Saving the Planet through People

Watershed management is a technical endeavor that requires engineering expertise in hydrology and civil engineering. A watershed management plan carefully studies the path every rain drop takes until it makes it out to a stream. This has value in city planning and the protection of natural resources. Water knows no political boundaries but has a long memory, absorbing a little of every pollutant it touches. We all live downstream of some other community’s watershed, so it should be important to us to make sure safeguards are in place (see Figure 1). The U.S. EPA has made a number of guidelines to help define and protect watersheds. Real-life watersheds often do not fit into the mold that is desirable for attaining government funding, approval of zoning changes, or implementation of best practices. It takes the coordination of an interdisciplinary team of experts to protect the environment and serve the community.

“Saving the planet” is a phrase avoided by civil engineers in professional settings because it is inherently political. In the context of this article, “saving the planet” involves a group of environmental activities that overlap with civil engineering analysis, design, and management. While my discussion focuses on watershed management issues, the themes are equally applicable to virtually all work that civil engineers do.

Like many engineers, I used to view political science as a contradiction in terms. Politics was this natural disaster that happened because of the absence of science. For example, a politician may support a drainage project of no value to anyone except to the aesthetic preferences of powerful people on his street, while a sorely needed project somewhere else in town goes unfunded. The engineer could see his role as performing calculations to prioritize the projects. Perhaps by demonstrating on a map with hard numbers the impacts of each project, science would then save the day and preclude the caterwauling. But this is a naïve understanding of the way things actually work. My time as a city engineer cured my naïveté. What it will take to save the planet is not more technology, but technically competent civil engineers who have the soft skills to communicate, sell, convince, and be outstanding leaders. To be successful, we need to lose the pocket protectors and pick up some breath mints. Environmental activists alone will never save the planet because it takes more than passion; you need to build consensus. It is too big of a job for one leader; it takes a whole leadership team that includes engineers and politicians.

The most important reason why science will not completely eliminate political wrangling is that all the data will never be available. Offbeat comedian Steven Wright once quipped: “I have a full-scale map of the United States. It took me all summer to unfold it…. It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” For all of the data to be collected to the point where politics would be eliminated, we would need to have that full-scale map of the country. Assuming we had all of the data, who could manage it? Who could paint it?

Engineering answers, no matter how well documented, are worthless unless they can be explained in a convincing way that brings people together. Douglas Adams in his bestselling book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy relates this in a humorous way. He tells a tale where massive supercomputers work to answer the ultimate question and determine the meaning of life. After many years, the calculated answer was “42.” The supercomputers went back to work trying to interpret what that meant!

Political leaders specialize in making decisions based on consensus, because rarely outside of computer programs can decisions wait for all of the facts to be uncovered. Even then it often needs interpretation. Engineers don’t have to be politicians, but they should embrace their role in the political process of decision making. Political leaders are charismatic and master wordsmiths that can lead the masses anywhere, including off a cliff. Engineers are straight-laced logicians who can calculate a path that spares the plunge off of the cliff, if they could only explain it. English can be a difficult second language for an engineer, behind visual basic, java, auto cad, or some other dialect of machine-speak. The rigors of engineering school historically don’t have much to do with improving social or verbal skills. The major projects, like watershed management, are too big for one person. Such projects are really all about people.

Karst is defined as “an irregular limestone region with sinkholes, caverns, and underground streams.” Karst geology features are numerous across North America. Karst features are very common in Kentucky, famously for Mammoth Cave National Park. Mapping karst is inherently difficult because features are mostly underground. The National Cave and Karst Institute has created a national karst map, which gives a fair picture of the extent of karst on the continent. Storm water drainage primarily goes into karst in regions where streams and lakes are far away. Cities grew up around rivers and ports to accommodate water source, transport, and runoff needs. If the trend of suburban expansion and urbanization further from the city continues, karst will become a factor of increasing importance in urban planning everywhere. Not enough has been written about the management of karst as it relates to urban growth and civil engineering, because most urban areas are close to bodies of water that can be used for less constrained drainage. A great source for information on karst is the Web site of the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS; see suggested reading section).

Karst presents many challenges. One important classification for watershed management plans is determining if a water source is groundwater or surface water. Although it may seem obvious that water coming out of the ground is groundwater, this isn’t always true for karst. It may have just gone into the ground a few minutes before, and be where a sinking stream resurfaces. Water can travel long distances in underground streams, without regard to the surface contour of the land. Surface water hydrologists do storm water and flood prevention planning based on geographic information system (GIS) analysis of the land contours. Since water doesn’t flow uphill, a ridgeline is a boundary for a surface watershed. Karst features can and often do “pirate” water from one surface watershed to another.

