You gotta have a Plan B.
—Eric Wilson,
manager of Galveston’s water utility
when Hurricane Ike destroyed it in September 2008
I’M STANDING IN THE DARK, at the bathroom sink in my Comfort Inn hotel room in Galveston, Texas, washing my hands. Or I hope I’m washing my hands. It’s a Monday night, September 22, about thirty minutes past sunset, and the whole room is dark. The power has been out for ten days, since Hurricane Ike shredded Galveston, and flooded it, the previous weekend.
The beachfront Comfort Inn, mostly undamaged, is renting rooms because it has a generator, but the generator routinely cuts off, sometimes for a couple minutes, sometimes for hours.
It’s my fourth day in Galveston, and I’ve spent it watching plumbers and electricians, city workers and navy sailors struggle to bring water service back to the city before its furious and impatient residents are allowed back to their homes at 6 a.m. on Wednesday. The city manager doesn’t want to delay the reopening of the city to its own inhabitants even one more hour, and he also has no intention of allowing sixty thousand residents back if the water isn’t turned on, if the toilets can’t be flushed whenever necessary.
The race to get the water restored started before Ike had even finished lashing the island—it’s been ten days of methodical but frantic effort, with just thirty-six hours to go. From the moment water service to Galveston mysteriously failed four hours before the eye passed over the island, nothing has gone as expected, and nothing has gone smoothly.
I’m in the bathroom in the dark, washing away the day’s grime. I’m holding a flashlight in my mouth, and thinking about what it means to wash your hands with water that isn’t safe to drink. Hurricane Ike has obliterated Galveston’s ability to provide water. Two of the three main water-pumping stations were crippled, as was the city’s main sewage treatment plant. A small building containing the electrical controls for the treatment plant has a sludge line on the walls four feet up, right across the fuse boxes and electrical circuit boxes, indicating that for hours the building and its vital motor and pump controls were awash inside with a mix of seawater and sewage.
Galveston’s water pipes, the ones in the ground, are mostly undamaged—except for outlying beachfront areas, beyond the protective seawall, where the water pipes have in many cases been scoured away.
Bringing all this back to life—the pumps, the sewage treatment plant, the pipes—is turning out to require more than just money or manpower or a sense of urgency. It’s requiring an exhausting level of persistence and ingenuity.
One of Galveston’s inland pumping stations is undamaged, and it is running at partial capacity using patched-in electrical generators so big they come on 18-wheelers. That means that even though the city’s water system—inbound and outbound, faucets and drains, clean and dirty—is basically a dead fish, a narrow strip along the beachfront is receiving emergency water pressure. The Comfort Inn is inside that emergency zone.
The limited water available is officially non-potable. No one knows how safe it is, or what’s in it, no one has time to treat it or test it, and the official word to the hundreds of government staff and recovery workers double-bunking in a few beachfront hotels is not to drink the water, or even brush their teeth with it. There is a “boil water” order out for those places receiving city water. The notice advises that the water should be heated to a “rapid boil” for four minutes. Straight from the tap, it is considered unsafe even for pets to drink.
This is the water I’m using to wash with, ice cold, by the light of a flashlight. One place I’ve been this Monday is a spot few humans ever get to stand: the bottom of a wastewater treatment tank normally filled with about half a million gallons of sewage, a cylindrical concrete pool ten feet deep and ninety feet across. The bottom was still clogged with the kinds of debris you’d expect, from both the sewage treatment plant and the hurricane. Most vividly, the debris pile was dotted with dozens of condoms, bright red and green.
What does it mean to soap up with dirty water? My dog routinely slurps from thoroughly ugly puddles. What does it mean to wash your hands with water that is officially unfit for a dog?
Once you start wondering, the water seems to hum quietly with peril, with invisible infectious possibility. A few hours earlier, I walked the bottom of a sewage treatment tank—but now I’m thinking, Is washing with this tap water making me cleaner or dirtier? I have been showering every morning, forcing myself beneath the icy spray, and wondering whether the water that splashed on my face, into my eyes, in my mouth was dangerous.
It isn’t often that a good-size American city has both its water system and its sewage treatment facilities completely obliterated in a single swipe—it isn’t often, that is, that you get to see what a modern American city with no routine water service feels like.
People routinely make do without electricity; we improvise around having no working refrigerator, or microwave, or traffic lights.
But without routine water service, it is hard to imagine civilization proceeding. Water is basic. It may be the most fundamental need beyond air, the one thing without which we cannot make it through a single day. And in the modern developed world, most people have no independent source of water, no simple, safe alternative that is the equivalent of a flashlight or a camp stove, a home generator or a cooler packed with ice. What’s more, in a devastated city—particularly a city devastated by water—the first thing people want to do is clean up, and even basic cleaning up requires clean water. The average American uses 99 gallons of water a day at home; that’s 750 half-liter bottles of water, the most common size in which we buy our indispensable Poland Spring and Evian. Seven hundred and fifty half-liter bottles per day, per person. In a crisis, even in a pinch, bottled water will not save us.
Like so much of modern life, safe, reliable water and sewer service is both essential and a complete mystery. We have no idea where our water comes from, we have no idea what happens to it when the dishwasher is done with it. We have no idea what effort is required to get the water to us, and no idea what’s required to get rid of it.
That ignorance doesn’t matter, until things start to go wrong.
In Galveston, Hurricane Ike literally washed away the Hooters restaurant built on pilings over the Gulf of Mexico—when dawn broke on Saturday morning, it was gone, as if it had never been there. Ike’s storm surge filled the first floor of the University of Texas Medical Branch hospital, rendering the ER and the operating rooms of one of the nation’s premier level 1 trauma centers useless for months. The city of Galveston decided civilization would not, in fact, proceed without water service.
