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Chapter 68
"What's on your mind, Chief?" Musgrave asked Kutzley.
"Well, I hope I'm not taking you away from anything," Don asked. "With this rain, I know you've got concerns about the plant."
"It'll hold for a while," Jack replied. "The rain's supposed to let up this afternoon, and it's been dry, so we may not overflow."
"Well, good," Don said. "This probably won't take long." He leaned back in his chair, and put his hands behind his head. "I've been thinking about this whole snake and sewer thing since we met with that Sanford girl last week."
"It does seem like too good an answer, just to come out of the bathtub drain, so to speak," Jack agreed.
"That's it in a nutshell," Kutzley said. "I know that Blackbarn and the Fish and Wildlife Service can tie the EPA up for a while, but there's a great big loophole there, and sooner or later someone's bound to see it. I know it didn't take me long."
Musgrave shook his head. "You got me on that one, chief."
"Damn, it's so simple. What if the EPA comes along and says, `OK, you got snakes, so what? We're still going to fine you if the plant overloads.'"
"You mean, we don't care where it comes from, all we're concerned is the output. How you solve it is your problem?"
Kutzley nodded. "That's it, exactly. They can say, don't harm the snake, don't overflow the plant, you solve it or we'll fine you. How the hell do we solve it?"
The waste water treatment plant manager cradled his chin in his hand. "That's a tough one, for an off the top of the head answer."
"Well, we gotta be thinking about it.
Musgrave shrugged. "Well, we can work on the system a little, maybe cut inflow by ten or twenty percent. Do it quietly, and maybe nobody will notice. That won't solve the problem, but it will help."
"It might, and it might not. Assume that we're going to have to file an environmental impact statement every time we do anything to the system."
"Could it get that bad?"
"Yes, it could. That Sanford girl was all sweetness and light last week, but for the moment, she's on our side. I can tell you this much about the Defenders of Gaea. They're going to be on our side just as long as their interests and ours coincide. Their interest is the
snake, and they have a real talent at making a pain in the ass of themselves. I asked around."
"She seemed real helpful."
"She did, indeed. She gave us a straw to grasp at. But, you ever hear of the snail darter?"
"That was ten years ago," Musgrave said, "But Carter really looked like an idiot on that."
"Wasn't real difficult for him," Don said. "I can give lectures on that subject, but that's beside the point. Assume we can't touch the system. How do we keep the plant in compliance?"
"Well, just talking, the easiest answer is to build a bigger plant," Musgrave said. "Of course, there's a whole list of drawbacks to that."
"Yeah, the money."
"It wouldn't be cheap," Musgrave said. At today's market, we've got maybe a five or six million dollar plant right there. We'd have to triple the flow capacity, but it's not like we'd need three of what we've got; there's some things that we wouldn't have to duplicate,
but at a guess, you're still looking at eight to ten million."
"After the way people went up over a five million dollar system, I don't want to think about what would happen if we told them the alternative was a ten million dollar plant."
"The money isn't the only problem," the plant manager went on. "You get a problem with keeping the process going with that big a fluctuation in flow. It's all a biological process after all, and it changes at biological rates. You take that big a plant, and you run it at a low
rate, and all of a sudden you get a big slug of water, and you're out of compliance, even if you've got the theoretical capacity. That's really a more serious problem than the money."
"That doesn't solve anything."
"Yeah, in that respect, we're better off with our current plant," Musgrave said. "The problem is controlling the inflow. I played around with an idea on that, one time. I didn't get very far with it, because there are a lot of problems. None of them are impossible, at
least technically, but it might be a solution."
"What?"
"A retention pond. When the flow gets so big we can't handle it, we pump it off to the pond. When the inflow dies out, we take the pond back down and process it. Build the pond big enough, and we stay in compliance, unless we get to where we need an ark."
"Sounds easy enough," Kutzley said, brightening.
"It sounds easy enough," Musgrave agreed. "But, when you start looking at it, there are a lot of problems."
"Name a few."
"Well, first off, you need a big pond. The maximum overflow we get is around twenty million gallons a day. The pipes just can't pass any more than that, with the fall they've got. So, worst case, let's say we have to stand off a five-day flow of that size. That means,
the retention pond capacity has to be around a hundred million gallons. You got a piece of scratch paper?"
Kutzley handed the plant manager a sheet of paper. Musgrave started running some figures. "All right," he said after a moment. "Cover an acre of water a foot deep, that's around 325,000 gallons. For easier figuring, let's make that 330,000 gallons. That means you
need three acres for a million gallons, or three hundred for a hundred million. You wouldn't want to mess around with a pond that big and that shallow, since the rainfall into it would be a very significant part of the total. So, make it ten feet deep when full, and that's thirty acres."
"That's not so bad," Kutzley said. "Thirty acres is not a real big pond."
"It's not a regular pond," Musgrave said. "We just can't go out and throw up a ten-foot birm around thirty acres and call it good enough. Remember, this is raw sewage we're talking about. Pretty dilute, probably, but still raw sewage, so we have to protect the ground
water. Most places if someone did something like that, they'd line it with clay, but we don't have enough clay around here to matter, so we'd probably have to pave it with asphalt or concrete."
"Ouch."
"Yeah, and that's just the beginning. We wouldn't want to have it very close to town, since this thing is going to get rather smelly at times. Let's face it, it's not going to be a tourist attraction for scenic Spearfish Lake. So, we've got to build it three or four miles out of
town, with a pretty good pipe connecting it. We can't build it in a wetland, for a number of reasons, including seepage and wetland protection, so it'll have to be high. That means a hell of a pump, one that can pump up maybe fifteen or twenty feet, at twenty million gallons per
day. Then . . . hey, there's a thought I never considered."
"What's that?"
"There's a power company in Michigan that does something like that. Pumps water uphill when they've got an excess of generating capacity, and then when capacity gets tight, they let it run downhill again, generating electricity, like a big battery. I bet we could sell at
least a part of the power we buy back to the power company, or use it to run the plant. That could make a real savings."
"Maybe you're on to something," Kutzley said.
"Oh, there's still a lot of problems. It ain't gonna be cheap, and the DNR would have to approve, and if it ever did get full, it would take a long time to draw back down and process. Like I said, it's technically feasible, but there's a lot of problems."
"I'd like to see a little bit better look at it," Kutzley said. "I just got a feeling we're going to need a back-up position. I know you're no engineer, but I want you to sit down and firm those numbers up a little. Doesn't have to be real good, but good enough to see if maybe
there might be something there. Can you do that?"
"Sure. If all you're looking for is ball yard stuff, I can probably have something for you in a week or so."
"Good," Don said. "Take your time, but don't let anyone know what you're working on. There's no point in letting anyone know what we're thinking about, and making a stink without knowing the whole story. And, if the EPA doesn't find out we're thinking about it, so
much the better."
