X. Day With Layla: Part Three, Politics of The Sewage - Built It In Order To Destroy Family
X. Day With Layla: Part Three, Politics of The Sewage
”Hey, how are you? To my great surprise, I have not given up yet. I am continuing my research and my plan of the construction of the sewage. Here is what I learned this week. Waterborne diseases are the leading cause of childhood mortality both in the city and the country. The costs to the economy must be enormous. According to a professor at City University School of Economics who specializes in the environment, lost productivity from death and disease resulting from river pollution and other environmental damage is equivalent to about 4 percent of gross domestic product. I am guessing that this is an exceedingly optimistic figure. My friends and I supposedly belong to the upper class and we have access to relatively clean water, but even we get sick more often than we should. Diseases like waterborne diseases are inconceivable in 1st world countries. 4 percept of the lost productivity simply does not make sense. The percentage has to be higher than that. I wonder, ‘Media outlets love hailing the 9 percept growth rate, but what growth? Growth or its reverse? Just stepping toward the end of the civilization?’ … And, listen to this. The city’s chief minister states that the municipal government simply followed the recommendations of outside consultants who encouraged the building of expensive sewage-treatment plants but didn’t anticipate the surge in migration of rural poor to the city. She also apparently commented to a reporter that they were tired and frustrated from spending money. Two problems: First. Unforgivable incompetence and severe lack of foresight. Second. The chief minister is unable to get out of the paradigm of ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’; ‘the poor’ are totally invisible in her eyes. This is not a matter of the moral or the ethic; she is unable to observe the condition of the city scientifically and objectively. Those classified as ‘the poor’ determine the quality of water simply because they are the majority group; she cannot understand this very basic fact. … But not everything can be blamed on consultants. A perplexed web of political appointees, civil servants and crony officials has made accountability almost impossible. At least eight city, state and federal agencies oversee various aspects of the river’s cleanup, alternately competing for funds and sometimes shifting blame from one to another when public anger reaches a boiling point. Indicative of the bureaucracy. … Professor at City University School of Economics states that the problem is not insurmountable. He argues that a clean river is a public good for which people should have to pay. But the city’s citizens are not charged sufficiently for the millions of gallons of waste they flush daily. According to him, the municipal finances are in a mess because they essentially do not raise money from property taxes and user charges, the two sustainable sources of revenue. I do not necessarily agree with this expert, but I am still reading his report, since it is one of the most comprehensive reports available. … Most local politicians do not want to risk levying new taxes and upsetting voters who already face regular brownouts and water shortages. Some politicians also look favorably on lucrative infrastructure appropriations, which can result in backing from businessmen who receive the contracts. I was stunned when I learned this. I sensed that this was how politicians were approaching the problem, but I still felt dumbfounded as I read and heard what they had to say. Water is a shared resource. As simple as that. The disastrous problem of water supply and sewage cannot be solved just be setting up sewer pipes in certain areas or for bribers. The sewage can only be built for the entire city. … The fate of the river is now in the hands of the country’s Supreme Court, which took up the issue on its own in 1994 after press reports highlighting the river’s dismal condition. I chuckled when I read this report. I mean, even the blind literally know that the river is contaminated because of its fetor. Last year, the Court approved a proposal from the municipal Board of Water and Gas to build interceptor sewers that would channel the waste flowing from unconnected parts of the city to the sewage-treatment plants. Court, in particular, the Supreme Court should not get involved in politics. It should only examine the constitutionality of legislation in principle. However, since the Supreme Court justices do not have to answer to voters like elected public officials, they are the only ones who can make such a decision. I am not pleased to observe the futile constitutional democracy but I let it go. The very basic and the most imperative infrastructure need to be built first and foremost. The rest of problems can only be solved afterwards. … The price tag for the new construction: another $500 million. The board’s CEO, predicts that by 2010, just in time for the city to host a major multinational, multi-sport event set to take place along the banks of the river - the river will experience a 90 percent improvement in water quality. I know that this cannot possibly be accomplished. Simply impossible. As I study how long cities in the 1st world countries took to solve similar problems, I cannot conceive of completing the project so swiftly, by 2011. I am not a pessimist, but there are impossibles such as reversing the rotation of the earth; completing this project by 2011 is as impossible as that. Build the state of the art sewage for the city of 15 million with virtually non-existent sewage system would be arguably the most monumental civil engineering project in human history. I am determined to complete it, yet the basic construction would take up to ten years. Further enhancements and modifications can possibly take decades. In fact, London and Paris did exactly that. … The director of the Campaign to Protect the Environment states that throwing more money into a sewage-diversion infrastructure project would be a waste. She has called for rethinking the city’s pollution-control paradigm and building small-scale waste-treatment plants on a neighborhood basis, reusing the water locally, and charging higher rates for excessive wastewater. I think that this is a pessimistic view. Also the solution suggested does not solve the problem. The comprehensive solution needs to be the hybrid of this distributed sewage system and the centralized sewage system. Often, a great engineering problem cannot be solved by applying a singular solution but by combining two or more different solutions and applying the hybrid. … The country’s Prime Minister has also come down on the side of innovation. In a speech delivered on World Water Day this year, he called on the county’s scientists, technologists and engineers to redesign the flush toilet. I practically ignored this. The issue is to construct a similarly designed sewage system as those in 1st world countries. It is not about creating a miraculous avant-garde toilet or trashcan. You know, it is incredible that humans, those who supposedly possess the greatest intelligence among all species on this planet have managed to create the catastrophe of this magnitude.”
