Essays From West of 98: One Year Later
Reflections on a local crisis and the future of disaster planning
It has been said that “what doesn’t kill you only makes your stronger.” I don’t know who concocted that saying, but I’d like to have a word with them about their good sense. Personally, I prefer to become stronger without wondering whether the situation is going to kill me first.
One year ago, in late July 2023, the City of Stamford experienced one of those situations when we suffered a catastrophic equipment failure at our brand-new water treatment plant.1 This plant had recently opened as part of a multiyear, $20 million project to upgrade our water supply and treatment facilities for decades to come. When this equipment failure happened, we lived through a local crisis for almost a full week. It was, frankly, a nightmare.
I have a very short list of events that I rank as the worst experiences of my life. As I have aged, a few events dropped off the list, because I realized they really weren’t that bad after all.2 Today, there are only three such experiences on my list: 1) a sick toddler in the hospital for multiple days; 2) studying for and taking the Texas Bar Exam; and 3) Stamford’s 2023 water treatment plant failure. This problem began to affect our citizens on a Monday night late last July. It escalated into a crisis on Tuesday and Wednesday, and it continued until we restored the plant to full operation on Sunday night. Mentally, that week felt like a year.
We have all been affected in life by events that happen outside our control. It is a helpless feeling. You are desperate to do something and simultaneously unable to do anything. It is an even worse feeling when it is a crisis outside your physical control but within your area of responsibility which has been entrusted to you by your friends and neighbors. I could not do anything to immediately fix the City’s water treatment plant. Engineers, technicians, and chemists were working around the clock. I could not merely bang on the machine and shake the problem loose, though I did consider it. It filled me with anger, anxiety, and frustration for all our impacted citizens. Water is one of the few true essentials in life and it is one of the most basic tasks of local government.
I do not write this for anyone to “feel sorry” for me. I sought the office of Mayor of Stamford on my own volition and I sought re-election with my own free will. Rather, I write this as a reflection over the last 12 months of thinking about this experience, how we responded, what we can do better, and how it made me feel. Candidly, I should say “how it makes me feel.” There is no past tense with this situation. I mentally live with it practically every day. I will never forget the feeling of being unable to provide water for our citizens. Unpleasant as that may be, it is a feeling I do not need to forget, so long as I am entrusted with the office of Mayor.
In an essay published the week after the crisis, I praised the neighborly spirit of our community. During those tense days, we saw the goodness of Stamford’s people. Sure, they were frustrated, and rightly so. It was the peak of summertime, so a lack of running water was a legitimate health issue. People of all ages and backgrounds volunteered and stood in the gap for the vulnerable. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of volunteers who checked on people, delivered water and ice to the elderly and to our nursing/assisted living facilities, and lent a hand however they were able, with tasks great and small. I will never know just how many people helped that week, because so many people did not even ask me for a task. They just went and found a place to help.
Unfortunately, our world has experienced more than a few disasters in the past 12 months. Thanks to the “wonder” of television and the internet, those disasters and their aftermath are delivered into our homes and onto our handheld devices. Those events are filtered through television and internet outlets that profit from drama. I see a much greater percentage of the online commentary about a local event than a disaster that occurs elsewhere so I cannot intelligently say whether Stamford’s people responded “better” in that situation than any other group of people. That does not matter. It is not a competition. I will simply say that I could not be more proud to live in Stamford and be part of this community. It was not just *this* event, either. When Stamford’s people are in need, whether individually or collectively, our community rises to the occasion.
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Four months after the initial crisis, we had another smaller issue with our plant. We had devised some long-term solutions in July that were still under construction, but they were rushed into emergency service and helped fix the problem in just over 24 hours. As projected, those measures resolved the source of our woes and have prevented further issues.3
An effective leader should not look back on a crisis event and relish the positive aspects without considering what they can do better. Over the last 12 months, it has weighed on me that catastrophes should be treated as a lesson and a warning. Our citizens were incredibly supportive, but we cannot take that good nature for granted. This was not Stamford’s first disaster, nor will it be the last. Our area is prone to tornadoes and severe storms of every kind. Excessive rains have caused flooding at Lake Stamford twice in the last twenty years. We lived through the horror of Winter Storm Uri that cratered the Texas electrical grid. Other communities in West Texas have been deeply impacted by wildfires in the last few years. And apparently, since we’ve had two minor events in the last week, we are now susceptible to earthquakes as well!
