Sediment-like materials spur emergency

The only thing muddier than the water is the prose

When I declared a local emergency when a hurricane was threatening to come across the hill 22 years ago, the city manager had made it reasonably clear that a local emergency didn’t mean that much. Mostly buying up bottled water, he said, although he also went on to list a couple of other things the city could do during an emergency. I polled the other City Council members to be on the safe side, but probably stopped calling when I had two others agreeing. I don’t remember specifically, but that’s usually what I did. You couldn’t get unanimity from that group on crunchy versus smooth.

Later, when the taxi company, the official one in those pre-Uber days, called to ask if they could close. I gave the vice mayor a quick call, and he agreed that would be a good idea. But then he laughed and said, “But it’ll be you doing it, Joe.”

Later I was reminded that during a declared emergency, the mayor was the only spokesman for the city. It became relevant in the wee hours when a bunch of students launched a canoe into the torrent Blacks Run had become, and naturally one of them died. I stopped on the way to the site and bought ten large coffees, and the manager of the all-night Hardee’s decided as I was reaching for my wallet that they should be free for the people on-site. I don’t remember if we called them first responders yet. Emergency personnel, maybe. It took a couple of minutes to void the ticket for the coffee and ring it up on the gratis button, but the coffee was still hot when I got to the site. I miss all-night Hardee’s.

As one of their many cheap shots at me, similar to kicking Deb off Planning Commission for marrying me, my council colleagues changed the rules after that to say that only the full council could declare an emergency, and not just the mayor. So the full council will meet today at noon to declare an emergency because mud has clogged the filters at the water treatment plant. The city’s publicist in his press releases hasn’t said mud yet. He calls it turbidity, which is the quality of muddy water, but that quality, along with its brother metaphor, turgidity, is what official press releases have instead of clarity.

“This issue has arisen due to high turbidity in the raw water coming into the Water Treatment Plant which continues to clog filtration systems and limit how much, and how quickly, untreated water can be treated and put into the local water system. Turbidity, in short, refers to the amounts of particles or sediment-like materials such as silt, clay and other inorganic or organic matter that is present in water. Heavy rains like the area recently experienced can cause increased turbidity in water sources. These particles must be removed before water can be made safe to use.”

Imagine for a moment if Chicago Blues great Muddy Waters had instead been named High Turbidity. The band that named itself after one of his songs would be Detached Boulders in Motion Maintained by Gravity and Momentum in a Downward Trajectory.