AS HURRICANE IKE WHIRLED toward the coast of Texas in early September 2008, it had the dimensions of a monster storm with a monster’s personality.
But Hurricane Ike didn’t get much attention. September 2008 was one of the most momentous months in modern U.S. history, and unless Ike was staring you in the face, you were paying attention to something else.
September 2008 was the month that the U.S. government let Lehman Brothers fail, and it was the month in which the sub-prime mortgage crisis nearly unraveled the world’s economy. The historic, unprecedented events came day after day, one more astonishing than the previous. The arrival of a hurricane on the Gulf Coast couldn’t compete with the financial tornadoes that seemed to be flattening one institution after another. Insurance giant AIG was taken over by the federal government. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the federal government. Wachovia was rescued by Citibank, and was then re-rescued by Wells Fargo. The Bush administration proposed the first $700 billion bank bailout, and the U.S. House rejected it. Washington Mutual failed—the largest bank failure in U.S. history—and was seized by the FDIC.
And, of course, as Hurricane Ike was gathering itself into what would become a category 4 storm, Sarah Palin made her national political debut with a speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota (and it was revealed that her daughter Bristol was pregnant).1
In a quieter moment, Ike’s swath of destruction would have lodged itself in American consciousness the way Hurricane Andrew did, if not Katrina. Ike is one of the largest Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, in terms of diameter, ever. Hurricane-force winds stretched across 240 miles, the distance from Orlando to Miami. Sustained tropical storm winds—above 39 mph—spread 550 miles, making Ike a brutal giant whose winds would easily have filled the entire space from Atlanta to Detroit.2
Approaching the Texas coast the second week in September, Ike completely filled the Gulf of Mexico, and it inspired one of the most sharply worded warnings ever issued by the National Weather Service.
On Thursday, September 11, at eleven-thirty in the morning, twenty-four hours before Ike would make Galveston a difficult place to find shelter, the NWS issued an unvarnished “leave or die” hurricane warning for Galveston and the nearby coastal communities.
“Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”
That’s as blunt as a government weather warning gets.3
Approaching hurricanes do make you think about water—about driving rain and flooding, about what might happen to the inside of your home or business if a window is shattered or a door gives way, if the roof peels off or the storm surge starts pouring in over the windowsills. And people know hurricanes will bring down the electricity—they expect it. But as with so many other things involving water, ordinary people don’t even think about their water supply during a hurricane. We just expect those invisible water mains to keep working.
Eric Wilson wasn’t underestimating Ike. Wilson was then Galveston’s director of utilities—water and sewer were his main responsibilities—and like almost all of Galveston’s officials, he rode out the height of Hurricane Ike in what seems like an unlikely spot, the posh San Luis Resort, right on the beachfront, with its rooms broadside to the beach and to the storm’s wind. The San Luis, ten stories tall, is one of the safest places on Galveston Island in a storm. It is built in part on the remains of a retired U.S. military installation, Fort Crockett, and the belowground floors are elegantly appointed conference space that also happen to be a windowless concrete bunker, protected behind old gun emplacements.4
Wilson and the Galveston water staff prepared for the hurricane’s assault in ways both routine and unexpected. All utility vehicles were filled with fuel. Water service was valved off to the entire western end of Galveston Island, where homes and businesses sit right on the beach, and water mains are buried in three feet of barrier-island sand, unprotected by the city’s famous seventeen-foot-tall seawall. Beachside breaks could suck the pressure from the city’s mains during the storm. “I didn’t want to bleed to death,” Wilson says. He had a big electrical generator staged on the mainland, to provide power to run water pumps if they needed it.
And although all the city’s critical water valves had been pinned down with GPS coordinates, city workers went out before the storm and added a nondigital backup. They pounded metal street sign poles into the ground next to thirty-nine critical water valves. “We drove the poles four feet into the ground,” says Wilson. “So we wouldn’t lose the poles, or the valves.”
As Ike’s northern edge was coming ashore on Friday afternoon, Wilson drove the beachfront road for one last check before heading to the San Luis hotel. “I could barely get out there,” he says. “Water was already crossing the road. Waves were breaking on the truck.”
Hundreds of staff and recovery workers spent Friday night at the San Luis. The power failed at about 9:30 p.m., as did the water service. The eye of Ike passed directly over the resort sometime after midnight. Wilson was sharing a room with his boss, deputy city manager Brandon Wade. “We got used to the noise, and I fell asleep. I woke up to silence sometime after midnight. I remember thinking, Am I dead, or am I in the eye?”
As dawn broke Saturday morning, the winds across Galveston were still hurricane force or better, and the scenes of waterborne destruction and chaos stretched from the Interstate 45 causeway connecting the island to the mainland—with both north- and southbound lanes completely blocked by boats lying on their sides—to the far western end of the island, where whole blocks of houses were simply gone.
Wilson was impatient to get out of the hotel Saturday morning and figure out what had happened to his water system. He was surprised that the water service to the San Luis had failed. Two of the three city water-pumping stations had backup engines powered by natural gas. Those natural gas engines—they look like ungainly motors pulled from 1965 farm tractors, and they roar like the sound of a hurricane itself—should have kept the water running right through the storm.
So at 9 a.m., with Hurricane Ike’s backside still slashing across Galveston at 70 to 80 mph (just stick your hand out the car window on the interstate sometime to see what a 70 mph wind feels like), Wilson stepped out into the storm. With one of his deputies, Dennis Stark, he walked out the rear entrance of the San Luis and climbed into a City of Galveston dump truck to visit whatever water facilities they could get to.