Here at West of 98, I write a lot about the importance of rebuilding the local. I firmly believe that also includes preparation and response for disasters. Last year, the Texas Department of Emergency Management (TDEM) was very helpful during our water crisis. Over the years, TDEM and the Federal Emergency Management Administration have both helped with local events. This is not to diminish that assistance. Rather, it is a recognition of matters both historical and forward-looking.
Up until the last 60 years or so, disaster response was largely the purview of local and state leaders. The federal government occasionally responded to specific disasters, but only on a case-by-case basis. No federal disaster relief agency existed until the Great Depression.4 President Lyndon B. Johnson took the federal government into disaster response as a business enterprise, partly as a vision of his “Great Society” and partly because he saw it as good politics. This indisputably changed the posture of disaster response in our country away from the local. If the feds had more resources and would come anyway, why bother having a local focus on disasters? This has created a reliance on agencies and people far removed from our communities and an expectation that we shouldn’t plan to help our own people.
Rural leaders should also be realistic about the possibilities of a widespread disaster. What if some sort of emergency impacted the entire United States or a large swath thereof? What if multiple urban centers were affected? How fast would the relief get to rural communities like ours? How far down the list would we be? Are we sure we would even be on the list? Federal and state governments have significant resources, but they are not unlimited. Those resources could become overwhelmed before they reached communities like my own and like many of your communities. That is a discomforting thought, but effective leadership requires considering such possibilities.
One year after one of our most significant local crises, I see that local disaster planning and response is more vital than ever. Stamford responded well in that moment, but there will be future moments that arise unexpectedly and outside our control. If we are to truly rebuild a healthy local culture and a healthy local economy, we must be able to withstand the unexpected events that impact our local people and our local place. For most of human history, disaster planning and response was the priority of local people. It should be so again.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.
If you’d like to read about the technical issues that caused this equipment failure, the City commissioned an engineering study and you can read the technical memorandum here. In short, our water has an overabundance of naturally occuring minerals. When our lake “turned over” (a naturally-occuring phenomenon affected by heat but largely unpredictable), it forced an unusually high concentration of minerals into our treatment plant and fouled the membrane filtration system such that the membranes could only filter water at a fraction of their designed capacity. Several chemical treatment processes were tested and re-tested until a proper solution was found to successfully “scrub” the minerals from the membranes.
Feel free to sing along to Garth Brooks’s “Unanswered Prayers” at this point in the essay.
I’ll not bore you with all the details, but our 1950s-era water treatment plant was designed with a “settling basin,” which is effectively a large swimming pool of sorts. Raw water is pumped into this basin where it sits for a period of time prior to entering the treatment facility. This allows minerals and organic matter to settle at the bottom of the basin and improves the water quality prior to its treatment. Newer treatment plants do not use settling basins, because modern filters are able to filter more foreign matter than older filtration systems. However, if a modern filtration system is too successful at filtering water, there is a downside: it can become choked down by heavily fouled water during events like a lake turnover. Prior to July 2023, the City determined that rehabilitating our old settling basin (a six figure project) was advisable, but the events of July confirmed that it was an absolute necessity. Repairs to the basin were completed in November 2023 and our experiences since that date have confirmed the essential nature of settling water prior to treating it. What’s old is new again, no matter what high technology might tell you. Wendell Berry would undoubtedly approve of our 70-year old settling basin becoming a key asset to a “state of the art” treatment facility.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created by President Herbert Hoover’s administration, is generally viewed as the first federal disaster relief agency.
James, it is always a pleasure to gain insights into your local happenings, and this one speaks to a topic that my husband and I were just discussing this week. We quickly realize how helpless we are when tech that we have come to rely on simply fails. The fact that you have such a tightly-woven community adds to your preparedness factor and is lacking in larger urban centres. Thanks for writing!