A Watered Down Version of Bloomington Water Issues

Water Before: Conservation

Conserving water in Bloomington seemed a little bit more real this summer when rainfall was dramatically less than expected. Even though draught was affecting most of the nation, as I drove South towards Bloomington from Chicago, the grass turned browner and the corn stalks more stunted. As you can see below, pretty much all of Indiana was in extreme drought in June of this summer. The Chicago area and Northwest Indiana were in severe droughts.

Compared to other cities, Bloomington is lucky to have Lake Monroe as our source of water. According to the Bloomington Water Conservation Plan (BWCP), peak consumption in Bloomington occurs during the summer with irrigation contributing to high water demands during period of hot and dry weather. Additionally, water demand for cooling purposes is highest during the summer. So with peak consumption in the summer, and less water to work with, Bloomington was in trouble (as were many other cities).

Source: NOAA

Roseland mentions that many communities reach for water efficiency by implementing voluntary and mandatory curtailment programs (79). Before the mandatory water use restrictions were instituted this summer, Bloomington had to focus on voluntary actions. As an intern with the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability (BCOS), I needed to help find the best ways to get people to reduce water voluntarily, and how best to get the word out. The BWCP noted that public education is necessary to encourage water uses to integrate water saving practices into their daily lives (Dziegielewski, 2003). To do this, we worked through Twitter and Facebook to get the word out! I also spent a lot of time putting together basic, intermediate, and advanced steps you can take to conserve water in your home. After some recent rains, the ban was actually lifted just last week on September 12, see the press release here.



Water During: City Of Bloomington Utilities (CBU)

CBU is attempting to rework their billing information to make it more usable for customers. This is something we did in our Human Behavior and Energy Consumption class with Professor Attari, for those of you who were in that class with me. One of our quizzes had a copy of a CBU bill and we needed to make adjustments to it so that it is more user friendly. How could we make people better understand the amount of water they were using? What kind of metric would work best? Swimming pools? Bathtubs? Kitchen Sinks? Maybe we should show graphs of our usage each month. The current bill doesn't help the average person want to conserve water, mostly because they do not understand it. I barely understand it. The BWCP recommends putting water conservation information on bills, but if I remember correctly, I pretty much always got the same tip on every bill. Not very effective.  (I don't get an individual water bill anymore because it is now included in my rent, otherwise I would be able to go into more details on what is actually on it).


Speaking of CBU and water conservation, I now get to tell the story of the WORST WATER BILL EVER! My sophomore year I was living in an apartment with 2 other girls. Fresh out of the dorms, we were paying bills for the very first time. One day, one of our toilets started to run. With no plumbing skills whatsoever and my father not being able to help over the phone, we called maintenance to come and fix it. They came and fixed it...or so they said. At the end of the month we received our water bill which totaled at about $300!!!!! We were freaking out! That’s not how much a regular water bill should be! According to CBU, a typically water bill for 2 people is $67.28 and for 4 people is $115.72. Since there were 3 of us, our bill should have been somewhere in between there. Turns out maintenance never fixed anything and our toilet was constantly running perfectly good potable water for about a month. Fortunately, the landlord agreed to pay the bill. So the overall water conservation lesson here is make sure your toilets, faucets, shower heads etc. are not leaking. It puts extra strain on the water treatment system and is mostly just a waste of energy and $300.

 

Source: CBU

Water After: Treatment

Roseland mentions that, “conventional sewage treatment systems produce an often-toxic by-product called sludge, which is difficult to dispose of, and use hazardous compounds in the treatment process, which end up in the environment” (82). The reason I bring this lovely part of water treatment up is because I was doing research for BCOS on alternative uses to bio-solids and sludge. Milwaukee was one example that really stood out to be and that is because Milwaukee has been selling their sludge as fertilizer for the past 82 years! According to their website, Milorganite (a contraction of the phrase Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen, and was created in a 1925 naming contest in National Fertilizer Magazine), “is derived from heat-dried microbes that have digested the organic material in wastewater.” The clean water is then returned to Lake Michigan. To see how they make this stuff, check out this link. Calgary’s Calgro Program described in Roseland on page 89 is also what reminded me of Milwaukee’s system.

On a completely different treatment note, most people do not get to say this or should even be proud of this, but I have ridden past Bloomington’s Blucher Poole Wastewater Treatment Plant more times than I can count. Bloomington cyclists know that the road the treatment plant sits on, Bottom Road, is pretty much the flattest stretch of road in all of Bloomington. My Little 500 team spent countless weekends running 1.5 mile sprints back to back, riding past the treatment plant every time. I actually did not know that it was called the Blucher Poole Wastewater Treatment Plant until I read the BWCP. But I do know that you do not want to be downwind of the plant when riding, it makes breathing (which is important in a 1.5 mile sprint) not always pleasant.

 
Overall, we need to work on all steps of water usage for there to be a real change. We cannot do much about the amount of rain we recieve, but we can work on how we allocate that water. We can help residents understand how their water is actually used through their water bill. If I knew how many actual gallons were being devoted to showering every month, I probably would keep that in mind that a shower can cost me $X. We can also figure out ways to make use of what is left after treatment. Hopefully Bloomington can look into other city's success stories, alter all 3 steps, and become a success story itself.