Wilson, who has a pilot’s license, took the wheel. His first goal was to get to the city’s hundred-year-old 30th Street Pump Station. It’s a handsome red-brick building with the proportions and styling of a nineteenth-century courthouse. It also has the distinction of being the nation’s second-oldest working water pump station. It would probably be the oldest, but it had to be rebuilt after Galveston’s catastrophic 1900 hurricane. The white granite cornerstone at 30th Street is inscribed “DESTROYED Sept 8 1900. REBUILT 1904.”
Thirtieth Street Station is about three miles from the San Luis, and Wilson drove slowly. “When we were coming down 30th Street, the water was four, four and a half feet deep,” he says. Imagine the condition your own home would be in if the street out front were cresting with four and a half feet of water. “A Cadillac was floating along, and as we drove past, the wake from the dump truck sent it floating into the side of an apartment building.”
What Wilson and Stark found when they climbed the stairs to 30th Street was discouraging. Except for the sound of the wind howling outside, the cathedral-like main room was silent. No motors running. The room is dominated by two large motor pits, each the size of a backyard swimming pool, with tall putty-colored walls to protect the four motors and pumps from flooding. Each pit had three or four feet of water in the bottom. Two small motors were submerged; two large motors crowned above the surface, as if floating. The natural gas backup motors were mounted higher, and were mostly dry, but the heavy-duty truck batteries used to start them were covered with seawater.
Wilson wasn’t immediately concerned with 30th Street’s regular motors—four high-speed electric motors sitting in pools of stagnant seawater aren’t going to be turning anytime soon. Nor did he stop to wonder how thousands of gallons of storm water had gotten inside the high-walled pits, in the otherwise sturdy, dry 30th Street Station.5
Wilson scrambled staff by radio to pull batteries out of city equipment to replace the waterlogged batteries, and to change out the contaminated oil in the natural gas motor. “I just thought, We gotta get these things running again.”
That Saturday, as he and city staffers worked to get the gas engines in 30th Street Station online, Wilson didn’t know how big the city’s water problems were, what it would take to get them solved, how long even temporary patches would take. But Saturday provided a flavor.
Eric Wilson is unflappable. He was forty-three when Ike arrived, and he knows water systems from the ground up—he got his start walking from house to house, reading water meters. He has tightly cropped hair, and his expression defaults to an open-faced smile, making him seem cheerful almost all the time. Up close, you can see some crow’s-feet that speak of a low-key seriousness and a steamroller determination. Wilson has a sense of humor about the bureaucracy, a wryness that includes an appreciation for the fact that he is the bureaucracy. He’s a large man, his weight ranging between 250 and 300 pounds.
Eric Wilson’s core utility operating philosophy is, in his words, “You gotta have a Plan B.” Which is his way of saying, to himself and everyone else, We’re in a no-excuses business. Things will go wrong, and I have to have a plan for how to keep the water flowing even when they go wrong. His Plan B typically has a Plan B of its own—Wilson thinks three or four failures out beyond Murphy’s Law. On a particularly trying day, asked how it’s going, he will chuckle and say, “I’m on Plan Z.”
On Saturday, the Plan B—two backup motors, already installed, with a power supply separate from the electrical grid—was all wet before Wilson could even turn the switch. He got the new batteries installed, he got the electronic controls fixed, he got the dirty oil swapped out, and in early afternoon, they started trying to fire up the gas motors. Galveston had been completely without water for fifteen hours.
“They just wouldn’t fire,” says Wilson. “Finally I said, Let’s break a gas connection and see if we have gas. That’s when we came to the stark realization that somebody had turned off the gas supply.”
So much for Plan C.
As much drama as water creates—crashing ocean waves, towering waterfalls, great rivers, monumental dams, floods, blizzards, hurricanes— there is nothing quite so lackluster, even disappointing, as a modern water pump station. The Roman aqueduct system inspires awe, and tourism, two thousand years after its creation; no one will be visiting twentieth-century municipal pump houses in a hundred years.
The Airport Pump Station of the city of Galveston is a perfect example of the modern state of the art. It’s an austere, well-lit room, about the size of a suburban home’s garage. On one long wall, four fat pipes emerge at about head height. The pipes take an elbow-turn down, and exit into the concrete floor. The pipes are aqua. Each pipe, in its brief course through the room, has a motor and a pump built into its length.
There are flow and pressure gauges with needles that are rock steady. There are electronic controls. Because the Airport Pump Station is relatively new, the room is quiet except for the low hum of modern motors.
There is no sign of water. There is no sound of water. There is not only no drama, there doesn’t appear to be anything going on; if you wait around for fifteen minutes, you can imagine that nothing will happen in the room. Ever.
But the appearance is deceiving in at least two important ways. First, of course, this is exactly the kind of place where you do not want drama. You can stand looking at an electrical substation for hours and never see any electricity. If you do, it’s bad news.
The utilitarian, even pedestrian, nature of most water facilities isn’t great for creating public pride and appreciation, in the way the drama of the arched Roman aqueducts did.
But trying to understand a modern water system by looking at a key facility like a pump house is like trying to understand the Internet by looking at a rack of servers. You can gaze as long as you want at the servers, from any angle, but you will never get any inkling of either the workings of the Internet or its usefulness and charisma. But try tapping the Internet’s usefulness and fun without the racks of servers.
