Backflow

I work with environmental regulations at work, and it has opened all sorts of new worlds to me.  This week’s topic: backflow prevention.  

Fascinating stuff, right?  If you didn’t know (though I suspect many of our more practically minded readers are very well versed in the topic) backflow is a scenario where negative pressure in a city’s water line causes water from residential or commercials properties to be sucked back into the public water supply.  If that water has been exposed to some sort of chemical or contaminant, this can turn into a big deal in a hurry.  

This knowledge in mind, you start noticing a lot of things really fast.  I’m willing to bet that your dishwasher is set up so that fresh water is coming in from above instead of below; this means that in the case of backflow, that water line is sucking air rather than your dishwater.  Same goes for your washing machine.  After a quick examination, I can now with deep relief confirm that your toilet’s water inlet was designed with this same consideration.  

This principle is worked into the design of most water consuming appliances, but sometimes this air gap cannot be provided.  Changes in elevation can mean that a failure of a valve at a local swimming pool gives residents downhill some funky tasting tap water.  Fire sprinkler systems hold stagnant water for years, allowing bacteria to grow unhindered.  If drawn into the main supply, the health consequences can be dire.  Carbolic acid from soda fountains sucked back into copper pipes start degrading the metal. And if all these seem unlikely, you should Google “backflow incidents.”  A particularly disturbing story is a mother who found nematodes, a type of parasitic roundworm, wriggling around in her bathtub because of standing water sucked up from her neighbor’s lawn sprinkler system.

Engineering controls do a ton to mitigate this risk.  Special backflow prevention valves, fully functional, make it near impossible for a backflow incident to occur.  Unfortunately, stuff degrades over time, so many local ordinances mandate that homeowners or businesses with systems at risk of backflow (lawn sprinkler systems being the most common) have these special valves inspected annually, which costs the owner something in the $30 range.  

Anyway, the unseen world of civil engineering, all those systems we take for granted on which our very lives depend, is fascinating to me, and work has led me into an investigation of these issues.  It also was timely in another way: I have been thinking a lot about the idea of social responsibility.

Personal responsibility, the idea that an individual needs to bear the consequences of their actions and, as a corollary, that a society that shields the individual from those consequences will ultimately loose its moral integrity, has been a common theme I’ve heard expressed through recent conversations.  Personal responsibility is indeed essential to a society, but so often what I hear missing in people’s rhetoric is any concept of social responsibility, the idea that members of a society inherently impact each other and that a society that does not recognize and enforce social responsibility, either through social pressure or law, will ultimately succumb to moral decay as well.

There is a lot quibbling over how far a society should go in enforcing responsibility, both personal and social, or even where one ends and the other begins.  I am surprised at how comfortable people are with enforcing what I’d consider personal responsibility (opposing marijuana legalization, abolishing or strongly regulating pornography, etc. (two stances I agree with, by the way)) while opposing what I would consider social responsibility (EPA and OSHA regulations, backflow inspections, etc.)  There seems to be a fairly common mental model that both society and government is out to corrupt us; us being individuals, or the church, or whatever, and to protect against these corrupting forces we need laws to make society look more like us, or in the very least inhibit its largest excesses, and gets the government out of our darn business.  This mental model is at least partly right, but it is also incredibly convenient; our norms get placed on the society and involves little to no sacrifice on our part.

Surely, this mental models needs to be supplemented.  If I am benefiting from some activity that harms my neighbor without properly compensating him, I am in essence stealing from him.  No one thinks it would be right if I took someone’s couch, sold it, and kept all the money.  If only all cases were that straightforward.  What about activity that converts my neighbor’s security into risk? Neglecting my backflow prevention valves might be an example of this.  This mental model forces some sacrifice on our part; no wonder people hate the EPA.

So where’s the line and how should a society enforce its norms?  That is a hard question, and it requires us to view reality as close to what it really is as possible.  If the first model is not sufficiently close to reality, than its adherents, with the best intentions in the world, will actively promote policies that harm their fellow man.   As people called to love our neighbor, let us be sure than in our thinking, Omnia Vincit Amor.