Two significant challenges of karst are sinkhole flooding and pollution prevention. Sinkholes are low local elevation geographic features where water sinks into the ground. In karst regions, they are formed by water and naturally accommodate storm water runoff for the watershed. Often the watershed surrounding a sinkhole roughly approximates a bowl, with the sinkhole nearly at the bottom. Think of it as a bathtub. A karst region will begin to flood every time the rainfall comes down faster than can be accommodated by the sinkhole. A community with a lake or a river nearby would only have to worry about a flood based on a large enough rain event to make the river overflow out of its banks, where a sinkhole region could have a flood with a very short storm, if it were sufficiently intense (see Table 1 for a comparison between karst and river valleys).

Pollution is a more serious concern in karst because sinkholes are a direct conduit for pollutants to enter the ground, which can contaminate groundwater and springs. Natural processes can mitigate the impact of surface water pollution—ultraviolet radiation from sunlight can break down compounds, biological digestion of some pollutants can occur, and the hydrologic cycle offers a bit of natural renewal. When groundwater is polluted, it will mean an expensive and long-term problem.

Another issue related to karst is the possibility of sinkhole collapse. Sinkhole collapse is where through a complex mechanism, runoff water over time makes a path for itself to an underground karst channel or cave, creating a sinkhole. This is a process that most often happens slowly over long periods of time. It can be accelerated by construction practices such as filling in sinkholes that accommodate surface runoff. The water must go somewhere, and it will take the path of least resistance. Catastrophic sinkhole collapse is rare, but does occur. Urbanization of karst areas can lead to increased frequency of sinkhole collapse. The increase in impervious surface causes the peak runoff flow to be higher. This may lead to an accelerated erosion process. Although it is unwise and against best practice, developers may fill in sinkholes that were obscured by brush without regard to the runoff it was accommodating, causing the water to seek a new path to the ground.

Before you can pull together the resources to take even the first baby step in making a watershed plan, you need to do what I call “people shed management.” The technical challenges pale in comparison to the leadership challenges of watershed management. The leadership team of the city of Radcliff, Kentucky, made tremendous progress in managing environmental problems including flash flooding, general flooding, and surface runoff-related problems. The coordination effort involved obtaining buy-in from the city council, coordinating with the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. EPA, the state department of water, the governor’s office, and FEMA. This is not to mention coordination with local government entities that share the watershed like the Ft. Knox military base and the county government. The most significant challenge was simply communicating a unique situation to the people who could help us.

Government is a “cookie cutter” world, with regulations and mandates designed to handle the normal situations with low cost and great efficiency. Yes, you read correctly—I said “great efficiency.” Contrary to popular opinion, bureaucracies evolve because they are efficient. They perform tasks that fit “within the lines,” like delivering uniformly sized letter mail cheaply and efficiently. They are inefficient at things that go outside the norm, like delivering large variably sized packages quickly. That is why UPS and Fed Ex are beating the post office when it comes to the package business, but are way overpriced for mailing a letter. When you have a problem that deviates from the norm, it becomes difficult to navigate the government. One such situation is karst hydrology, and the required permitting of sinkholes as wells.

Philosophers beg the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a noise?” Another form of the dilemma is the question: if a sinkhole forms in the forest and no one drilled it or was there to see it form, is it a well and does it need a permit?

The U.S. EPA and the Kentucky’s department of water are very interested in the protection of groundwater through wellhead protection. A well can be a significant source of pollution to groundwater, so there is a program that manages and classifies wells. A sinkhole is classified as a “Class V injection well.” There is a requirement to map all wells and obtain a permit from the state water agency. The intent of the rule is to put an end to the practice of injecting waste into the ground. If an injection well can’t pass an administrative review, it is ordered capped by the state. This is problematic for sinkholes, as they are naturally occurring, and will naturally occur somewhere else nearby if capped. Sinkholes are mischievous in that they do not read memos or respect bureaucracies. Sometimes sinkholes are very small and numerous, occurring in wooded areas and on private property. They are known to “move” through natural processes; that is, a sinkhole may become dormant and recur in another place nearby. Local officials were initially very fearful of the permit requirement. If one followed the language of the federal government documentation, an imagined scenario would be the capping of all sinkholes, fines, and nearly permanent flooding, an anxious vision that projected a paralyzing effect on our efforts to help identify our sinkholes. This was a classic example of an easy problem to solve when properly broken down into layman’s terms by engineers. Officials in the federal government understand the intent of the rules, and a little real-time communication goes a very long way. The guidance we received made sense of regulations meant to deal with a more general situation; they wanted a report of our “improved” sinkholes—sinkholes where we had installed grates, catchments, or otherwise done work to keep them from becoming clogged with debris. The value of an engineer was not in doing hard-core engineering calculations, but in the softer skill set of explaining and communicating the situation to a government official.

