Today the city of Kalamazoo will be turning off the water to a series of properties that includes my workplace. The general statement is that the water will be off from 9am to 4pm today, although of course, they will endeavor to not let it be off for any longer than it really has to be.
This event got me thinking about the topic of infrastructure. How much of the first world lifestyle is possible because of things none of us see or notice until they are gone. It’s a curse of ubiquity and constancy, everywhere you go there is running water, there has rarely ever been situations where running water was not available, so then, what happens when it’s gone? There are so many pieces to modern living that we all take for granted and in doing so we have become functionally dependent on these things. This is a savage dependency, without running water, electricity, fuel, and information services how can the average of us cope? That’s both fascinating and terrifying. To see how average folk would respond to the sudden loss of first-world fundamental services, to the failure of first-world infrastructure is a possibility to see how we can cope and the terror that will descend upon us when we find we cannot cope.
Politics touches on so much of our lives, and even here in terms of infrastructure it lumbers along. How much time and energy have we invested in our roads, in our electrical systems, our fuel delivery systems and our water systems? We used to before we spent all our money on wars, but now? Ever since the I-35W Bridge failed the nation turned at least one wary eye to the conditions of our infrastructure. How much of it is rotting away, needs maintenance, needs money. How can we function without it? Can we?
The government, through their primary readiness website ready.gov has resources a-plenty, but really, how many of us are ready for any of it? At work we have fire drills and tornado-readiness drills, but what about other sorts of disasters? What about infrastructure failure drills? What do we do when we have to span a day at work without some fundamental service, such as electricity, information services, fuel, or water? That’s what has captured my attention currently.
Getting back to the topic of infrastructure, if there is failure, do the systems we have have enough robust redundancy to cope with failure and can we quickly recover function from the gaping maw of failure if it should strike? It’s clear and present, when it comes to water supply that we may be running too close to just-in-time delivery for comforts sake? What about having a large container of potable water in a gravity-fed system just in case we need it? There rarely is such a thing because the system has rarely failed and we don’t feel the need for the extra design or cost. Just because something has rarely failed does not necessarily mean it is proofed against failure.
So when will the water go out? Nobody knows. Maybe at 9, but it’s still running so I doubt that. What is our plan to cope with this loss of one part of the infrastructure? We don’t have one. We don’t need one, or do we? Nobody is really clear and instead of asking, we’re just sitting around warily looking at the sinks and wondering if it will work, and if it doesn’t, where are we going to go when we need to use the bathrooms? Good questions, all.