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By John Trotti
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| John Trotti |
Earlier this week I was at a trade show organized by the National Utility Contractors Association (NUCA), looking at the equipment and materials involved in water, sewer, gas, electric, telecommunications, and construction site development...areas of interest to all of our magazines. As I roamed from booth to booth I found myself nagged by fleeting visions of threats to our basic urban infrastructures, my concerns rooted in the recognition that most of these dangers lie hidden, buried beneath our feet. Buried, yes, but safely so? I’m not at all sure.
Along with Onsite Water Treatment, we publish six other infrastructure-related publications— MSW Management, Erosion Control, Grading & Excavation Contractor, Stormwater, Distributed Energy, and Water Efficiency —for professional audiences, a situation that gives us an interesting vantage point from which to view the common denominators and barriers that exist among their subjects. You may find it a stretch to believe that such disparate areas as water handling, transportation infrastructure, waste handling, and energy resource management have much in common, but I’d like to suggest that the factors affecting them at the deepest level are strikingly similar. The areas of command and control, once in the hands of predominantly local interests, have gravitated inexorably to higher and more remote levels of centralization, a situation not well suited to the demands and changes taking place in our society.
It’s my heartfelt belief that centralization of our principal infrastructures, especially at this time and place, is contrary to the best interests of the nation. Simply put, it is unacceptable that the operation of systems crucial to public health and safety be sundered by natural or human-induced events that lie within bounds of reasonable expectations.
Public Health and Safety Standards
When I think of all the spaghetti wandering around beneath my feet—beneath where I live, beneath where I go out to eat—and when I consider its age and susceptibility to damage and then allow myself to consider the constituents that might be coursing through it at any given moment, I get nervous. Nervous? How about scared?
If we step back and take a long-range look at the challenges we’re facing—that much of our water conveyance infrastructure is antiquated, failed or failing, and perhaps no longer relevant to the purposes for which it was initially designed—we will see that it’s time to set a new course by expanding our vulnerable wastewater systems into decentralized nodes that permit treatment and possible reuse as close to the source as possible.
Hardly a week goes by that we don’t read of a major wastewater spill somewhere in the country, and while some may indeed be judged unavoidable, many could have been anticipated and perhaps even expected. This leads me to the conclusion that systems crucial to public health and safety need to be held to far higher standards than were considered reasonable even a decade ago.
If you’re a Washington Watcher, no doubt you are familiar with the term Distributed Operations (DO), which—in its present guise—emerged from the Pentagon in response to the changing nature of the conflict in Iraq, migrated over to Homeland Security because of its applicability to that mission, and has since permeated the thinking of most other departments and organizations roosting within the Beltway.
The concept of DO is neither new nor particularly startling, reflecting instead the intuitive recognition that while centralization is key to the formative stage of nearly every organization, as that organization reaches maturity, centralization tends to impede the flexibility and vitality necessary to progress. If you apply this vision to our wastewater infrastructure, you may see that in many cases today’s demands go beyond what the system designers could ever have imagined.
To meet the higher standards necessary for the protection of public health and safety, decentralization of the infrastructure is just one of many steps. Just as important is our recognition that even that makes little sense if we don’t also provide the tools, the training, and the clear authority for immediate and resolute action on the part of onsite personnel faced with routine and emergency
situations.
OW - March/April 2007 |