Today’s water facilities aren’t dramatic; they aren’t particularly pretty. But in the developed world, they are part of a system that is so seamlessly integrated into daily life that they have come to seem part of the landscape, almost organic. And, in fact, city water systems do substitute for natural systems—the pipes tame the river or the lake or the well, domesticate it, bring it right inside the house. The product is the same as it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. But we are completely removed from the source of the water and the work required to deliver it.
In some ways, the systems’ very reliability undermines both public awareness and public support. The pipes are in the ground. The water comes from the pipes. Just like in the pump room, nothing ever happens. What’s the problem?
In Galveston, the problem turned out to be a slow-motion catastrophe—the natural water system overwhelmed the man-made water system in a way that was both offhand and humbling. Quite simply, the tide came in, and it came in high, crested by waves. One railroad bridge connects Galveston to mainland Texas, and Galveston’s water supply comes across the same bridge, in a thirty-six-inch pipe alongside the rails. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks—rails and ties—were lifted and shoved over five or six inches toward the water main by Ike’s storm surge and the waves crashing atop it, leaving the rails wriggling across the bridge like so much overcooked pasta. The railroad bed is seventeen feet above the bay below.
If you don’t count the water main itself—which was undamaged— Galveston has four major water facilities, and water completely overwhelmed three of them; it came within just six inches of overwhelming the fourth. What was left when Ike passed was mud and silence.
Galveston’s 59th Street Pump Station is a two-story stucco building, long and narrow. Built in 1950, it has a sturdy, tropical air. The building’s most distinctive feature takes a moment to dawn on you: There is no access on the first floor. The building’s doors are all on the second floor—the door for people is accessible by a flight of metal stairs bolted to the outside wall, and there are service doors on one end, the size of barn doors, only useful if you have a tall ladder or a forklift. This design was made with water in mind. Galveston Bay is four-tenths of a mile from the stucco building, in two different directions.
Through the second-story door, you step into a long, narrow room that looks and feels like an engine room. You are on a balcony, and over the railing is a deep floor, several feet below ground level. Four big motors, with pumps attached, are lined up on the floor, surrounded by water pipes. The wall opposite the balcony is covered with electrical conduits and boxes; a set of steps leads down from the balcony into the motor pit.
What happened at 59th Street is as simple as it is astonishing: The building filled up with Ike’s storm water. Faintly visible encircling the outside is the scum line Ike left behind. A scum line is, simply, a bathtub ring. It’s the level to which the water rose, and where it lingered, leaving behind a line of dirt and debris when it started to drain away.
The scum line on the outside of Galveston’s 59th Street Pump Station is nine feet off the ground—108 inches up. A typical U.S. doorway, for comparison, is 80 inches high. Ike’s storm surge completely enveloped the little stucco pump house, and cascaded into the building from the second story, pouring in around both the people door and the service doors.
When you stand on the road and look at the pump station, it’s hard to take in. Fifty-ninth Street became a new inlet of Galveston Bay that was, however briefly, at least ten feet deep. Inside the pump house, standing on the gallery overlooking the pumps, the water would have been pouring in across the balcony, around your feet, and over the edge into the pump bay below. It would have come in from the side, around the service bay doors. No one was inside 59th Street during Ike, but the experience would have been both terrifying and surreal. During the height of Ike, almost 100,000 gallons of water may have poured into 59th Street.6
Hurricane Ike quite simply killed 59th Street Pump Station. All four motors were dead; every foot of electrical wire was fried. And the repairs would begin in the hazy window-light that didn’t reach too far into the motor pit, because the building’s own electricity was also gone.
Eric Wilson didn’t try to reach 59th Street that Saturday morning as Ike headed north. “I knew I was looking at needing a boat to get there,” he says.
Galveston’s wastewater treatment plant is completely different from the pump stations—an open expanse of grassy land, sitting right on Galveston Bay, with a dozen open-topped tanks of all shapes and sizes buried in the ground. In the tanks, a combination of aeration, gunk-eating bacteria, gravity, and a smattering of chemicals routinely turns raw incoming sewage into water clean enough to be released directly into Galveston Bay, at about 4,500 gallons a minute. Wastewater, for the record, is almost all water—at least to look at it. If you think about what leaves your own home from the drain and sewer pipes, well, most of it is soapy or dirty water. Just 1 percent of the waste arriving at Galveston’s plant is solids.
But the wastewater treatment plant—while a completely different kind of place than a pump station—was in exactly the same condition as 59th Street and 30th Street. Seven or eight feet of water had washed across the place—the waves easily topped the plant’s six-foot fence—leaving behind everything from uprooted trees to navigation lights from a boat. A mobile home used for office space was torn from its anchors and pitched on its side against the back fence. Tons of sand and mud lined the bottom of the treatment tanks. The motors, the pumps, the spidery skimmer arms, the electrical controls—all drowned. Even the happy bacteria that eat the waste had been washed away.
The best symbol of the wastewater treatment plant’s condition was the simplest: If you needed to go to the bathroom, you had to use the Porta-Potty that had been delivered. Not even at the sewage treatment plant could you use the toilet.
The missing bacteria were a reminder that a wastewater treatment plant, any wastewater treatment plant, is both uniquely human and, like the water supply system, an imperfect effort to duplicate a natural system. Squirrels and seagulls, hippos and salmon all produce copious waste, but none have resorted to creating waste treatment facilities. And even people, despite the density of our civilization, have had a lot of faith in nature’s recycling system until recently. Memphis, Tennessee, was the last major city in the United States without a wastewater treatment plant. Until 1975, three years after passage of the federal Clean Water Act, it simply piped its untreated sewage into the Mississippi River.7 But even in a sophisticated wastewater treatment plant, most of the treatment is coming from the ciliates and metazoans—from the bugs, that is, from nature.8
In fact, before the place could get going again—in addition to the pumping, the vacuuming, the stringing of fresh electrical circuits, the sheer physical labor of removing whole trees—Galveston would have to coax the bacteria back into action.
