LESSONS OF THE FLOOD: Too much water, too many agencies
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The flood on Washington Boulevard and its tragic consequences should be a wake-up call for the city and our entire region. There were many factors that contributed to the flood, but there's one that stands out and it is entirely within our control to fix: the fragmented responsibility among multiple agencies.
In this region, fragmentation of water management is especially important to understanding our flooding and sewer overflow problems. It would be hard to imagine that, if we were starting over again, we would create a system where three disconnected entities are responsible for an interconnected system located in one watershed.
The confusion among the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority and the city of Pittsburgh regarding the Aug. 19 flooding is an illustration of our larger challenge.
The 11 counties of southwestern Pennsylvania have nearly 1,000 different government entities with some role in water and sewer management. In fact, while Pennsylvania has 4 percent of the United States' population, it has 30 percent of the country's special-purpose water and sewer districts. And that doesn't include our county and municipally provided water and sewer services, regulatory agencies, watershed associations and other related organizations.
This is not a misprint: A third of all the special-purpose water and sewer service entities in the United States are in Pennsylvania! To say that we are out of step with the rest of the country (and the world) is an understatement.
We are also out of step with reality. Water issues are unavoidably multi-jurisdictional. Water flows across municipal boundaries without concern for government-created lines of responsibility; the upstream affects the downstream.
The substantial costs involved, complex technical challenges and realities of water management have compelled metropolitan areas around the country to coordinate water planning and water infrastructure investments at a regional scale (some have been doing this for years). We are out of step with how these other regions are planning for and managing water problems and, as we are unfortunately experiencing now, that not only can result in property damage but it also can cost lives.
We chaired (Cohon) and staffed (Gourley) a committee on water issues for the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics. Our major conclusion was that our fragmentation across the region had created a huge barrier to the efficient and effective management of our water resources. And, ours was just the latest study to draw this conclusion; there have been a series of local and national studies over many years that have made the same observation.
First Published August 28, 2011 12:00 am
