Using Real-Life Stories to Spur Action

My recent testimonies in front of the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies have left me more determined than ever to do what I can to educate Congress and the general public about the need for increased State Revolving Fund (SRF) funding to repair and upgrade this country’s underground infrastructure. Now, it’s clear about how that should be done.

NUCA’s lobbyists have been doing an outstanding job of informing Congress about the facts and figures of infrastructure failures. Both of the committees mentioned above knew the facts and figures as well as I did. However, I have something they don’t have — a graphic picture in my mind of the horrible sequence of events that follows a failure. I knew that what I needed to do was plant that same picture in the minds of the committee members with a real-life story. Here’s the story I told the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies.

Three days prior to my testimony, I received a call from one of our Indiana cities. They had a serious sewer pipe failure and needed emergency crews to repair it. At the failure site, a lift station, I found a 20-ft deep manhole that was surcharged 18.5 ft deep with sewage. The actual break, which was in a 24-in. concrete pipe, had allowed dirt to flow to the lift station and plug up the pumps. The sewage then began overflowing the structures onto the ground. A city official told me that prior to my arrival the sewage was actually flowing over the road; that meant that a low area of about an acre around the station was covered with about 3 ft of sewage. In order to get to the manhole and the break in the line, city crews had to pump that sewage to a local ditch that passed through several neighborhoods and finally into a local creek. The only good news coming out of the incident is that we eventually replaced the entire line and put the system back into service.

With my story told, I proceeded to ask and answer three questions: Why did the line fail? Answer: The line had outlived its designed life span. The walls of the pipe, which were paper thin, had literally been eaten up by sewer gases. This is typical of much of our infrastructure, which was designed and built 60 years ago with a life span of 50 years. Why had the line not been replaced? Answer: No money! The city had identified the line in which the break occurred as one that needed replacing, but found that the City of Indianapolis had used up all the allotted SRF funds for Indiana. What about all the sewage that was spilled? Answer: You could smell the stench of raw sewage in the air and you could see it flowing down the ditch and from there into a creek and finally a river. I was never told of any basement backups, but my experience tells me that if there is 18.5 ft of sewage backed up in a manhole, there is also sewage in someone’s house.

You can, and should, tell your lawmakers at whatever level of government that there are 118,000 sewage spills a year that dump more than 950 billion gal of raw sewage into our lakes, rivers and streams. It will at least get their attention. Then tell them your own real-life story like I did. Trust me, it will make a lasting impression — one that just might just spur them to action. And, if you’ve got photos to back it up, all the better.

Regards,


     Terry Dillon