8 a.m., Sunday morning in Davis Square: Yuppies with small children in tow wander around the square looking bereft, holding our reusable mugs, looking for somewhere, anywhere, that will serve us our morning cup of over-priced beverage with wi-fi and soft jazz. The local independent, Diesel, isn’t open for another hour. Starbucks will sell you only iced chai, without ice. Dunks is just dark, no sign, no lights, no life, no coffee. We have no where to go — we are caffeine refugees.
“But,” chirps the Starbucks barista, who I know by first name, “you can go to the Cambridge stores. They are open as usual.”
You get the feeling the poor man has said this a thousand times this morning and every time he does, there’s a smallish stampede for the door and the T and the refuge of a bare-brick coffeehouse in Harvard Square. That’s where we go, at least, and stand in line for a very long time to get our drinks, our daughter’s warm milk, our ritual greasy Egg McMuffin. It’s like a benediction and all the other yuppies around us are sighing in deep contentment. We got our ‘Bucks, all is well in the world.
Why all the sturm und drang? Because one pipe broke.
I don’t know how the news is playing in non-New England parts of the world — I don’t know if anyone from outside of New England reads this blog — but the greater Boston area is under a boil-water order and has been for 48 hours. It’s likely to continue for at least two more days. This is because a pipe — a 10-foot pipe — in the aqueduct that brings water from the Quabbin Reservoir to Boston failed, catastrophically. We still had water, it was just from the back-up reservoirs and therefor untreated — hence the boil water order. Also, a water conservation order because the back ups were just not equipped to handle a modern city.
It’s a wonderful analogy, actually, about why we need to eat locally, if you’ll pardon a jaunt into badly strained similes.
First, I have to tell you that, some years ago, my husband and I wrote a fictional blog about, among other things, the collapse of modern society. We wrote it one year in the future — so entries dated Oct. 2008 were written in Oct. 2007.
My husband took the political side of the story — discussions of laws, legality, protests, real politik, and military matters. He researched cyber wars, submarines, laws, and other related topics so that we could get it as close to real as possible. Every time we thought we’d come up with some dark plot twist, we’d do some research and discover that the facts of the matter were so much worse than anything we’d thought of that we’d have to change the plot. The whole thing was much much grimmer than we’d intended. (But it’s a rollicking good read, if you’re interested.)
I took the “home front,” and started looking into things like our agriculture, our food supply lines, and related issues. And that is when I started to get really scared.
First, you need to know that, if you’re a typical American, the vast majority of your food comes from a handful of producers using a handful of crops. I won’t throw stats at you, but you can find the information pretty easily if you Google. Mostly, that food is coming from factories that are pretty far away, too.
Thanks to things like on-demand shipping, our grocery stores don’t stock a whole lot of … anything. There are no warehouses of food, no supply in the back room. If something is out and they can’t get a truck into the city, then they are OUT.
So imagine, please, that the four or five food producers are the Quabbin Reservoir, way far away. And the aqueduct is the constant stream of trucks into the city. (Imagine Boston represents the majority of Americans, buying their food at local megamarts.) And the back up reservoirs are the handful of local farms and suppliers.
One disruption — in this case a 10 foot pipe breaking but it could have been a failure in the water processing facility or at the source in the Quabbin or at a million points in between — and the whole damned city is fucked. To extend this analogy way way past any reason, let’s imagine what could possibly disrupt America’s food supply:
- Gas prices skyrocketing (because of, maybe, a giant ass oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that might, possibly, block traffic to Chemical City, Texas?) could put a serious kink in the pipeline
- A case of a particularly vicious black stem rust could wipe out, oooh, all of the wheat in America.
- A major economic collapse (had any of those lately?) could monkey with one of the four companies, which could cut our food supply in 1/4.
- An earthquake in California (which is entirely unlikely, right?) could wipe out so much of our produce that it would make your head spin.
- As it turns out, a volcano could mess with air travel, which wouldn’t muck with America’s food but apparently left much of northern Europe without fresh vegetables….
- A cyber attack could mess up our communications systems and no one would no where anything was going.
