Buzzards DID foretell water misery for Gladewater!

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Earlier this week, did you laugh at our juvenile superstitions over buzzards roosting atop the Gladewater, Texas water tower? Did you scoff at our contention that this was an unsettling, bad sign?

Well, look at this, left-brainers, we were right! The Feb. 26, 2009 news-journal.com reports the “breaking news” that LINE BREAKS LEAVE GLADEWATER WATERLESS.

The city of Gladewater was without water most of Wednesday after two breaks to a main water line in less than 24 hours.

The broken line was about 50 years old and connected the water plant to the Gay Avenue water tower, City Manager Jay Stokes said.

Due to the original break, Gladewater students didn’t begin classes until 10 a.m. Wednesday. After the second, the schools dismissed at 1:30 p.m.

“We had bottled water available for the students to drink, but there were health concerns involving the inability to use restroom facilities, so we dismissed early,” Superintendent J.P. Richardson said.
Schools will operate on a regular schedule today if the water problem has been resolved, he said.

City residences and businesses also were without water Wednesday.

“This is not a good position to be in,” Stokes said

“If we had a fire without adequate water pressure, it could be difficult to bring it under control. It’s also just uncomfortable and difficult for people to go about their daily business if they don’t have access to water in their homes and place of employment.”

The Drainage Problem that Grew…94 feet?

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For every endeavor, there’s a “best of the best” list and if you’re with Roto Rooter, you’d aspire to this one. Each year Roto-Rooter Plumbing and Drain Service surveys 4,000 field technicians to honor (spotlight?) the year’s ”five strangest items recovered from pipes and toilets over the course of the year.”

The list for 2008 includes cats, diamonds and this record-setting, traffic-stopping 94-foot-long root extracted from a drainge pipe at the Manatee County United Way office.

In June, Roto-Rooter Contractor Bart Mathis of Sarasota, Florida was called to the United Way offices in Manatee County. The building had a clogged courtyard drain that caused the office to flood whenever there was heavy rain. Mathis cut into the underground pipe and found a giant root mass filling the entire pipe. When the root wouldn’t budge, he hooked up his 4 wheel drive truck to it and dragged it out of the pipe. Roto-Rooter had to close off four lanes of traffic because the root turned out to be 94 feet long and stretched across the nearby roadway. The monster root is one of the longest Roto-Rooter has ever extracted from a pipe.

Snitch on that Water Hog the Easy Way

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Watching your jerk-twerp neighbor thumb his nose at drought-driven water restrictions? Fuming as his sprinklers soak a perfect green lawn, under the cover of night, while washing his giant SUV on an ODD day?! And smirking at you while he does it? You’re MAD AS HELL, and you’re not going to take it any more!

If you live in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, exacting revenge is just a few clicks away. Just download the County’s ready-to-go Sworn Witness Statement for Outdoor Water Use. It easy! It’s legal! It’s notary-ready with words like “sworn to and subscribed!”
UPDATE July 2009: This document is no longer available online, but I’ve archived a pdf copy here.

Fill it out, drop it by City Hall, and now it’s your turn to smirk while you watch his lawn go as brown as yours! Feel better? Good, but don’t start your own little micro water war. Make up, act neighborly and initiate some over-the-fence chatter about xeriscaping.

©Associated Press: We Want to See that Beaver!

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It was a tweet from WaterWired that alerted us:

Following quickly along, we tiny-url’d ourselves right over the the Christian Science Monitor:

The first beaver sighting in the Detroit River in at least 75 years has been hailed by wildlife officials as a sign that efforts to clean up the waterway are paying off. The animal was spotted by a utility company motion-sensitive camera.

Neat! But no picture! I’m a visual person, I’ve just got to see that caught-on-tape, homesteading beaver! On to Google, where I find 200-some stories, and…one picture? And when I have a look, I see why. The single photo is from Associated Press, an organization that’s quickly gaining a notorious reputation for crabbiness when others reproduce their content unaccompanied by a check. So I, too, cannot show you the photo of the beaver in question.

Instead, I’ve drawn it for you! (Now you see why I write for living, despite my Art degree.) No rights reserved at all, reproduce this all you like, and please don’t feel the need to blame credit me!

Town is abuzz about water tower buzzards

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It appears as if a sequel to Hitchcock’s The Birds is shooting on location atop the Gladewater, Texas water supply! Of course, buzzards and vultures have been spooking mankind for eons; from Disney cartoons to classic literature, they frequently portend dying and death. So naturally, city leaders are worried that, “if the birds remain on the tower, their droppings will ruin the paint, which would cost about $80,000 to reapply.”

From the Friday, February 20, 2009 news-journal.com,

City Manager Jay Stokes discussed buzzards — the ones roosting on the water tower — Thursday with the City Council. Stokes said he has had numerous complaints from residents about the birds and has counted up to 80 of them on the tower at one time.

The city had a problem with the buzzards several years ago and eliminated them by applying for a permit and shooting them, Stokes said. If the birds remain on the tower, their droppings will ruin the paint, which would cost about $80,000 to reapply, he said. It’s also possible the birds could damage telecommunications equipment on the tower, Stokes added.

“I’m open to any and all suggestions from council members or others in the community about how to deal with this,” Stokes said. “The main thing to emphasize is that we don’t want to spend money on a temporary solution. We need to find something that will keep them away.

Stokes asked the council if anything was off limits as far as considering ways to deal with the problem. Councilman Scott E. Owens said Stokes should investigate all possibilities and take whatever action is necessary to eliminate the birds or get them to relocate.