IN THE FALL OF 2007, metropolitan Atlanta came within eighty-one days of running out of water. The potential for catastrophe was staggering— Atlantans use about 500 million gallons of water a day, about 21 million gallons of water an hour. Even supplying one-tenth that amount of water on an emergency basis—just 15 gallons of water per person—would have required five thousand tanker trucks a day.9 Leave aside where you could find a fleet like that—it’s hard to imagine where you could fill them with water, since the city itself would in fact be dry.
In response to the crisis, the state banned almost all outdoor water use for Atlanta and its surrounding counties, and public officials implored residents to cut back use voluntarily. Still, cities and counties routinely overshot their conservation targets, using between 10 and 20 percent more water than they pledged.
In fact, city, state, and federal officials had no plan for what to do if Atlanta actually did run dry. They were simply betting that it wouldn’t. In the midst of the drought, Major Daren Payne, a senior official for the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages Lake Lanier, offered this reassurance: “We’re so far away from [running out], nobody’s doing a contingency plan. Quite frankly, there’s enough water left to last for months.”10
On April 29, 2008, in the comparatively tiny town of Emlenton, Pennsylvania, the nine hundred residents, all customers of the Emlenton Water Company, were issued a boil-water order by the state—they weren’t to use their tap water for any potable purpose without boiling it first. The water coming to them from the Allegheny River, which runs alongside the town, wasn’t adequately cleaned by the Emlenton Water Company—the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection found intestinal parasites that the little utility’s filtration process wasn’t removing.
The utility, then owned by Jeff and Kathy Foley, who had purchased it from a previous couple a decade earlier, never did fix the problem. The state of Pennsylvania ultimately revoked the operating license of the owner of Emlenton Water Company, and forced its sale in order to get the water from the hundred-year-old plant properly treated. The boil order lasted until January 27, 2009—273 days of boiling water for the daily needs of cooking, washing fruits and vegetables, drinking, and toothbrushing, a period long enough to conceive and give birth to a full-term child.
And in January 2010, the city of Jackson, Mississippi, went without water for an entire week after a fourteen-day freezing spell fractured the city’s water mains. The unrelenting cold spell froze the Yazoo clay on which Jackson sits, fracturing the pipes, and the pipes themselves also froze.
Except for the Northridge, California, earthquake in 1993, it may be an event unprecedented in modern U.S. water history. In the space of roughly eighty hours, Jackson suffered 154 water-main breaks. Jackson is 107 square miles, meaning there was on average more than one water-main break in every square mile of the city. Not only were the city’s 175,000 residents put under a boil-water order, many of them literally had no water.11
What did no water mean in Jackson? Well, unlike Galveston, which was evacuated before Ike, everyone was home in Jackson.
Jackson’s schools were closed for a week, as were three universities, including Jackson State. Jackson is the capital of Mississippi, and state offices were also closed for the week. Police headquarters was temporarily relocated.
“If we had ice on the ground, people would be much more understanding,” Jackson mayor Harvey Johnson said. “We have a disaster. It’s just not one you can see.”12
Almost as remarkable as the scope of the water crisis in Jackson was the fact that it received literally no attention in the media. The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, NPR—none did a story on Jackson’s crippled water system. Indeed, not one news outlet of any kind outside Mississippi did a story on the capital city of a U.S. state whose water system completely shut down for a week. (Jackson’s water crisis started Monday, January 11; the devastating Haitian earthquake happened on Tuesday.)
It’s easy to be sympathetic with what happened to Galveston’s water system during Hurricane Ike, while silently shrugging. Our cities aren’t, in fact, likely to be overwhelmed by a twelve-foot, hurricane-driven storm surge.13 But while water system disasters, or even significant water system failures, remain remarkably rare, it’s important to take a lesson from how they play out.
Atlanta’s water crisis was really a function of twenty years of refusing to consider water as a limiting factor in growth. As Atlanta’s reservoir fell by one foot per week in the midst of the drought, Roy Barnes, who had been Georgia’s governor from 1999 to 2003, told reporters, “Los Angeles added 1 million people without increasing their water supply. And if Los Angeles can do it, I’ll tell you, Georgia can.”14 Meanwhile, with crisis staring them in the face, Atlanta and Georgia officials didn’t actually have a worst-case plan. They bet Atlanta wouldn’t run out of water, and in the end, this time, it didn’t. But what if the drought across the southern United States wasn’t a one-time event, but prelude to a permanent shift in rainfall?
Over the course of nine months, the state of Pennsylvania couldn’t manage to force a tiny water utility serving just nine hundred people to clean up its act. Pennsylvania literally had to wrest the utility from its owner and hand it off to another company to get the problem corrected.
And in Jackson, the problem wasn’t a hurricane, it was a freeze—but the result was the same. The system collapsed.
Indeed, all four of these water failures—Galveston, Atlanta, Emlenton, Jackson—are the result of a man-made water system colliding with a natural system, and crumpling, or coming close. Especially in Atlanta and Emlenton, the problems were magnified by a refusal to see our relationship to water clearly, and by a refusal to pay attention to how the water supply itself is changing—in terms of climate change, and in terms of what’s in our water.
Modern municipal water systems in the developed world are an unlikely combination: They are so reliable and so apparently robust they seem to have become almost part of the natural system itself, easily taken for granted in both their complexity and their cost. And they are oddly brittle—when something overwhelming happens, the water systems have no resilience. There was nothing to do in Jackson, Mississippi, but dig up every single one of 154 water-main breaks, jump down into the water- and mud-filled holes, and fix the pipes.
