Guest Commentary

Editor’s note: Jack Peasley contacted Doug Griffiths, MBA with Kelly Clemmer, the author of “13 Ways to Kill Your Community” published by Friesen Press, who graciously gave permission to reprint in the East Washingtonian, the first chapter of his book. What follows is part one of five of Chapter 1, Forget the Water.

CHAPTER 1

The evolution of humanity can be seen in the development of its communities. I’ll speak more of this in a later chapter, but essentially communities formed out of a need for security and protection. As the risk and threat of immediate harm lessened, early community dwellers were able to turn their focus and their daily aspirations to initiatives that would improve their wellbeing. Growing more food and learning new skills led to a barter and exchange system that created economic trade. That development improved efficiencies and the use of resources in a way that increased overall wealth for individuals, families and communities, and led––and still leads today––to a progressively better quality of life where basic needs, and much more than our basic needs, are met. That is the story, greatly oversimplified, of why com munities formed and how they led to increased prosperity.

This explanation, however, misses one critical element that would have had to be in place for any of that history to occur. All communities throughout human history have formed, evolved and grown because they were located at, or near, a river, lake, or ground aquifer that could supply the residents with water. Water is the foundational resource on which communities build. As my grandpa so eloquently put it to me when I was young; “You can go three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. You can do without just about everything else you can imagine.” Without water, mu die. We have seen many communities throughout history suffer urd die when they didn’t have enough water. Sometimes the quality of the water was an issue; the result of contamination, and other times it was simply an absence of water altogether. Regardless, a lack of quality, or the lack of quantity of water is enough to kill your community.

We can all recall recent examples of communities that have experienced water quality issues that were catastrophic, such as Walkerton in Canada, and Flint in the United States. On many occasions community members were made violently ill by an “event” that caused the water to become contaminated. Some of the more horrific events lead to tragic deaths and made national and international headlines. Such an event is horrible for people and for communities to experience, but those events have also led to improvements and new investments in basic community water infrastructure in recent years. Yet we are far from ensuring the problem never happens again. Every month across Canada and the United States there are multiple communities issued boil-water orders because of health risks associated with the quality of water. Those boil-water orders aren’t what concern me, however. Those orders mean we are catching the challenges before they cause negative consequences. The one that worries me is the one that isn’t caught in time. just because we are better at making sure we don’t experience acute impacts on our water quality doesn’t mean our work and the investments that are necessary are clone. Acute contamination of water can kill a community, but it can also kill residents. The security of the quality of our water is not something we can afford to take for granted.

Those acute contamination issues seem to be the real headline grabbers and the issues we usually focus on, but Water quality is about much more than just guaranteeing our water doesn’t kill us or make us violently ill when we drink it. I have stayed in a lot of communities over the many years I have been working with them, and I have found a correlation between the quality of the water in the community and the state of the community overall. Blindfold me, take me into virtu ally any community in North America and sit me down at a kitchen table in one of the homes with a glass of water from the kitchen tap. When you remove the blindfold, I can tell you the state of the community based on the quality of water in the glass. If the water is discolored, has a strange or bad smell, has a bad taste, has a lot of gas in it, or shows poor quality in any other way, the community will almost certainly have serious shortcomings of its own. That community with the poor quality of water will almost always have grungy, dirty streets, boarded up windows on empty businesses, old unkempt houses, and no new subdivisions. Essentially the town will look like it is dying.

If that glass of water is clean and clear, on the other hand, if it doesn’t have a bad smell and it has a “quality taste” to it––I know, that’s hard to define, but you know what I mean––then I will see a different town. There is a good chance when I walk out the door of the house I’ll see new businesses, clean streets and washed windows, new homes, plenty of flowers planted and in general a town that looks alive. Of course, there is no assurance a town with quality water will be a raging success. There are many towns I have helped over the years that have quality water but still struggle to find ways to achieve enduring prosperity. The point is communities that don? have quality water are always failing, and won’t be successful. Through my experiences, it has become painfully obvious to me communities that don’t have quality water need not expend effort on any other initiatives because nothing will improve until the quality of the water improves. The reason is very simple. People demand good, quality water.

Actually, that isn’t true either. People do not demand quality water anymore. They used to, but now people don’t demand it, they simply expect it. People won’t tolerate anything less than quality water, and you can check this out for yourself. Spend some time in your local gas station. Buy a cup of coffee and sit by the front counter for a half hour and listen to people who come through. You will probably hear every person who comes into the station complain about the price of gas, but they will not say a word about the price of the bottle of water they are purchasing. By volume those bottles used to be three times the price of gasoline. Now, water can be bought in bulk cases for cheap, but in individual bottles it is still often twice the price as the gasoline we buy, and the water is really nothing more than decent tap water. People simply expect good, quality water. They don’t demand it out loud anymore. They simply won’t settle for less.

-Griffiths is the Founder and CEO of 13 Ways Inc, a consulting firm based in Alberta, Canada. For more information visit http://www.13ways.ca.