Tomorrow night at 8 p.m. Alabama Public Television will air a documentary nearly six years in the making.Liquid Assets has its humble beginnings in an internal publication, a market analysis, done for Ultraliner, Inc., by company vice president and Jacksonville resident Grant Whittle. Whittle knew his research could have wider implications, so he requested and received permission to publish the analysis at conference in 2002.
“The trade association I served on the board of directors of said, ‘This is a big issue, people ought to be interested in it. Why don’t you shop the idea around as a television documentary?’” said Whittle, discussing the National Association of Sewer System Companies.
After six months of trying to get in touch with different television companies about the documentary, Whittle turned to the universities. He found interest in the engineering department at Penn State, where one of the professors brought the film idea to their public broadcast station, WPSU.
“It’s more than just a documentary. It’s a great hour and a half long explanation of what happens in the industry. What’s kind of even bigger is there is an educational outreach program that is going along with it. We have 13,000 copies of educational outreach tool kits,” said Whittle. “Those are being sent out nationwide by all the trade associations with the American Society of Civil Engineers being one of the primary outreach partners.”
The film takes viewers through a brief history of our nation’s sewer system – what it has taken to build the modern system as well as how dependent our lives and lifestyles have become on it. Some of the oldest systems in our nation are well over 100 years old and many are in need of partial or complete replacement.
“One of the primary messages that we hope to get across without ramming it down everybody’s throats is that we have to make sure these systems are sustainable for future generations,” said Whittle. “When we started putting these systems in 150, 200 years age we planned for the future, for the growth of society and the benefit of our children and grandchildren. Somewhere along the way we just kept adding to them and adding to them and we never planned for replacing and repairing what was put in 150 years ago. Now, as the American Water Works Association puts it, we are reaching the dawn of the replacement era.”
Whittle sees the documentary not only as education for those who are involved in the maintenance of water and sewer systems throughout the country, but also the people who use those systems. He believes it is necessary for everyone to truly look at their city or county’s water and sewer infrastructure needs and realize the need may be greater than the available funding for upgrades and repairs.
“Water and sewer rates are doubling and tripling nationwide. We haven’t been charging the true cost of sustainability of our systems,” said Whittle. “The average citizen is going to want to know why their water and sewer rates are climbing so rapidly when the level of service, if anything, seems to be going down. It doesn’t seem to be getting better and users want to know where all that money is going. Well, the fact is all those investments from 100 to 150 years ago we never replaced it to be sustainable now.”
The film looks at these problems on various scales – the issues of a large city contrasted with a smaller town and the way their problems are similar in some ways and very different in others. That is part of the message; that no matter the size of the city or the size of the system there are problems that must be addressed.
Here in Jacksonville, the city recently approved the purchase of a camera to be able to see inside the sewer systems and get a complete picture of what portions of the system need repairs and what will need replacement. With a tight fiscal year 2009 budget and no rate increases projected, there is little budgeted in the next year for improvements in the areas where problems are found.
