random bits
Dear Pittsburgh water authority: could you arrange for me to have more than a trickle of water by tomorrow morning when I'm going to want to take a shower? Thanks. (A water main broke in Oakland this afternoon -- about ten hours ago, so I would have thought we'd have water pressure by now. I wonder if they're having trouble finding the shut-off
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It's partly stupidity and partly entropy.
The Pittsburgh water and sewer system is about 100 years old, though there are pipes as old as 150 years. As changes were made to the system over the decades, the record drawings were stored away in a records room, where they were often hard to find and were subject to deterioration as the paper aged. Even archival paper isn't forever, and these were handled frequently. The city was slow to adopt computerization (money, always money, but also some hidebound officials), and when they finally DID begin computerizing records (which, BTW, was part of Leifr's job when he interned at the City under Johan over 10 years ago), it was too late for some that had deteriorated badly. Also, when money ran out, they not only stopped converting records to computer, but also let go of the guy who maintained the records room (and this was BEFORE the Act 47 budget crunch). So it's hit or miss as to whether they really know what's under the streets in any given location.
In the case of THIS water main break, they OUGHT to know where the valves are since a break happened there before. However, I'm betting the break was not in exactly the same place (unless the contractor did a lousy job repairing it last time, which is unlikely with Johan looking over his shoulder), but rather some place near there, possibly on one of the older pipes that did not get replaced in the previous repair. So it may have required a different set of valves to stop the flood. Also, one of the things Johan was very good at was figuring out how to reroute water supplies among reservoirs and water tanks. Your house and Oakland may be fed off the Squirrel Hill tank, but the flow CAN be rerouted so you're fed from, say, the Highland Park reservoir #1 instead. But it's a tricky process, and both Johan and Tom Bruecken (the only other man who had memorized the entire city's water system) are now gone. Tom, who was retired by then, died about a week before Johan, in a car crash.
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