Going on five days without potable water being pumped to the house does lead one to think. Water pressure is pretty much restored but were still under a boil water advisory. I still have plenty of bottled water on hand and it is still just an inconvenience to me at least. But it certainly shows some serious issues with our infrastructure. Apparently it should be restored fully by midnight Friday and then everybody has to flush their house lines, which should give the local sewer system one heckuva workout.
This incident leads to a few observations:
First, when you have any disruption to society's typically smooth-flowing infrastructure the panic gets rather palpable - people around here the first day or two of this crisis have been clearing out all drinking water from store shelves - completely. Its now been restocked in most places and while the water issue has affected a very large area of southeastern Michigan one can only imagine if the size of the affected area was much larger how much worse it would be.
Second, people hate that the law of supply and demand becomes very visibly in effect during a crisis. A gas station in Commerce Township was selling cases of bottled water for $19 a case of 40 bottles and people were flipping out and complaining on Facebook etc about gouging. The same bottles they would have no problem buying for $1 each from a cooler they suddenly hate the idea of buying a case of bottles at .48 cents each as pre-crisis a case of the water was about 5 bucks. In places where the price stayed at 5 bucks, there were empty shelves. The higher price encouraged the gas station owner to have it in stock and those who wanted it at that price paid it. Your choice, had you not stocked up on it prior to the break was either none or $19.
Third, we don't pay nearly enough attention to infrastructure. it's simply not sexy.
Few politician wants to be seen ribbon-cutting at a refurbishment of a water processing plant. No politicians, none, no mater how they may deserve it, would like a sewer line named after them.
Maintenance gets short-shrift as maintaining power lines, sewer and water lines tend to not be noticed until they break and society then notices their lack very quickly indeed. The sorry state of the roads around here is illustrative of the failure to maintain what is already in place. Lots of the infrastructure around here is old and getting older and failure to have enough funds to maintain and improve it over time is going to lead to a much larger bill as politicians keep kicking the can down the road until it becomes too big a failure to go unnoticed. Add the endemic corruption in Wayne County and Detroit, with its sorry legacy of diverting water and sewer funding (including payments form the suburban communities around Detroit) into a slush fund for political patronage and the problem gets even worse. The longer we wait to fix the issues and defer the needed maintenance, the more expensive it gets and the higher the consequences when failure inevitably happens.
The historic lack of spending on infrastructure in this area is unconscionable even as its understandable for politicians to spend money on more shiny and visible things for their constituents and to buy their votes and feather their own nests rather than on the necessary but not necessarily seen supports for decent civilized living. The consequences of the political misalignment of priorities are fast coming to a head and this should be seen as a wake-up call rather than an unexpected and unanticipated incident to be forgotten once the pipe is fixed.
