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Category: Sea Level Rise

  • A Gray Tsunami

    Further adventures in water system consolidation

    I didn’t get to write to you last week, as I was at a conference and otherwise immersed in water system concerns. This, week I get to tell you all about it. Writing this newsletter keeps me honest. Mostly Water subscribers are represented in each of the groups of people—state and county staff, commissioners, neighboring water systems, and others—with whom I work and whom I write about. Just as in our island community, where most of us behave in traffic because that might be our neighbor we just flipped off, I have nowhere to hide. I think of you, my subscribers, as my accountability partners. If you’re reading and are not among them, here’s a button to become a subscriber. If you feel moved to support my work, which is otherwise unpaid, there’s a paid option.

    https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vrE79jaDfsbtBGXVxif9g?si=c525509ea6da48c6

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    This post is about community. OK, on a technical level, it’s about drinking water system problems against a backdrop of climate change, but the solutions don’t happen without community. If you didn’t catch it when it came out, you could read “You might want to move your wells” as an introduction to this piece, as well as for the why.

    Because control of a common pool resource like drinking water should remain in public hands; because running a public water system is one of the few remaining areas of life where people from different political and social backgrounds must work together for the common good; and because building trust, relationships, and community is the point.

    This month, I found myself on a stakeholder panel for a series of three workshops on the Climate Resiliency Sub Element of the Comprehensive Plan, required by the State Department of Commerce as part of the county’s comprehensive plan update. The first workshop was on sea level rise. For a primer on the sea level rise issues our island is facing, you can read An Imperfect Storm.

    In short, Island County is home to half of the most at-risk beach front properties in Puget Sound. There is no state-wide or sound-wide plan to deal with them. It’s left to the counties. King County, home to Bellevue and Seattle, has property tax revenue from Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, and Boeing that they can use to buy out these properties in the county’s Vashon Island. Island County, however, relies on property taxes from those same companies’ executives’ 6000-square-foot beach front mansions, and is hardly in a position to do the same. Those hanging on to family beach cabins in between the mansions are left both high and dry, and low and wet. Shoreline public infrastructure and natural habit seem destined to become collateral damage. Beach front property owners were conspicuous by their absence among the invited stakeholders.

    What’s needed is a community conversation about the future. As Elizabeth Rush shows in Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, solutions work better when the community is involved in crafting them. What will the beach look like in 10, 20, 50 years, and how do we get there from here? It’s not happening. People see few options other than to defend their properties with armor. Their views easily follow. If government can’t position itself as part of the solution, it’s going to be seen as part of the problem. Sea level rise comes back to bite us in the consolidation discussion further down.

    Following the sea level rise workshop, I headed out Wenatchee in central Washington for a conference on funding for infrastructure projects. As part of the consolidation effort, we’ve been working with the group from the Department of Commerce whose conference this was. It was wonderful to meet in person so many I’d only met on zoom calls or through phone or email.

    There’s talk in the water business of a gray tsunami. Usually said in the context of the wave of retirements of baby boomer generation water system operators, it’s equally true of the volunteer boards than run many of them, and increasingly of their physical infrastructure – the wells, pumps, and distribution systems.

    Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there’s a once in a generation funding bonanza right now that has the potential to address these issues and save the day. The problem is the lack of pipelines and programs to get that money to where it’s needed. The federal government has sent that money to the states, but the state agencies and counties are used to operating in an environment of scarcity, and don’t have systems in place to handle abundance. Without someone at the front line pulling on the other end, they are pushing on a rope. The pulling falls to those aging and tired board members who are being asked to build a water system for a future they may never see. Encouraging and cajoling them into action falls to a few volunteer champions, for whom it can quickly become a full-time unpaid job. Yes, that’s me over here, planting sequoias.

    “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.”

    — Wendell Berry

    I had a sobering conversation and an inspirational conversation during the week. At the breakfast table one morning were the staff of a small Eastern Washington City, both of them. He’s the public works department – everything from dog catcher to sewage treatment plant operator. She’s the city clerk. She’s paid minimum wage. She lives on the reservation, 32 miles out of town. She spends $100 a week on gas, and needs a new set of tires every year. One day a week, then, she’s working just to pay for her car. Washington Initiative 2117 would cancel the state’s Climate Commitment Act and with it part of the gas tax. I’m going to vote no on I2117, but I must do so knowing that it’s going to hurt this lady much more than it hurts me. I must also remember that it’s her tax dollars that are paying for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We have a duty to her to spend that money wisely.

    I also met the mayor of small town in Eastern Washington, one of two devastated by wildfires in 2020. These were not forest fires. The towns are in the Palouse, the rolling dryland wheat country best known to those of those of us of a certain age from this beloved Windows 95 wallpaper.

    One hot, dry, day in the summer of 2020, a spark from a combine harvester set fire to a wheat field, and gusty winds blew the flames into the town of Lind. That same wind blew a branch into a power line in Malden, resulting in a fire that destroyed 85% of the town’s buildings. Meanwhile, the relentless march eastwards of irrigated alfalfa for dairies and export is displacing dryland wheat and pulling down the water table under these towns so much that their wells are now thousands of feet deep and are pulling up warm, salty water. Despite the same age challenges that we face here, these towns are meeting with each other and with the farmers to hammer out solutions.