“While I will try to find some sort of other solution first, we may have to be open to the option of seeking a permit to destroy the buzzards,” Stokes said. “I don’t know that there’s any way to persuade them to roost at another location.”

Anti-cultural-ignorance footnote: In many non-Western cultures, buzzards are traditionally a good omen, foretelling happy times ahead with health, luck, or wealth.

Headed to Pick Up His Stimulus Check

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I saw this hysterical pic about a year ago, but this week’s Stimu-lust media blitz brought it crashing out of my subconciousness. Water & Pork: you can’t have one without the other! 

Thanks to herzogbr on Flickr for sharing this suddenly-relevant photo.

The Good NEW Days: We’re on AllTop!

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The email last night that put me into respiratory arrest began,

Your site has been added to http://water.alltop.com/

If you’re not familiar with AllTop, it was launched last year by Guy Kawasaki; it aggregates scores of  RSS feeds on one single topic into a clean, easy page, grouped by site and displaying the 5 most current headlines for each site. Your site gets reviewed before it is included, and upon inclusion gets aggregated onto this “digital magazine rack.” This spares readers of having to fiddle with RSS feeds, while still getting fresh updates on their topic of choice.

So how did I land myself in such esteemed company? Not by myself! I definitely had some help! This is where “The Good New Days” part comes in.

Have you ever caught yourself disillusioned and thinking, whatever happened to the “good old days,” when community meant something? When neighbors helped neighbors? When both strangers and friends extended a helping hand, with no expectation of anything, without being asked, and gratitude as their only reward?

The answer is, nothing happened to it. Here in the ‘Net community, it was those very gestures that landed Thirsty in Suburbia on AllTop. Thanks, Thanks, Thanks, Dr. Michael “Aquadoc” Campana of WaterWired, The Institute for Water and Watersheds, American Water Resources Assocation (AWRA), and a host of other places where super-smart water people gather. Although we’ve never met, he was a “neighbor” who repeatedly helped me with no expectation of benefit to himself. It is people like him that make these the Good NEW Days and the ‘Net a place where community still means something. And I am so very grateful.

Now, regular readers of WaterWired know that A-Doc closes his posts with a quote. So in his honor, I impart some words of wisdom for him:

“Watch out who you’re hanging around with! Don’t you know you’re judged by the company you keep?” –Anonymous

Headline Let-Down: Aussie Metered Toilets?!

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You know the feeling, you see a tantalizing headline and bolt upright in your chair; like today, when “Doomsday Jim” (this blog’s eyes and ears “down-under”) sends a link to this:

AUSTRALIA’S TOILET TAX WILL CHARGE AUSSIES PER FLUSH

Wow! I read further on macedonia.eu:  

Householders would be charged for each flush under a radical new toilet tax designed to help beat the drought.

This is groundbreaking! Naturally, I am envisioning something like this:

Let’s read more! How shall they implement and administrate this exciting innovation?

The reform would see the abolition of the property-based charge with one based on a pay-as-you-go rate and a small fixed annual fee to cover the cost of meter readings and pipeline maintenance…As nearly all of (the homes in) mainland Australia’s cities and towns already have water meters, introduction of a volumetric charge, such as that used in the City of Bellaire, would not be difficult to implement.

Oh. Charges based on volume. Just like they do it my suburb. I’ve shared my belief over the years that the headline and lead-in should be 5% of the word count but 95% of the labor. This is yet more proof of the truth.

Unnecessary footnote: Photo is a faked-up photoshop job by the author. To my knowledge no such metered toilet exists.

Disaster Dignity: Water Emergency Week Day 5

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Have you considered that in an emergency, your bath water might “save you from great embarassment?” Kobe, Japan’s website shares real-life experiences of citizens who were victims of the devastating Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake to encourage people to start thinking about disaster contingency plans. Here, Nada Ward, age 24, writes…

On the day of the earthquake, my husband was on a business trip and there were just two of us, myself and my child. I was so terrified by the seemingly never-ending after-shocks that we went to take shelter in our next-door neighbor’s house. Because I was under such stress, I had an upset stomach and went to use the toilet. There, something happened that I had never dreamed of. I could not flush the toilet. I did not know what to do. My neighbor’s wife brought me a bucketful of water from the bathtub.

In their household, they always used to leave their bath water in the tub undrained so that they could use it for washing or in case there was a fire. I was saved from great embarrassment because of this.

The 1995 Kobe quake left nearly one million homes without water and power. Electricity was completely restored in a week but it took over two months to fully restore drinking water. So there, shower-loving Americans, take a bath instead and don’t pull that plug just yet. Especially you folks near the fault lines.

In the Future, Business Leaders will be Closely Supervised

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I rarely read or write fiction. Why bother, when the real world produces rich stories like this, my nomination for best punch line in a news story in 2009. From News 10 in Rochester, New York,

It was a school fundraiser that some parents say went to the extreme. Drinking fountains at Canandaigua Academy were turned off during a school dance and students were told they had to pay for bottled water.

About 300 students attended that dance on Saturday. It was sponsored by a school club, the Future Business Leaders of America. The district says they were selling tickets to the dance and water to raise money for club activities.

The group asked for and received permission through a building use request form to shut off the two water fountains where the dance was being held. Once they were turned off, signs were posted on them directing students to a table where the club was selling bottled water for one dollar each.

The rest of the story is here, proving we still need much education on the evils of bottled water AND ethics.