In Galveston, even Brandon Wade, then the deputy city manager and Eric Wilson’s boss, was stunned by what happened to the waterworks.
In an interview nine months after the hurricane, he said, “I’ll tell you that the most horrifying thing I heard during the entire storm was, as the sun was coming up and the storm was trying to pass, someone coming to tell me that we had no water pressure in the place that we were staying.
“It was shocking to me, and to be quite honest with you, I was briefly in denial. I was wondering what it was that the hotel had done to cause them to lose water, because I just really didn’t expect that we would have lost water.”15
It turned out that natural gas, the backup energy supply everyone had relied on—the city’s newspaper, too, had a natural-gas-fired emergency generator—was the wrong choice. Along Galveston’s waterfront, the Balinese Room, a famous nightclub that once hosted Frank Sinatra, along with the Hooters restaurant, had been washed away, leaving large natural gas lines torn open. The utility had no choice but to cut off service until it could close off individual gas leaks.
Wilson managed to get a diesel generator onto the island on Sunday, which allowed him to fire up two motors and pumps at the dry Airport Pump Station. That brought water back to the San Luis Resort on Sunday night, forty-eight hours after Ike knocked it out.
Five days later—a week after Ike arrived—you could drive the cleared streets of the city, you could shop at the oceanfront Kroger (which had its own water purification system—something the level 1 trauma hospital did not); you could shop at the oceanfront Wal-Mart, which had been flooded from front to back and sanitized from front to back before reopening; you could kick back with drinks, surrounded by recovery workers, at the San Luis Resort’s pool bar, the H2O lounge.
But Galveston’s H2O system was still a wreck, and it was, in fact, the main problem preventing city officials from reopening Galveston, which had literally been closed to residents since the hurricane, with checkpoints staffed by state troopers, allowing in only recovery workers. Impatient, angry residents had begun to sneak back to their festering homes using boats.
The pressure to get the water flowing again wasn’t just intense, it was quite blunt. At an all-hands city staff meeting of about seventy-five people at the San Luis Resort on Saturday morning—one week to the hour from when Wilson headed out into the storm in his dump truck—city manager Steve LeBlanc turned to Wilson and said, “Eric, man, I need you to come through. Whatever parts you need to get those pump stations working, let’s call the president. … We’ve got to make sure that our water and wastewater work when people come back. That is the central element.
“And you’ve got that message loud and clear, Eric.”
It wasn’t a question, actually. It was a decree.
As LeBlanc moved on to talk about an emergency no-burning ordinance, Wilson slipped out of the banquet room. Although he and the city utility staff of seventy had been working twenty-one-hour days for the previous week, tangible progress was mighty thin.
Thirtieth Street’s backup motors—the natural gas ones—were running, helping supply limited water pressure to the seawall hotels and businesses.
And that was it. No sewage was being treated—whatever made it to the plant spilled through several settling tanks and out into the bay.
The eight drowned water pump motors—four at 30th Street, four at 59th Street—were all still bolted to their concrete pads, their shafts frozen in place. Thirtieth Street Station had been cleaned up; 59th Street had been pumped, but the motors still sat in a four-inch layer of pudding-like mud.
The residents would return in ninety-four hours, and Wilson would need every minute.
DESPITE THE TICKING CLOCK, despite the pressing needs of human biology, despite the list of major and minor-but-urgent things that need to get done—find motors, find connector parts, get old motors winched out, get new motors winched in, get new wiring, find electricity to make it all go, get a sewage pump truck waved through the checkpoint where an overzealous state trooper is holding it—there are few moments of high drama in the struggle to bring Galveston’s water system back to life.
In fact, the really striking thing, hour after hour, is how almost nothing works right, no effort is rewarded the first time, but everyone simply pushes ahead.
One bit of good news is that right inside 30th Street Station are a pair of beautiful, brand-new electric motors with pumps attached. They are fire-engine red, and a crew from a construction company arrives in early afternoon to pick them up and trailer them to 59th Street, where it is hoped they can be installed as is.
The motors are tucked behind a locked chain-link fence, inside a storage area, inside the building. No one has a clue who has the key to the lock. This doesn’t slow the guys from Boyer Construction down for a moment— they simply take a wrench and disassemble the hinges on the locked gate.
The gleaming motors do not come out to the loading dock easily, but after 45 minutes of sweaty, noisy, backbreaking work with crowbars, chains, and a forklift, the motors are on a trailer.
In what seems like a moment of some significance for the drowned city, the motors head off to the stucco blockhouse of 59th Street through the streets of Galveston in a slow parade of three vehicles. The Boyer Construction guys—they were on contract to Galveston when Ike struck, in the process of building a brand-new 30th Street Pump Station, just a block from the old one—back the trailer with the motors up to the side of 59th Street Station along a gravel driveway. They laid the driveway the previous day in the saturated mud around the pump station, to provide a place for heavy equipment. They used gravel from a nearby concrete company, which said they could take it, since it had been soaked in seawater and rendered useless for making concrete.
As soon as the motor-pump combos are sitting outside the building, something unfortunate becomes clear: The water pumps have extensions to allow them to connect to the water pipes they are pumping. The new pumps have flanges 34½ inches long. Fifty-ninth Street’s pumps have flanges 46½ inches long. The new pumps are one foot of steel pipe from being able to connect to the pipes they need to pump.
A few phone calls. No pipe extensions that match can be quickly found.