    Since I wrote “You might want to move your wells”, our engineer completed the consolidation study discussed there and recommended that we consolidate with our neighboring water system and relocate away from threats associated with development and sea level rise. The State Office of Drinking Water approved the report, but went further and suggested that we consider extending the consolidation to include other neighboring water systems, an idea that makes a lot of sense but is, of course, even harder to do.

    Initial casual conversations with those neighboring systems revealed a level of interest in pursuing this further. There are issues with water rights and land use that are complex enough to earn a dedicated post at some point.

    Here’s sea level rise coming back to bite us. All of our neighboring water system’s connections and almost half of ours are on the most at-risk beach in the most at-risk county in Puget Sound. Two thirds of those members are second homeowners here and only drink the water a few weekends a year. They may be reluctant to invest in a water system for the ages when the existing ones may be good enough to outlast their homes. We’re going to need a plan that works for everyone. It may not be one-size-fits-all.

    Thanks as always for reading or listening. If you’d like to support this work, a like, share, or subscription is a great way to do that.

  • “You might want to move your wells”

    Adventures in Water System Consolidation

    https://open.spotify.com/episode/2kuYOLDeCcjqxf2bGUThdt?si=ed12373eccbf4a59

    Last week, I gave a talk at the Evergreen Rural Water of Washington (ERWoW) Fall Conference in Yakima, Washington, on water system consolidation. I spent some time on the nuts and bolts, but more on the community issues that so often derail these efforts. While this post is nominally about drinking water, one of my special interests, there are broader lessons here. It’s also about the challenges of spurring community action to protect and enhance a common pool resource against a backdrop of rugged individualism and private property rights. I’ll illustrate with my own community’s journey.

    Two Liquid Streams Pouring into Water, by Paul Taylor

    Like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing

    Water system consolidation is a merger, the combining of two or more community drinking water systems into one. It’s a particularly hot topic in Washington, because we have so many water systems, about thirty-six thousand the last time I checked. In my county, population about eight-eight thousand, we have over four hundred Group A community water systems serving at least fifteen households, seven hundred and fifty Group B systems serving three to fifteen households, and about six thousand two-party or single household wells. Seventy-two percent of the county population is served by one of these groundwater systems, meaning that we have a well for every seven people on groundwater!

    The county is adding several hundred more wells each year as people move to our rural zones in search of a little house on the prairie or a cabin in the woods, each with its own well and septic system. Our zoning and water rights laws make it all too easy to do that. Consolidating water systems feels at times like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing, or, for those who can relate, like cleaning the house while there’s still a teenager at home.

    Our aquifer layers are ice-age glacial deposits, common across the northern tier of US states and in many places around the world. Our groundwater naturally contains iron, manganese, and arsenic, with latter in particular reaching levels posing a risk to health. Although we’re spared the pesticide contamination common in agricultural areas such as the Yakima Valley, chlorination. added to deal with the almost ubiquitous coliform bacteria, can react with other material in the water to generate disinfection byproducts, or DBPS. If any these contaminants are present in problematic amounts, the water must be treated to remove them, a major cost for a small system.

    Man-made contamination with nitrate and other compounds from animal waste and septic effluent, with PFAS and some other compounds from firefighting and landfills, seawater intrusion into the aquifer, and seawater inundation of low-lying facilities are all hard to treat and require relocation of the well, another major expense.

    Increasing contamination, regulation, development, and sea level rise are all making these problems more prevalent and harder to handle. The certified operators who run these systems are in short supply. Most are employed by service companies called Satellite Management Agencies (SMAs). Around the state, several of these SMAs have failed and others are on the brink. One of the two significant SMAs on the island has been bought by a parent company that is also the largest private owner of water systems here, putting a critical mass of systems in the hands of a distant corporate board, shareholders, and their banks.

    “Remunicipalization” is a term coined in France that has gone global. From Paris to Philadelphia, Bozeman to Buenos Aires, cities, counties, and even countries are remunicipalizing their sewer and water systems — buying them back from corporate ownership. Better would be not to let water systems get into private hands in the first place.

    Consolidation can reduce costs for the users and relieve pressure on the operators. It can also give water systems the scale and power to resist private ownership and keep water in public hands. If we can only get people to do it.

    “You might want to move your wells”

    In the early 1900s, a gold miner from Alaska bought a piece of land near the water on Useless Bay, Whidbey Island. He sold building lots along the sand spit, and the community of Sunlight Beach was born. Our gold miner hand dug a well on the spring line at the bottom of the upland to supply the homes. Over the years, duck hunting cabins became family cabins, then second homes, then first homes.

    Sunlight Beach 1872
    Sunlight Beach 2019

    For historical reasons, the community has two water systems. One family, let’s call them the Montagues, was putting so much water on the back forty for the horses that the Capulets down the street weren’t getting any, so they started their own water system. Juliet was really into horses and started hanging around with Romeo. Those two are still living happily ever after, but the water systems remained estranged.