Often seemingly insurmountable technical problems are solvable technical communication issues in disguise. We had a large sinkhole that was habitually clogging with debris. The area around it was packed with deadwood that could lead to unpredictable clogging and flash flooding of a nearby neighborhood. The city was paralyzed in its response to the problem for several technical reasons. The flood area was not on a FEMA map, making it difficult to use government programs to help people. The flooding could be due to the clogging of the sinkhole, or it could have been that the capacity of the sinkhole to accommodate water had been exceeded. It also could have been due to deficiencies in the storm water system, including insufficient detention basins for the amount of development. There was the possibility of localized flooding due to relationships between the sinkholes and how they were connected underground. It was becoming clear that the key to many decisions was a better understanding of what happened to the water once it went into the ground.

There was government money available to help in various ways, but it was only possible if we could answer some very complex technical questions, questions well beyond our financial and technical ability to answer on our own.

As city engineer I met with government officials from different agencies to communicate our problem and see what could be done. After many false starts, blind alleys, some research, and a little serendipity, we found our answer. It came in the form of partnerships with organizations and teamwork involving human beings, not calculus or computers. The key to determining the cause of flooding was coupling traditional surface hydrology analysis with a good model of the capacity of the sinkhole to take storm water. I spoke with Jim Currens of the Kentucky Geological Survey, and discovered that KGS not only had experience doing the very type of groundwater tracing analysis we needed, they were at the very top of the profession. The Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) has a program where they assist small urban areas with city planning and flood prevention. It is a matching grant, where the Corps will match what the city agrees to spend. We were able to contract with the ACE to perform the work, who would subcontract to KGS. This helped us in several ways. It allowed us to benefit from the world-class staff at ACE through their review and suggestions in defining the project scope. The involvement of the prestigious ACE made it easier to get the city council to approve the substantial funds for the groundwater study. It also helped us in another very important way.

The state of Kentucky had a grant program where they would offer 50 percent matching funds to cities involved in projects with a federal agency to improve flood control. It is important to communicate frequently with the dedicated people who work in government to win grants like this one. There is a secret to winning competitive grants that is simple, yet it apparently is top secret to most people who apply. It is related to the ability of technical people to communicate verbally through speaking and writing. If you fill out your grant application completely and on time, you have already put yourself in the top half of all the applications received, according to casual conversation with people responsible for processing the paperwork. If you fill the forms out correctly and have included all of the required documentation, you are pushing into the top 20 percent. The key to moving up in the pile is more communication; one needs to talk to the people at the state, and make sure your project is aligned with their unpublished goals for the current year. Sometimes you have to “work it” and make sure you use the right buzzwords, or even to focus on the most likely project on your list for the given year.

We were able to involve the expertise of KGS and ACE to launch a project where we would know the capacity of our sinkholes. We would be on our way to get flood areas on an official map as well as off to a good start on a comprehensive watershed plan that would protect the environment. We benefited from an incredible amount of work by experts, and only had to pay for less than a quarter of it from our own meager small-city budget.

Just as a watershed is managed by the relationship of water with the environment, in the same way an engineer’s success is defined by his leadership ability and connection with others in his environment—the community. This is a new trend related to our moment in history. It is important to look at this historical context, because success will elude us if we merely emulate our heroes of the past.

It was over three hundred years ago that Isaac Newton invented calculus and outlined the laws of physics that bear his name. He said of his tremendous achievements, “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.” Today we may be standing on the shoulders of Newton and others in history, but increasingly we are standing on each other’s shoulders as partners, co-experts, and team mates. It is a popular myth that Newton discovered the law of gravity by being bonked on the head with an apple. If this is true, it is ironic that failure today is defined by what was Newton’s approach—a hardheaded engineer who apparently spent a lot of time alone waiting for ideas to knock him in the head. Success is defined today by relationships, connection, and leadership.