Who Are You Gonna Call?

Repost from Somebody Should Do Something

No, not when you see pink slime coming out of your bath tub faucet. When shit backs up in your basement. Probably a plumber, who will tell you it’s $500 just to come out and have a look (since this will probably happen around 2:37 AM, on a Saturday night/morning). And, a few days later, once the shock of the damage wears off a little bit and anger starts settings in, you’ll probably get on the phone with your local water and sanitation district.

What does any of this have to do with the recent zoning changes that Lakewood shoved down our collective throats?

Lets talk about safety factors. A safety factor is adjustment factor applied to, say, how much weight a bridge can carry, fully loaded, with room for adverse conditions.

Say, a bridge is to carry 50 tons, max. With a safety factor of 3, one is to design and build a bridge that can, for at least limited time, carry/support 150 tons. Why? Well, most days, when traffic is flowing, rarely will you hit the max. But, say one day some moron decides to do burn-outs on one end of the bridge, crashes out, and now there 3 cars on fire at one end, while, it being the rush hour and such, the traffic is piling up from the other end. Suddenly, there are a lot more cars stuck on the bridge than is the case 90+ % of the time. The load is growing.

Plus, a local rock quarry is on that end and a particularly big order was to be delivered day, so now there are, say, 5 fully loaded semis sitting in the middle of the bridge. Those 5 semis are an analogy for the extra shit that was to be released from a hypothetical development over the hill, for those paying attention.

And it being Colorado, the wind is unusually active that day. So, the total mass on the bridge is now 120 tons, but with the environmental factors in play, it is actually exerting 140 tons of effective mass on the bridge structure (with additional side-way loads that are not typical). No worries though. We got some time to clear stuff out, since we did not hire the lowest bid contractor and used the highest quality materials and built the bridge to those safety factor specs. Right?

What does that have to do with poop flowing through the sewer pipes? I live in Ward 4, so Green Mountain Water and Sanitation District (GMWSD) is the one I would be calling when that poop flows the wrong way.

Read up on what does depth-of-flow mean. In plain terms, it is the ratio of how much fluid is moving through a pipe, relative to the pipe’s cross-sectional area (specifically, the inner diameter). A sewer pipe with the depth of flow of 1 is not a good thing. You want it to be below that. With a bit of room for those “quarry semis” happening here and there. The poop from our/your house is more like one of those cars on the bridge. While the depth-of-flow is not a safety factor, per se, it is a one-stop parameter that can be dictated in order to achieve some safety headroom when running a sewer system.

A mature water and sewer system has sort of a balance in order to server the existing users (you) in a safe and cost-effective manner. Any significant additional loading will result in stressing the system capacity past the safety margins AND may require infrastructure upgrades costing millions. Guess who will be paying for those?

An additional exacerbating factor is the age of GMWSD’s infrastructure. So, not only do you have to account for the load on the system as if the pipe were brand-new, but you have to take in to an account the age of the pipes, materials they were built out of and other factors which drastically affect the water and sanitation systems with age. Again, additional “cars and trucks on the bridge” are more likely to fatigue the bridge to the point of failure if that bridge is, say, 30+ years old. In case of GMWSD, some of the pipes are much older than that. Which is fine, to serve the existing loads, but not drastically increased new ones. Again, who will pay for expanding the system to handle the abrupt increase in the load on to that system?

Lakewood city council (along with the planning department) recently shoved the new zoning down our collective throats. Without any consideration for who will actually pay for the abrupt and significant increase in the potential load on the aging infrastructure (not only GMWSD’s, but other sanitation districts within the city’s limits). Without any consideration for the future potential non-trivial increase in the fees you will pay as the need to shore up the infrastructure will hit all of a sudden.

Not because that infrastructure has not being maintained and kept up. GMWSD has done a stellar job of serving its current constituents while doing its best to keep the costs reasonable, but because the City’s Corporate Fascists will bend over backwards to ensure that their biggest campaign contributors make profit that you will have to subsidize.

Not only should you now be worried about the normal amount of cars on that bridge, plus those semis from the quarry – but now the number of cars and trucks might have been multiplied by a factor of 3 (or more). Still feel alright (and safe) about driving over that bridge, while paying tolls that will, likely, triple (and keep increasing from there) in just a few years?

And if you don’t think that those fees will go up, ask Broomfield residents how the unbridled development has been working out for their infrastructure

Feel free to ask the city council (and the city manager, and the planning department) who will pay for the needed upgrades to the water and sanitation networks all over the city. They are the experts on how to be fiscally responsible, after all. That is, if one considers a city short a few tens of millions of dollars each recent year running, fiscally responsible. And start setting aside thousands of dollar for any potential plumbing repairs and the potential damage due to that poop flowing the wrong way. Gives a whole new meaning to a “rainy day” fund.