Satire. This column is parody and is not a news report.
By Lyle Pennacott
LEWISTON, N.Y. — Officials in this Niagara River town are weighing a bold new approach to their sewer troubles: if the pipes can’t take any more water, the sky will simply have to stop sending it.
Under a proposal circulating in the imaginations of several fictional municipal employees, all precipitation falling on Lewiston would need a final, approved downstream capacity analysis before reaching the ground. Drizzle under 2,500 gallons a day would be exempt. Thunderstorms, nor’easters and anything the Weather Service describes as “training” would be told to wait until at least the end of February.
The idea grew out of a real problem. The town’s sewage plant, which is permitted for 2.75 million gallons a day, averaged about 2.9 million in July and 3.07 million in August after a wet summer, according to records the Town Board reviewed this month. On Monday night the board takes up a six-month moratorium on final approvals of the engineering studies larger developments need, following a similar pause Niagara County Sewer District No. 1 adopted in August.
The culprit, officials have said, is not the sewage new homes would make. It is rainwater and groundwater sneaking into pipes that were built for sewage only. That is the part this column has chosen to take personally.
The weather will need a permit
“The clouds have had a free ride for too long,” said Dale Brinkerhoff, acting deputy director of the entirely made-up Lewiston Office of Atmospheric Compliance, which operates out of a folding table near the salt barn. “A developer has to prove the pipes can handle his apartment complex. Why should a low-pressure system from Ohio get to skip that line?”
Mr. Brinkerhoff said the office has already mailed a 40-page application to the jet stream, return postage included. As of press time it had not been returned, which he attributed to “the usual federal delays.”
Under the office’s draft rules, rain could still be submitted during the moratorium. It just couldn’t receive final approval. Any puddle that formed in the meantime would “not create a vested right to remain a puddle.”
Neighbors take notice
The proposal has drawn interest across the region. Officials in the fictional Erie County Department of Snow Optimism asked whether the same paperwork could be applied to lake-effect snow, adding that they would “love to see the clouds try to fill out that form in a whiteout.”
Albany, for its part, offered to help by forming a task force. The task force will hold its first meeting after a study determines whether the room where it meets has adequate downstream capacity for the coffee.
Across the river, an imaginary spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Precipitation Harmonization said Canada would watch the experiment closely, noting that much of Lewiston’s weather arrives by way of the Great Lakes, which are shared waters. “If New York starts turning away clouds at the border, they will back up over Niagara-on-the-Lake,” the spokesperson said, “and frankly we already have the wineries to worry about.”
Developers adapt
Builders in central and northern Niagara County have begun drawing up contingency plans. One fictional developer, who asked to be identified only as “a guy with a lot of drywall in a barn,” said he is redesigning a proposed 120-unit apartment complex as 120 separate single-family homes, each connected by a very long hallway, so that every unit qualifies for the residential exemption.
Another is pitching a subdivision of houses that come with buckets. Residents would be asked to carry their share of each storm to the river by hand. The sales brochure calls this “community engagement.”
The boring fix nobody wants to film
Engineers, who are real and who were not consulted for this column because they would have ruined it, generally say the answer to too much stormwater in sanitary pipes is unglamorous. You find where the water is getting in, through cracked pipes, leaky manholes, roof drains and sump pumps tied into the wrong line, and you fix it, block by block, for years. The draft Lewiston law itself calls for exactly that kind of town-wide inflow and infiltration study during the pause.
This approach has two major drawbacks. It costs money, and it does not lend itself to a ribbon-cutting. No elected official of any party, at any level of government, in any decade of recorded history, has held a press conference in front of a freshly lined eight-inch sewer main.
Until someone does, the Office of Atmospheric Compliance says it will keep the pressure on the sky. Mr. Brinkerhoff said the office expects a reply from the jet stream “any day now,” and in the meantime has issued a stern written warning to Lake Ontario.
Lake Ontario did not respond to a request for comment. It rarely does.
This column is satire. Dale Brinkerhoff, the Lewiston Office of Atmospheric Compliance, the Erie County Department of Snow Optimism, the Ontario Ministry of Precipitation Harmonization and the developers quoted here are fictional. The sewer figures and the proposed moratorium are real; read the Buffalo Chronicle’s news report for the facts.
Featured image: illustrative photo of rain entering a storm drain, by Ellin Beltz via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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