This is exactly what happens, right along, hour after hour, at every waterworks location. A plan of action is tackled, an unexpected problem derails it, the plan is reconfigured, and work pushes forward.
No pump extensions? No matter. A crew sets to work unbolting the red motors from the red pumps. They won’t replace the pumps—they’ll just replace the motors.
Inside 59th Street, a second crew of men wades into the mud and starts unbolting two of the drowned motors from the pumps, and from their concrete mounting pads.
It takes the rest of the day to winch the old motors out—each weighs hundreds of pounds—and winch the new motors in, using chains and manual winches. The good news: The new motors have mounting holes that match the old motors perfectly.
The next day, Sunday, back at 30th Street Station, the navy arrives, without fanfare but with an unmistakable air of determined competence. A Humvee, a flatbed truck, and a nifty self-propelled crane wheel into the yard, along with a half-dozen Seabees. While Ike was still in the Gulf of Mexico, President Bush dispatched the USS Nassau from Virginia to be on station to provide recovery help as soon as the storm passed. The Nassau is an amphibious assault ship that looks like a small aircraft carrier and carries both attack jets and helicopters. It is anchored eight miles off Galveston—you can see it on the horizon—sending heavy equipment and a hundred sailors and Seabees to the beach each day to do whatever is most urgent.
Two brand-new motors—dull turquoise—have been delivered to the loading dock at 30th Street. The mission is for James Wooten, a Seabee mechanic, to use the X-Boom self-propelled crane to get the motors into place in the motor pits inside the big motor room.
The X-Boom has the nimbleness of a crane you might find in a video game. It sits on four oversize tires, and the whole body of the crane can tilt left and right, giving it a kind of joystick maneuverability.
Wooten gingerly lifts the first motor off the loading dock. The motor is going into a motor pit that is right through the front door of 30th Street Station. So Wooten rolls the X-Boom crane, with the motor swinging from the boom, around the front, lines up with the main door, and takes it right up the stately front stairs, rolling up one stair at a time like a creature from a Bionicle movie. The X-Boom’s tires are taller than the balustrades, and Wooten uses a sure, smooth touch. He has two inches of clearance on either side.
He needs a spotter to get the motor in, and over the wall of the motor pit, without the boom taking out the top of the doorframe. The metal handrail mounted in the concrete wall around the motor pit has been cut away in anticipation.
Once the motor is hanging over the pit, a small problem is evident. The motor is two feet to the right of the mounting pad it needs to go on. But Wooten can’t jockey the boom sideways without destroying 30th Street’s stairs and main entrance. Some consultation, some radio calls. The Galveston city staff summons an A-frame—simply a big metal stand with a winch—that can support the motor. Wooten lowers it to the floor. The city crew will use the A-frame to wrestle the big motor the last two feet into its proper spot.
The navy has offered another critical service. Motors and pumps don’t connect to each other directly—they need custom-fit connector plates, which allow all kinds of motors to drive all kinds of pumps. The connector plates for the new motors are different from those for the drowned motors—and the navy has sent ashore two machinists to take measurements, helicopter back to the Nassau, cut the plates in the big ship’s machine shop, and chopper the connectors back to 30th Street.
About a dozen sailors spend the afternoon working alongside city crews to get the motors in place and hooked to the electrical supply. On the Nassau, the machinists cut the new connectors. At 59th Street, meanwhile, the Boyer staff starts stringing new electrical service—starting with an enormous electrical panel drilled into a wall—so the new red motors can be fired up.
“Things are coming together quite nicely,” says Wilson. “If we get power, we’ll be in nice shape.”
Indeed, the small motors Wooten lowered into place in 30th Street are hooked up (with the help of one of Galveston’s traffic signal electricians), their connector plates fit perfectly, and they start water spinning into the system Tuesday morning, twenty-four hours before the people return.
They help, but even with the pumps at the Airport station, Wilson needs his big motors at both 30th Street and 59th Street to provide pressure when a whole city of people starts turning on faucets.
At the wastewater treatment plant, teams of men with squeegees, rakes, shovels, and huge vacuum hoses get the layers of black sand off the bottom of the tanks at the sewage treatment plant, and with twelve hours to go, it, too, is limping back into service.
But the big motors can’t quite get going. With just ten hours to go before the residents return, two things go wrong at once at 59th Street. The generators brought in aren’t big enough to start the two motors and keep them running. And as Wilson and the folks from Boyer Construction are trying to figure out why, they discover that the red motors installed there with such hope have slightly different specifications than the old ones. The horsepower is the same, but the motors have to turn faster to generate it. They’ll need a special coupling to work at all.
Says a supervisor from Boyer, exhausted after many frustrating eighteen-hour days in a row, “These babies are definitely not plug and play.”
And back at 30th Street, where the two smaller motors are pumping water, it turns out that the navy machinists have custom-cut the connectors for the big motors incorrectly. They don’t match. A fresh set will have to be cut—but the Nassau has sailed for home port. Wilson will tap a shipyard on Galveston Island.
In the midst of the tumult, one of Wilson’s phones rings (he’s carrying three, plus a two-way radio). It’s his big boss, city manager Steve LeBlanc. “He called to tell me that the sprinklers are suddenly running on the grass at a shopping mall.” As the water system has slowly begun to come back to life, the city staff is discovering not just leaks, and sprinklers running that shouldn’t be, but that many people who lost water service have left a tap or two open in their homes, so they’d know when the water came back on.
“Before I got into the business, I would have left the tap on too,” says Wilson. He dispatches a city truck to valve off the shopping center sprinklers.
What he does not do is tell his boss that in just the last hour, several major problems have developed.
