but when we  deliver 60 million gallons it puts it into perspective.

None of this is an excuse for us or for you.  We have to mitigate our losses.  Some will say that is just good business.  I say that is the right thing to do.  That 4 million gallons isn't mine to lose.  Every gallon gone was destine for another purpose.  We take great pains to mitigate loss.  We camera lines to see inside, we listen with devices and track the sound waves.  We prioritize the replacement of that underground pipe to make sure we are decreasing loss.  We adjust the pressure in our systems.  It is the right thing to do.

What about your own system?  Is a dripping faucet just something you live with? I mean water is cheap and how much can that really be?  Your neighbor waters in the rain; this is small potatoes.  Do you know how to read your water bill?  Do you look to see if your use is higher than last month?  Have you had your kids go on a leak detection scavenger hunt?  When is the last time you checked to see if your pressure reducing valve worked?  You can buy a gauge for 10 bucks at a hardware store. Did you know your fixtures were designed to perform optimally at 60 PSI?  Do you know where you T&P valve is on your water heater?  Do you think all toilet leaks make noise?

I have a responsibility to get every drop of water to fulfill it's purpose?  I don't want to work so hard only to have it lost when it gets there. 

Conservation

Conservation or should I say the word to never be spoken aloud?  This week I was at a meeting and this topic came up.  I am ashamed to say I was a willing and even complicit participant.  We were talking about the strategic direction for an organization focused on saving water.  You may ask yourself why don't I say we are focused on water conservation.  Well I don't say that because like a few other words, the word conservation is being held hostage, it is handcuffed to Xeriscape.  By whom you might ask?  I can promise you the answer is even more surprising!  It is held hostage by Water Conservation Professionals.  To be fair also by energy conservation professionals and land conservation professionals, you get the picture.

We were talking about the very unique challenge of championing water efficiency in a an area where rainfall is in a feast or famine cycle. When we have a rainy year like this people look at us like we grew a second head.  When we have a severe drought people look to us to solve it!  It is a weird crossroads to live at, but I digress.  We were discussing that the need for water efficiency is constant to make the times when conservation is needed less painful.  We went on, of course we did. It was a room full of water professionals discussing water.  We said water efficiency is using water as efficiently as possible to accomplish a purpose.  Water Conservation is when the sacrifice might hurt a little.  I am pretty sure I added the rationing word.  What?

The Merriam Webster Dictionary actually defines conservation as:  the protection of animals, plants, and natural resources
: the careful use of natural resources (such as trees, oil, etc.) to prevent them from being lost or wasted

I should have stood up, someone should have stood up, and defended conservation!  It would have seemed hollow coming from a person who created their program and intentionally called it the water efficiency program, to avoid the negative connotation of conservation (guilty!).  When did conserving things for the future, or for the benefit of the collective, or gasp... the benefit of the environment become a bad thing.  Not for nothing where were we when it happened?  Maybe we were busy explaining that Xeriscape is actually a technical term. 

I don't mean to imply we are the ones who cast conservation as the villain.  It wasn't a bunch of conservation professionals sitting around discussing that their job would sound so much cooler if they were efficiency experts, actually doesn't that usually mean you fire people for a living.   The viewing conservation as taking away instead of protection and preservation happened when somewhere along the lines we began to believe that everyone is due to have as much of something as they want. The accompanying belief that asking them to make any adjustment, that might allude to the fact that they are not alone on this big rock orbiting the sun is a sacrifice.  Conservation professionals just stopped fighting it.  So today in a blog no one reads, because it is about water.  I am proud to say in a whisper, I am a conservation professional.  But please sshhh don't tell anyone. 

Responsibility

There is a quote I love from John F. Kennedy.  "To whom much is given, much is expected."  I thought about that a lot today.  Today was one of those days.  "Let's just call it total lack of responsibility day."  I did not talk to one person today who wanted to take responsibility for their role in protecting and preserving our water resources.  I was astonished by conversation after conversation that treated water like it was just some commodity to be bargained down or someone else's responsibility to pay for it.  Days like today make me tired and sad.  They make me think we haven' t gotten very far down the road of helping people understand that water, especially the privileged access we have to it, is a penultimate responsibility.  We have been given much in the infrastructure, water treatment process, delivery and conveyance and reclamation processing.  It is the greatest public health discovery of the 20th century. Or as was explained to me today grossly overpriced and not worth it.

Today I actually had to explain why you could not let a toilet leak for thee years, unabated, and then ask to have all your bills for the last 3 years set back to what they would have been if you fixed the toilet.  I had engaging conversations on Linked In about pricing water, many of which ended with a final pronouncement that pricing water to account for efficiency and environmental services was an unwanted and unneeded tax.  Don't get me wrong I realize that not everyone thinks about water like me.  I am famous for saying to fellow water professionals "remember we are not real people.  Normal people don't have 3 hour dinner conversations about how per capita is a bogus metric for determining an efficient use of water for a community or the impact of micro constituents in our water sources."  Even if we aren't normal, isn't there a happy medium somewhere?  In all the noise in the world, not about water, is there some room to talk about our responsibility to protect the resource?  Is there a space to talk about preserving it for the next generation and exactly who is responsible for that?  Does it start with one person telling me they understand that they have to pay for the privilege we have been given.  That would be nice. 

Education

There is nothing quite like an existential work crisis that is precipitated by a 9 year old. This was my experience yesterday.  FYI - if you ever want to feel validated in your career do NOT turn to children for that reassurance.  We kicked off our Fall Planting Tour at a local elementary school yesterday afternoon.  This is a fun annual program we do to teach kids three primary things:

 1) Correctly selected and planted native plants require less inputs and are more suited to the environment and wildlife.  We planted Asters in their pollinator garden.
2) Water saving tips for planting and maintenance.  The kids and their parents are now armed with rain gauges and soil moisture probes.
3) The benefits of these choices and practices when we are in a drought to make plants resiliant.  Here is where the wheels came off, or I seriously questioned the career path I have been on for the last 12 + years.

I started to talk about drought and a nine year old boy immediately said, "we don't have any droughts here.  It rains."  I was a little taken aback and was getting ready to launch into my explanation of our varying climate when a classmate piped in. "We can't have droughts we had a flood a few years ago."

Okay so now you can clearly see the snowball gaining momentum down this hills.  Luckily it only crushed my self-esteem, since in those 12 years of my water career we have spent 8 in drought.    At least 4 of them in severe drought and experienced an actual water shortage.  Go me! that our citizens are so plugged in to all this!! 

It goes directly to my word: education.  These kids were 4th and 5th graders; they learned the water cycle, they studied weather, and still drought and flood can't coexist in the same region.  It is stark reminder for those of us in the industry who feel that education is some kind of feel good line item on a budget or regulatory check box to fill.  In fact education may be the only true way forward to change anything.  We have to keep engaging the public in water.  Until it is a part of their conscience we will likely struggle with funding infrastructure, nutrient loading, supply challenges, ecosystem protection, and the provision of clean water to the developing world.

Once my pride I healed, I can only thank those kids for giving me a very succinct reminder, to get out of the office, stop just crunching numbers and working on policy and get back to regularly engaging the public in the essential dialogue of water.  Maybe I will start with the guy who called to tell me he learned today that water was a limited natural resource and almost as important as oil!