Seattle is spending tons of money on SJW programs but zero on infrastructure. From The Seattle Times:
West Point treatment plant ill-prepared for growing Seattle region, says post-flood report
The West Point sewage-treatment plant, the region’s largest, is ill-prepared to handle an emergency during heavy rains, a contractor hired to investigate a catastrophic flood at the plant last winter has found.
The contractor, AECOM, reported: The plant lacks redundant treatment capacity and systems backup; workers don’t have proper training to manage an emergency such as the flood that swamped the plant; and the new $40 million automated control system fully implemented just days before the flood actually made managing the emergency worse.
The computerized system is intended to monitor operations throughout the plant to alert managers in control rooms to anything amiss. Instead, as the flooding disaster unfolded, the system overwhelmed them. “The shift supervisor was faced with more than 2,100 alarms in less than one hour and it was not clear which were critical and which were of lesser significance,” the report states.
Yet during the flood, the alarm system also provided no automatic alert to the disaster itself; managers didn’t know flooding had occurred until they saw it, and then had to eventually manually turn off pumps still surging sewage into the crippled plant.
Ahh yes - the result of years of progressivism. Management by committee and nobody is held accountable. The fools that signed off on the new system are not elected and they just accepted whatever was handed them and they paid through the nose for the privilege.
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