Plan W, at least. “We’ll be fine,” says Wilson. “It may be five a.m.”— just an hour before residents stream back in—“but we’ll be fine.”
IT HASN’T TAKEN US LONG to get used to indoor, hot-and-cold running water, to water service we never have to think about. In 1940, 45 percent of the U.S. population lived in homes without complete indoor plumbing, and in 1950, more than one-third of U.S. homes still lacked indoor plumbing— including ten states where a stunning 60 percent or more of the homes didn’t have it.16 In both 1960 and 1970, the United States had a startling benchmark: During the ten years when the United States made it to the Moon, more homes had televisions than had complete indoor plumbing. In 1960, 83 percent of homes had plumbing, and 87 percent had TVs. In 1970, 93 percent of homes had plumbing, and 95 percent had TVs.17
What we take for granted isn’t the water itself, of course, so much as the work, and the money, necessary to provide instant, safe water. It takes at least $29 billion a year in the United States just to keep up with the deteriorating water pipes and aging water treatment plants. The typical American family spends about $34 a month on its water utility bill—$408 a year. But the water system—the pipes, pumps, and treatment tanks— needs $260 per family, per year, in capital spending just to prevent things from corroding and aging into uselessness.18
And that doesn’t count what it costs to improve the quality of drinking water and sewage treatment as scientists wrestle with the danger of micropollutants; it doesn’t cover the cost of increasing demand for water; it doesn’t account for the costs of grappling with water scarcity, which is often hugely expensive.
It costs $200 a foot to lay replacement water pipe under a four-lane road—that’s $1 million a mile. Las Vegas is building a single new water intake pipe, just to make sure it can still draw water from the rapidly shrinking Lake Mead, that will cost $700 million. Five Australian cities are spending a total of $13 billion to build desalination plants so they can continue to provide drinking water to their residents in the face of disappearing rainfall.19
The cost of no water is hard to imagine or measure in advance, but crippling in real time. The state capital of Mississippi was brought to a standstill for a week because its water system shut down. Galveston, Texas, suffered all kinds of devastation from Hurricane Ike, but it was closed to its own citizens for eleven days. That’s how long it took Eric Wilson and the city staff, FEMA, the navy, and private contractors—all working flat out—to get the water system patched together enough to let everyone back on, with the assurance that, while their homes might have been turned into festering messes, at least they could flush their toilets.
When people rolled onto Galveston Island that Wednesday morning, the century-old water pumping station at 30th Street had two of its four pumps running, with new motors installed and connected and tweaked.
The Airport Pump Station, undamaged except for its power supply, was running full tilt off an extra-large portable generator.
The pump station at 59th Street—where new motors couldn’t quite connect to old pumps, where the generators on hand weren’t quite big enough—remained silent as Galvestonians streamed back along Broadway, just a half-mile away. But by late Wednesday night, seventeen hours after the island reopened, Wilson and the men from Boyer had managed to get 59th Street online too.
Which was a good thing, because the next morning the power failed at 30th Street.
The long-term transformation of the Galveston water system to survive the next storm—almost incredibly, Hurricane Ike was only a category 2 when it washed over Galveston—is well into the planning, if not the building. The new 30th Street Pump Station, already under construction when Ike hit, was given an extra foot of protective wall in the wake of the hurricane. The Airport Pump Station is going to get a diesel generator, elevated well above potential storm surges, with its own fuel tank. No more reliance on natural gas for emergencies.
Fifty-ninth Street—the stucco building that was turned into a water tank instead of a water pump station—is still practically held together with bubble gum and baling wire. The electrical supply is zip-tied to the balcony railings. FEMA only funds one disaster repair for a facility; Wilson wants 59th Street torn down and completely replaced.
“I want to make it what I’m referring to as bulletproof,” he says. “Built to the five-hundred-year storm elevation, and to survive 190-mile-an-hour wind.” That would mean that the finished floor would be about where the roof is now. That one new pump station would cost $21 million—$350 for each resident of Galveston.
The sewage treatment plant, too, is functioning but is a total loss. The state of Texas has told Wilson any restoration of the plant has to comply with rules that went into force just two weeks before Ike struck—the plant itself was built in 1950. So the wastewater treatment plant will have to be rebuilt one section at a time, while still treating Galveston’s dirty water— rebuilt to modern standards and to withstand another storm surge without being inundated.
And there are small things that aren’t quite so small.
Virtually every fire hydrant in Galveston was marinated in seawater, and many are rusting in place. There are 1,400 on the island, and a new one costs $2,800 to buy and install. That’s $4 million, just for fire hydrants. “We’re caught in a FEMA endless loop on that one,” says Wilson. Eighteen months after a storm that laid four to eight feet of water across the entire island—fire hydrants included—FEMA is insisting on certification from the fire department of the damage to each hydrant. Which means each one has to be inspected.
As for the water itself, Galveston gets its water from the Brazos River, on the mainland, supplied to it by a water utility called the Gulf Coast Water Authority, which cleans it and puts it in the pipe that runs across the railroad bridge to the city, where it gets a final polishing.
So the chances were that, once Wilson got water pressure back into the system thirty-six hours after Ike passed, anyone receiving that water, including both the San Luis Resort and the Comfort Inn, was getting clean water. There was a chance of contamination from leaking sewer pipes, there was a chance of contamination from the water mains themselves having been damaged somehow in the storm. And there was no way to know.
It took nine days after people got back to Galveston—the three-week anniversary of the storm—to do the testing necessary to lift the boil-water order. As to whether the water was safe before then, during the crash effort to get the water flowing again, Wilson could only say, officially, that it wasn’t.
“But I’m brushing my teeth with it.”