Something Amiss in Shreveport

Shreveport is an interesting town. Yesterday, while doing the dishes in the morning, I noticed that my water pressure was a little low. At the time, I chalked it up to my apartment complex’s spotty history concerning hot water, heat, working drawers, mail delivery and other essentials. Thusly ignoring the water pressure, I went about finishing the chores around the house, including laundry and cleaning myself up a bit with a nice hot shower. About three hours later I picked up Annie from Dad’s day out and only then found out about the local crisis at the water plant. It turns out we had been in a “boil advisory” all day long. I don’t know how this information could have been delivered to me at home, but if I were running things I would have started with the television, which I had tuned in to the news.

We have one water treatment plant here in Shreveport and it is called, get this, the “Amiss” Water Purification Plant. That’s a joke, right? Well, at the Amiss Plant yesterday, a two foot pipe broke and between 15 and 20 million gallons of water spilled out before it could be fixed. I have no idea how the plant works, and finding out would probably make the forthcoming opinion a more responsible one, but here goes anyway. How is it possible that the second largest city in Louisiana has only one route for its purified water? Is it not possible that the city could have put a system in place where in the event of emergency the water is routed from another plant?

Let’s have the official unveiling of the fictional sister plant to the Amiss right here…The Awry Water Purification Plant. It will be located on the opposite side of Cross Lake and have a few features that marginally improve on the old plant. First, at he the new plant the shutoff valves that shut off the water in an emergency would be located above said water. Second, those very same valves could be turned off with something less than the 100 to 200 turns that is took the multiple firefighters in wetsuits. Oh, and lastly, the new valves would not be “several feet wide with very fine threads!” I was thinking something like a switch in a warm, dry room somewhere on the grounds would work. It sounds like the Amiss plant was the set for the final scene of an Austin Powers movie. The only things missing were the sharks with lasers.

Now naturally the only reason that a resident would be upset by this is because it is affecting their lives and family, and I am pretty pissed. I have Gymboree at 11 O’clock today and dinner plans tonight at seven. What are you going to do about this Shreveport? What’s that you say, how is Annie doing? Is she affected by the microbiologically compromised water? Oh, yes, she’s fine.