    Both water systems have wells at the low end of a sloping field. In 2013, the owners of the field, descendants of the original gold miner, listed it for sale with a total of forty-eight building lots. Shortly after the sign went up, our State Office of Drinking Water engineer stopped by to inspect our facilities. He looked at the sign, looked at the wells, looked at me, and said “You might want to move your wells.”

    The original listing text, courtesy of the Wayback Machine

    What rolls downhill

    We all know what rolls downhill. The concern with development upslope from our wells was nitrate and other contaminants from septic systems making its way into our rather shallow wells. According to the State Office of Drinking Water, our first line of defence was to develop a Wellhead Protection Program. Our responsibilities as a water system included a susceptibility assessment — we were pretty susceptible — and a thing called a Wellhead Protection Area (WHPA) Delineation, essentially figuring out where our water gets into the ground and how long it takes to reach our wells. For that we’d need a hydrogeologist.

    A few weeks later, I went to a dance and met a hydrogeologist. This is Whidbey Island. Things like this happen all the time. He had one of his staff do a WHPA delineation, which showed that water — whether rain or septic effluent — falling or originating on the field would be in our wells within five years.

    A Department of Health septic system calculator showed that forty-eight septic systems would push nitrate in the drinking water up to 16 mg/l (parts per million, or ppm). The state maximum contaminant limit is 10 mg/l. The World Health Organization prefers 2 mg/l. Nitrate can cause problems in vulnerable populations, for example blue baby syndrome.

    As we’re in an area designated as a high susceptibility Critical Aquifer Recharge Area (CARA), the county would review an application to build on or subdivide the property. The county’s criteria are that the project should not increase nitrate by more than 2 mg/l or take it above 5 mg/l. However, there is no guarantee of the county’s decision.

    In 2014, our water system made an offer for the property. The offer was rejected, and the listing was removed. All was quiet until 2021, when another proposed development triggered a crisis on the water system board.

    Peace breaks out

    Contentious meetings resulted in changes on the board. I stepped down as well. Shortly afterwards, the owners of the field announced an intention to develop the property themselves.

    I had been president of Whidbey Island Water Systems Association for a number of years, and in that role, I had helped the other water system, who were members, with some planning documents, building a degree of trust with them. Sensing an opportunity, I reached out to our regional planner at the Office of Drinking Water to see if the Consolidation Feasibility Study Grant Program, which had been suspended, might be reactivated. It turned out that it would be, at a higher rate.

    Following our board changes and the increase in trust, peace broke out between the water systems. The boards agreed to apply for the grant to tackle consolidation and probable relocation together. They successfully applied for the grant and hired an engineer to carry out the study. The consolidation team had two members from each water system: a scion of the Capulets, a real ex-NASA rocket scientist, a professional mediator, and me.

    The Puget Sound flood of December 27th, 2022, hit many properties on the beach and brought salt water to within feet of our wells, strengthening support for their relocation.

    http://etitrain.com/2022/12/30/an-imperfect-storm/

    We overcame our differences to guide the engineer through evaluating each water system separately and looking at moving them out of harm’s way individually or together.

    “The risks of contamination of the groundwater wells is sufficiently credible to recommend that affirmative actions be taken to protect the water supply in the future.”

    “A prudent alternative will be to pursue construction of wells at a new location that is upslope of these potential contamination risks.”

    Engineer’s Consolidation Feasibility Study report

    The engineer’s report confirmed a need to relocate. The cost savings in consolidating were significant. The state Department of Health put a thumb on the scale on the side of consolidation by advising us that the zero down, low interest, possibly partially forgivable Drinking Water State Revolving Fund loans would not be available if the water systems decided to go it alone.

    While the report addressed all the technical and many of the financial issues, open concerns remain around governance structures and water rates for a new system. The big issue, though, is the possibility of community resistance. This is where consolidation efforts so often fail.

    It’s challenging to persuade retired people whose homes may be washed away by sea level rise and who may not even be alive in twenty years to invest in water system improvements for the next fifty. We have been conditioned to reject long-term cooperation to solve major problems, if it’s presented to us as a short-term threat to our independence. Our fixation on freedom has been weaponized against us.

    Building trust, relationships, and community is the point

    Overcoming that kind of resistance takes time in building trust, relationships, and community, as we can only move at the speed of consent. It’s tempting to feel that it’s not worth the effort. After all, we’re adding new water systems much faster than we’re consolidating. So, what’s the point? Why bother?

    Because control of a common pool resource like drinking water should remain in public hands; because running a public water system is one of the few remaining areas of life where people from different political and social backgrounds must work together for the common good; and because building trust, relationships, and community is the point. So far, it seems to be working.

    Thanks, as always, for reading or listening. To make sure you don’t miss any of these posts, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

  • An Imperfect Storm Part Two

    An Imperfect Storm Part Two – by John Lovie – Mostly Water (substack.com)

  • An Imperfect Storm

    An Imperfect Storm – by John Lovie – Mostly Water (substack.com)