- The coming phosphorus shortage (or peak oil) could create a choke point in the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and whatnot that create the outrageous yields we’ve gotten used to.
I could go on and on and on. But the point I’m trying to make is that our infrastructure is old, wobbly, and very vulnerable to any minor disruption, whether we’re talking about water supply or food supply. We lack resiliency — that’s a big buzzword in national security right now.
And all of these disruptions are entirely predictable! If all your water comes through one flipping pipe, it’s not hard to imagine that that pipe might fail. So maybe we should have a back up plan? Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
What we really need to do is to start decentralizing — get our water from lots of places, get our food from lots of places. And those places should be nearby.
Because I’ve been a foodie for yonks, everyone assumes I got into the locavore movement for culinary reasons. And certainly that was part of it. But another, just as compelling reason, is because I see how fragile our world is and I need to fix it. One way to fix it is to encourage sustainable food (and water!) from a wide variety of sources, most of them nearby.
Wow, that was a long rant. So sorry.
akitchenwitch
alwaysbecooking
hearthwife
pekmez
So, I agree with you. But also, you had a very different experience of the boil order than I did.
First, it looked to me like they did have a backup plan. They immediately started taking water from several emergency supplies, kept the water pressure up at all times, and in fact kept us at all times supplied with water we could use for washing. Cooking was fine too, as long as you boiled the water for a minute. This situation was vastly better than the everyday experience of much of the world.
They asked us not to water our lawns, and to generally not use a lot of water when we didn’t need to. This is always a good plan, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable request as they’re fixing a break.
They fixed the break so fast that in our house we didn’t even need to boil water for drinking, we were still running running through our normal supply of filtered tap water that we’d filtered before the break happened. Admittedly, that was luck, as it was only the connection that failed, not the pipe itself.
In fact, it really only inconvenienced me in a few ways. My kids’ hair is pretty dirty, because I didn’t think washing them safely was worth the bother when it seemed like it’d be fixed soon. My kitchen has a lot of semi-dirty dishes, because again, it seemed too much bother to rinse them in bleach-water when I’d be able to run the dishwasher again soon. And when I tried to go to the grocery store yesterday, I had trouble getting to the parking lot because there was a long line of cars waiting for free bottled water that the city was giving out. On the other hand, no one was in the grocery store for some reason, so that was convenient.
So while I agree with you, your analogy doesn’t do much to convince me of coming disaster.
I know there are some terrible things that could happen, but they don’t have much reality for me. But I’ll keep trying to grow tomatoes, and maybe that’ll help me survive. 
I have to agree with the above commenter. The pipe break demonstrated how upset and panicky our communities can get over a distinctly first world problem. We had plenty of water, and boiling it made it perfectly safe to drink and use for whatever needs we might have (though it seemed most people either didn’t trust that advice or would rather purchase or wait in long lines for bottled water than boil what they could get from the tap.) Potable water is hard to get in many countries, so I think the reactions show just how much we take our safe, virtually unlimited water supply for granted. I do feel for the businesses that suffered from the boil water order, but the MWA did a really good job of adressing the situation expeditiously and having a backup plan that allowed us to have water that we could use, with some extra effort, and even keep showering in.
That said, I agree that massive disruption in the supply of food to stores would be a big problem, most likely a much bigger one than this water issue. The way that much of our food travels to us through distribution hubs is highly problematic.
Actually, you MAKE my point, quite nicely. Because you had a house full of water — you were prepared with a well stocked pantry, in my analogy — you weren’t too adversely affected by the situation.
MOST people don’t have well stocked pantries. Hell, I know people who had to move the files out of their oven to turn on their stoves to boil the water and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine people who had to go out and buy a pot to boil the water in. Those are both pretty sad on either side of my analogy.
And yes, as I said, the analogy was pretty stretched. Boston did have a back up plan — and the news reports coming out today indicate that we didn’t even need to actually boil our water. So that’s good — they had a plan. (Even if it was a little half-assed.) But the fact remains that our food supply doesn’t. Which was my somewhat tortured point.
Wait, they had to WHAT?! Seriously?