Ross:
And I think too Heather, just clicked back to that slide from Toledo, Ohio because they’ve had the “Do not drink (notice)” for the entire population due to that.
They’re getting through the treatment plant. And yes that’s a different cause of the problem from a break or the Boston one but the issue is when you got “do not drink” notice out for an entire city, there’s massive disruptions and the actual cost to what that diagnosis implies.
So yes, the stories from Toledo where they have queues around the block, for people to queue them up to get water from the market or from the shop.
And people getting and you can come and you can only buy two bottles of water or whatever it was.
So instead of just getting on with life as normal people, they’re queuing for water, and then they have to go out and queue for some more.
And I understand that the National Guard was shipping in water from the neighboring counties and places like that. And on and on it goes.
When I wrote the blog post on that, the question I ask is, “What price water?” because we tend to, when it’s all working well, we tend to go, I pay too much for my water.
Try living in a place where the water gets shut off for a while and then all of the sudden you’ll realize that you pay anything you have to, to get water. And it would be far far more than your utility bill or invoice for that period.
And there are some really good studies in places like Manila, where the poor, they’re really poor, you know the people – they’re living in the rubbish dumps are paying a hundred times more for their water than the people living in houses.
They’ve got on-demand tap water and the people in the rubbish dump have to go and buy it from the water seller who’s buying it from the utility who’s carting around in 10-gallon drums.
The simple issue is you have got to have it.
So you can do those sorts of analysis, and say, well hey, if we up our budget a bit, we can all avoid some of these problems.
And therefore do something in a planned way (infrastructure asset management planning), be a part renewal or dealing with those sorts of things like that, which was the issue in Toledo.
And then, that’s actually over a ten-year period or longer. It is a far more cost-effective way than lurching from crises to crises.
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