Water is last necessary utility we can control

To The Eagle:

T’was indeed a spectacular donnybrook at last week’s PUD meeting. Mayor Wehrfritz and Chairman Jungers are both skilled verbal swordsmen, and the other main players, Healy, Swart, Reid, Tramblie, Booth-Watts and Cruickshank were all articulate and impressive. The article in The Eagle made me sound like the prophetic leadoff speaker, but that’s off the mark. I had just sorta stumbled in to give my semi-annual catchment water/septic vs. sewer back-to-basics pitch with no idea that the OK Corral was in the offing.

Both sides had a lot of valid points, but it was all about stuff that out here in the real world continues to mystify me. Why, when we are inundated daily with millions of gallons of pure drinkable water, do we let it fall on the ground and get dirty, then spend a bunch of money cleaning it up, and then pump it through miles of pipeline to get it back to the folks it fell on in the first place? Then we run most of that potable water through our toilets and washing machines and then back through miles of pipe (in our case, a lot of it uphill) to an expensive plant to clean it back up so we can dump it in the river? Why not just catch it at home, use it as needed, water the flowers with the gray part, dump the brown part in a septic system, and spend your money on fun stuff instead of sewer and water bills?

I’ve been bangin’ this drum for a lot of years. Did my best, but obviously not enough, to persuade previous administrations to avoid building the expensive new waste treatment plant that went on line last week. Sewer bills will cross the hundred dollar mark and keep climbing, and that’s now carved in stone, along with a lot of other things. If we as a nation had followed our 1970 plan of building 100 nuclear plants across the country, electricity would now be practically free. If we had been halfway intelligent about oil and natural gas, those commodities would now be reasonably priced and the coal problem would have solved itself years ago. Those errors were made by the federal govenment under pressure from the rabid enviro crowd.

Water is the last necessary “utility” that we still have some control over at a local and personal level, but the regulatory state is creeping up on this, too. In some places they charge people for pumping their own well water, and there has been at least one case of trying to put a water meter on a rain barrel. Advice from the 16th century: “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Howard Brawn, Puget Island