Grace Ross: Preventing Building Explosions and Bursts
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™
June 28, 2011: I sat in a hearing room at the Massachusetts State House listening to gas workers and a representative of the New England Gas Workers Association testify to a growing danger of explosions across Massachusetts. They were begging the legislature to step in and force the Department of Public Utilities to address a significant and continuing under staffing trend in the gas companies and a reclassification of gas leaks which was endemic across the industry – taking gas leaks that might cause explosions and downgrading them one level.
This meant that pipes across our state have not gotten replaced as needed; even when people report ongoing gas smell, this is creating increasing numbers of evacuations and even small explosions. These leaks amount to a loss of enough gas to make a measurable impact on the income of the residents of Massachusetts paying for gas that leaks, instead of them using it.
Even more staggering, the amount of gas escaping into our atmosphere and not being used productively is greater than the amount of gas that could be saved if we weatherized and stopped the wasteful use of gas to heat our old leaky buildings. In other words, the amount of gas leaking is more damaging to the environment than the amount of gas we could save weatherizing all of our homes.
12:30pm, November 12, 2012: in Worcester a 30-inch water main broke leading to the shutdown of the entire water system in the city, impacting our businesses significantly.
Fall of 2006: I sat with an expert from Massachusetts River Ways and he explained to me about the dangerous situation of peak water in our state; there are areas of the state where we’re using water more quickly than nature replenishes it. And one of the ways in which we lose a significant amount of water is that our water pipes throughout the Commonwealth are old and leaking water, and that when water leaks, it seeks the lowest level.
So, we were losing a measurable amount of water out of our pipes costing our residents extra money in water they get charged for, but do not use because it gets seeped away into the ground. Water pipes all across our state are leaking more and more as time goes along and we are draining off more water than our river ways can sustain.
Now, we can look at this as two incidents isolated and unto themselves that our public servants are trying to address without enough resources, and these things happen.
Or, we can acknowledge that the folks who work in these areas, who address these problems day to day are recognizing that we are not putting enough workers and resources into addressing completely predictable and increasing dangers. A situation with pipes under the ground, old infrastructure that desperately needs to be replaced.
These two problems, the amount of gas leakage and the amount of water leakage that we have into the ground from old pipes are both in their own ways having a significant environmental impact; it is worsening over time, it is predictable and we can address it. This is an incredible waste of natural resources that both peak water and peak gas tell us we cannot afford to continue to waste.
In addition, they are creating increasing costs to most of the residents, if not all of the residents of our state. These are phantom resources that folks are getting charged for using, but are not in fact being used by people.
Moody’s, hardly your radical research firm, which studies the financial multiplier effect of various kinds of public investments tell us that, second only to food stamps and unemployment benefits, the best way that we can use our public dollars to rebuild our economy is through infrastructure investments.
Just today I was honored to emcee a fabulous forum talking about the need for job creation. Someone pointed out more eloquently than I can the insanity of having the human capital – the incredibly rich resources of hundreds of thousands of people out of work, when we have more jobs that need doing than we can possibly even name. Surely, in the vast unused resources of humanity that we are wasting right now by allowing so many folks to be un- and under-employed, we can meet all of those needs.
If we can’t address these damaging infrastructure problems because it’s good for the environment. And we can’t do it because it would save money for our residents. And we can’t even do it because we are endangering lives by not doing these basic infrastructure investments. And we won’t do it because our government leaders are not willing to use their foresight and their power to insist that companies and those who can afford to pay to put the resources in that we need.
Then, perhaps the small business people and others who are injured financially by having to shut off water to the second largest city in New England, or having to have our public servants injured while a massive, completely unnecessary explosion leads to huge damages in another one of the largest cities in Massachusetts, will.
These dangers were predicted to me in my presence a year and a half to almost five years ago. There is no excuse for this. We can do better. We must do better. I don’t know what the wake up call is going to have to be, but these two incidents right on top of each other could and should be that wake up call.
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