Trego's Mountain Ear

I spoke with Noel Duram when he was still commissioner-elect, and he mentioned Singapore as an example of how waste management could be done.  He got me thinking, so I reviewed how Singapore deals with waste management – and it’s a complex system.  I listened to him at the community meeting in Trego, and he reinforced that idea when he spoke of an incinerator at Eureka.   When I see complex systems, I remember Joseph Tainter – who wrote The Collapse of Complex Societies.  There’s a good synopsis of Tainter’s theory at Philosophical Disquisitions: The Collapse of Complex Societies: A Primer on Tainter’s Theory for folks who don’t want to read the whole book.

The idea is that we build increasingly complex systems to deal with the problems we encounter,and that the complexity reaches a spot where increasing levels of management don’t provide a return equal to the effort.  As I write this, the fires in California have just wiped out Pacific Palisades, and residents are looking for a politician or three to sacrifice.  I’d like to describe the increasing complexity of waste management in Lincoln County, and how it has grown beyond the ability of the folks in the county health department to handle.

Understand – the Hoop isn’t a bad person.  She’s just the person in charge when the problems have grown beyond her ability to solve.  Had Ron Anderson made different choices a generation ago, the Hoop might have, like Ron, finished a peaceful career and moved into retirement.  Not evil – just competent enough to hang on until overwhelmed by the complexity of the solutions.  Not the complexity of the problem, the complexity of the solution.

Back in my pre-teen years, the area adjacent to Libby Creek had a problem – poor septic systems, porous soil, a high water table and shallow wells.  I think the disease back then was hepatitis, but the situation was a miniature of 1850’s London, where Snow stopped a cholera epidemic by taking the handle off the Broad Street pump.

Even into the seventies, while there was plenty of information on how to build a septic tank, we had folks who came up with novel methods of doing it – one was burying an old car, knocking a hole in the windshield for a drainage pipe and another one in the back window to connect with the toilets, cover it up and call it good.  Another operated on the challenges of getting cement – follow the design, but build the tanks from laminated cull 2x4s, and proceed.  Something needed to be done – and with the record of public health heroes like John Snow John Snow, Cholera, the Broad Street Pump; Waterborne Diseases Then and Now – PMC the obvious choice to handle the problem was the county health department.  The problem that is showing up now is that Snow didn’t work for public health – looking at his biography shows a man who spent his time confronting the authorities.

Our county health department is the authority – and bureaucrats prefer solutions where one size fits all – and part of the problem here is that the health department recruits and promotes sanitarians, and sanitarians are, at the most charitable, poorly trained on soils.  Septic tanks, drainfields, landfills – they all are based on soil physics.  And the people charged with running the increasingly complex system didn’t really understand the soil on which they stood and approved permits.  Soil has complexity beyond their abilities.

The department’s lack of understanding of soil physics was brought home to me when I retired, moved home, and needed to put in a septic tank.  Mick Nelson explained that the only realistic option was to hire the consultant the health department trusted, give the guy $750, the health department would take his report and issue the permit.

Mick knew that I had nearly eight years with the Soil Conservation Service and that Renata worked as a soil scientist – and explained that it wasn’t worth the fight – spend the $750 and all would go smoothly, and if you fight the system you’ll be years in getting the permit. I tool Mick’s advice – and when I read the report, I saw that the a**hole had diagnosed a soil series that had never been reported in Montana.  You see, in counties with a published Soil Survey, you just open the book and see what the air photo shows.  In Lincoln County, for years, Happy Jack Cloninger had been sent out to map individual properties and that information was available on the old conservation plans.  The ‘consultant’ that the health department approved had put in words that described soils somewhere – but not on the spot for the application.  Jake Mertes was the new sanitarian then – and Jake explained his understanding of clay soils with the term ‘rope’ – a soil scientist describes the ‘ribbon’ he or she makes.

It’s no surprise that the County Health Department can’t handle the complexity of the landfill – they demonstrated it to me ten years ago by mandating a consultant who didn’t know what he was doing and accepting his bogus report.   That gets into the second part of the problem – somehow,  the health department has moved into an operating mode where they regard the citizens, the taxpayers, as the enemy.   Jake taught me that – when I retired and moved home, inheriting Dad’s trailer court, on our first meeting Jake threatened to shut it down.  Later, in a half-a**ed apology, he explained that he was just trying to get my attention.  He did – but that threat by a trainee says a lot about the departmental culture.  Now, the health department is finding a way to inconvenience everyone in the county, not just the folks with restaurants and trailer courts.  Covid brought the health department into every home, and garbage disposal keeps them affecting every resident.

The systems are increasingly complex, and the people the county hired to manage those systems are no brighter than the folks were when simple systems dominated.  There’s been an attempt to improve their competence with correspondence (now online) schools – which basically provides more certificates for the wall.  Instead of education, continued classes provide indoctrination, and convince them that they are smarter and better educated than the public.  Despite their professional development, they still want simple, repetitive forms to address the challenges that face them.

So stay with me while I describe the basics of soil – it’s composed of three things, based on particle size – sand, silt and clay.  Sand is the largest, clay the smallest. Water runs through sand the quickest and clay far more slowly.  Here in Trego, our silt and clay was laid down and spent millennia with a bunch of ice on top of it.  It’s compacted layers of silt and clay.  Water percolates slowly – so it can be a good spot to seal off a landfill, or with lengthy drainfields can form a wastewater discharge system that won’t contaminate groundwater.  On the other hand, sandy soils let water percolate quickly and contaminate groundwater easily.  Generally, the folks in the health department understand that much.

The challenge to them is that not all soils are easy to classify – while a loam is defined as equal parts of sand, silt and clay, it takes experience to come up with a more specific classification.  Again, the soil changes – here, I’m used to encountering bands of fine silt with skins of clay along the top and bottom edges of the band.  When you make a ribbon of it, it will show the silt component by breaking.  When you put water on top of it, the slow infiltration rate is a result of that clay on top of the silt layer.  Soil is not a topic where one size fits all – so to make it easier, someone in the health department set up a contractor to collect money from the landowner, and submit a bulls***t report they could file away, and nobody has to do it correctly.  It’s easy to test what I’m saying – I explained this to Jake Mertes – just take a dozen of their pet consultant’s reports, with the legal descriptions, and contrast those with the old maps that the Natural Resource Conservation Service has that show the work Happy Jack and his colleagues did in the fifties and sixties.  It would take a little time – but I paid for the first bullsh*t report, and I am sure others would share theirs if asked.

A final observation on the health departments in general.  The folks in public health jobs are indoctrinated that they are protecting the public – the citizens, the taxpayers – from their own ignorance, stupidity and folly.  That indoctrination begins with the history of John Snow and the Broad Street pump handle and goes through the same scorn that Anthony Fauci had for the American people during the Covid mess.  They really do think that they are better than us, and that their mission is to protect us from our own folly.  Their organization feeds authoritarian scorn for the people they are hired to serve.    Slight increases in complexity can be handled by midwits.  We’ve reached a level of complexity where the authoritative agency just can’t manage the challenges.  Not bad people – not stupid people – just not up to the challenges of increased complexity.  John Snow wasn’t employed by a health department.