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By Jim Logan
As I write this, New Orleans has become an almost incomprehensible scene of chaos, death, and despair. Even now, more than a week after Hurricane Katrina struck, it's hard to reconcile this vision of a flooded nightmare with our memories of a city where even funerals seemed to be celebrations.
But here's an odd, maybe even blasphemous thing you probably did as you watched this horror begin to unfold: You sat on your couch, staring at the televised images of miles and miles of submerged city, and all you could think was, "Man, that's a lot of fecal coliforms."
Maybe it's not something you want to share with the neighbors over dinner, but there it is.
The people who work in a particular industry can't help but view any circumstance through the prism of their own experience. When I was a kid our family would drive around town during the holidays looking at Christmas lights. But my dad, who was a plumber, had eyes only for the invisible. While my brothers and I oohed and ahed over elaborate displays, Dad would regale us with tales about finding a leak in the slab at this place, or replacing the water heater in that place. It was pure blue-collar nerdiness, but it was cool in a way I didn't understand. I get it now, of course. It was pride-a good man's delight in the pleasure of a task well done.
I thought of my old man as I gawked at the hell that used to be New Orleans. He would've wondered how you fixed a thousand miles of plumbing when the city itself needed a good, long flushing. His curious, practical mind would've tried to envision that vast grid and figure out ways to put it all back together.
As smart and positive as he was, though, I suspect even he would have been overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem in southeast Louisiana. Who wouldn't be, for that matter?
Try, for a moment, to look at New Orleans as a giant OWT challenge. Where do you start? The untold billions of gallons of standing water is a toxic soup of chemicals, pathogens, heavy metals, and more. How do you treat it before pumping it into Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi River? Is that even possible? Probably not. So what happens then? Right: an environmental disaster that will spread to a depressing chunk of the Gulf Coast. As Harold Zeliger, a Florida-based chemical toxicologist and water-quality consultant, told the Reuters news agency, "In effect, it's going to kill everything in those waters."
My first plan for this commentary was to talk about what I learned from doing the first issue of Onsite Water Treatment . I was going to wax poetic-or at least try-about our inevitable stumbles and the challenges of fairly covering a growing industry full of strong personalities and long memories.
And while all that's important (or we wouldn't be here), it can't help but pale in the face of a tragedy so immense that it tests our ability to grasp its reach. As an editor I understand the necessity to keep the magazine balanced and objective; as an American I wrestle with the persistent notion that what's happening in New Orleans hints at something troubling about the state of my country. It is, at minimum, a wake-up call for the government to get serious about the condition of our infrastructure. We all know that the country's centralized wastewater infrastructure is in poor shape; maybe now the bureaucrats and politicians will notice and actually consider innovative alternatives.
But more immediately, I'd like to think Katrina could force us to slow down and examine what we most value in our lives. Maybe in the coming holidays a few more of you will decide it's time to load up the kids and go look at the Christmas lights in your town. You probably won't even notice their eyes roll when you tell them about the septic system you installed at that house over there.
OW - November/December 2005 |
