SMALL TOWN WATER

The case of water access is one of the more interesting illustrations of individual versus group.  Few of us live with individually accessed water now, whether a well or nearness to a stream.  In modern towns water is managed by a small staff that is closely governed by a state bureaucracy and sometimes affected by federal edicts or federally developed standards.

Briefly, the water is taken in from the "wild" by some kind of device (possibly a pump), treated for various conditions (contagion or toxins), held in some kind of impoundment and conveyed through pipes via gravity, sometimes created by putting the holding tank up high on stilts or up a hillside.  The pipes then run under the streets and alleys where they are accessed by other smaller pipes and possibly metered for charging.  

Normally, water is not a commodity being charged for as though it were a liquid like milk or wine, but rather the product of a cooperative enterprise created by the town.  One pays one's share of the cost of capturing and delivering the water.

But one must also pay for the cost of removing used water to a place where it can be rendered safe for releasing again.  Since it is used to receive and remove sewage -- both human excrement and other unwanted substances -- it leaves as it came, underground, and is received in a "lagoon" where we have learned how to supply and protect bacteria that will "eat" the nasty stuff.  Cleaned water is released back to the "wild."  The lagoons accumulate "sludge" that must eventually also be removed and dealt with, maybe spread on fields or burned.

Each house attached to this system must also use this system of receiving water and releasing sewage.  A third element that must be planned for is the management of air which must come into the house's webworks of pipe to release smelly gases and to prevent the pipe contents from locking up when they are full of liquid.  If air doesn't enter the pipe system to replace the void left behind when it moves on along the way to the sewer, the result will be very much like a pipe getting plugged.

The substances used to create pipes have varied over the decades from hollow logs (East Glacier still delivered water that way in the Sixties), earthenware, "orangeburg"  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2gPYxfxpIc), cast iron, and PVC (plastic) pipe.  The early kinds of pipes had life spans of sixty or seventy years and could easily be invaded by roots.  Ironically, roto-rooter people are obsessed with plugs from inside, but those who dig up pipes obsess about roots and joinings, which must be ingenious to connect various materials and always represent a point of vulnerability.  Even metal has a lifespan, though it's much longer than the basically paper orangeburg.

Undetected until modern testing, some pipes are toxic, perhaps because of lead in metal, and easily corroded when water is acid.  Flint, Michigan, poisoned its inhabitants by not realizing that the entire city-wide system had been become toxic because of a one-two punch of acid and lead.  Laws were quickly passed to mandate regular testing for this, as well as infectious presences.

People on wells are advised to test constantly and if agriculture is allowing animal waste or toxic fertilizer or herbicides to get into the well water, that must be addressed.  I watched a rancher address ground water getting into his well by simply pouring a lot of household bleach down the hole.  In my area the practice of "frakking", which means pumping treated water into an oil well to break apart the stone geology so it will release oil, can badly contaminate the water to the point of being able to set it on fire.  (Actually whatever is flammable gas carried with the water.)

There is another crucial element to water systems, which is the manager of the system.  These are not inert and self-sufficient guidance and containment systems, but dynamic and constantly changing flows of fluid that can change its environment as well as responding to it.  Therefore, towns must employ people to make sure the water towers don't run dry, that the unpredictable flow of underground water is monitored, that testing is regularly scheduled, that leaks in major pipes are addressed and so on.  When I moved here twenty years ago, it was estimated that as much water escaped into the earth under the town through leaks as actually got to the houses in the pipes.

Which raises another human element besides the plumber who serves the individual house.  What is private and the responsibility of the home owner versus what is public and must be addressed by the whole settlement or the representative managers of it?  Both cost and maintenance may be divided.  Twenty years ago, the charge was simply a fraction of the whole because there were no meters.  It was like shares in a co-op, because that's what it was.  Then meters were mandated in a world of constantly increasing quantification and control, partly because of the pressure of increasing population, even though the population of small northern Montana towns is shrinking.  

The supply of water is also shrinking through the global problems of climate change, meaning less waterpack in the mountains, and competition for uses, principally the diversion of water for irrigation, directly from the streams and lakes.  Far more sensitive methods of investigating the past have brought to us vivid examples of whole cultures stretching over the continents for hundred of miles have been emptied and ended by drought.

How much water is "enough" depends on how it is used.  In a household with teenagers who shower at least once a day or with car owners whose fondest occupation is washing the car or housekeepers who do laundry at a high rate, water use can be high.  Habits in various parts of the country adjust to these things, as well as to the cost due to metered water.  

Managing it and affording it become an issue when private companies offer to buy and manage water systems, promising better outcomes and never mentioning that it means the lives of all the people in the town will depend upon hard-to-control companies interested in their own profit.  The supposedly educated college town of Missoula, MT., sold their water system, were slow to realize what they had done, and bought it back this year (2018).