Alexandria Gazette

Let’s not water down Alexandria.
By Karen Pallansch

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Ducks paddling on Union Street. Sandbags protecting businesses. Flood waters creeping up King Street. The City of Alexandria and its residents are no strangers to the Potomac spilling over its banks after days of heavy rains or a stray tropical storm. Some take it in stride. After all, it doesn’t happen every year. Or will it?

Although greenhouse gases and rising temperatures seem to command the most attention in the current debate; climate change is fundamentally about water. If global warming continues unabated, scientists and climatologists predict a much more extreme weather pattern, including heavier rains, stronger storms and Noah-like floods in some areas, including possibly ours.

We in the clean water community are growing increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change. Here’s the problem. Extreme wet weather threatens not only our basements and backyards, but our ability to recycle the water.

Most wastewater treatment plants — including the Alexandria Sanitation Authority (ASA) — sit in low lying areas, such as by rivers. That’s not by coincidence. Gravity serves as the main force for moving wastewater from our homes and businesses to treatment plants that are located along these waterways and near our coasts.

Even today, heavy downpours in a short period of time can result in sewage overflows from treatment and collections systems that were not designed to handle large volumes of water. This comes with serious environmental, economic and health consequences. Some public health officials in the Chesapeake Bay watershed advise people to stay out of the water for 48 hours after a heavy rain for fear they may contract serious illnesses caused by the overflow and dangerous runoff from other sources that may include human and animal waste. Climate change could make an already bad situation even worse.

Another potential victim to extreme weather? Our infrastructure. Flooding can result in costs — to reconfigure and reconstruct facilities — ranging into the billions. Lack of water caused by drought can lead to higher pollutant concentrations entering our treatment facility, taxing processes and requiring more infrastructure to meet clean water requirements.

The National Association of Clean Water Agencies and the Association of the Metropolitan Water Agencies released a report which put the cost of adapting these facilities to climate change at between $448 billion and $944 billion through 2050.

A changing climate does not alter ASA’s mission. We remain committed to providing clean and safe water and ensuring the strongest protections for public health and the environment. Our economic security depends on it. However, in the midst of a changing climate, we need help ensuring we can continue to provide these vital public health and environmental services.

In this regard, we urge the Senate to pass the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733), which includes the Water System Mitigation and Adaptation Partnership program. It would establish a competitive grant program through which the nation’s water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities could compete for billions of dollars in funding to help them adapt to the potential impacts from climate change.

With the proper tools to deal with the foreseeable water-related challenges of climate change, Alexandria and other U.S. communities will be able to avert potentially serious public health and water pollution risks.

The good news is that these risks can be substantially avoided if federal climate legislation now before Congress is enacted. We urge our Senators, Mark Warner and Jim Webb, to support S. 1733.