Alexis Pancrazi, Blueprint America

Blueprint North Carolina

North Carolina is embarking on an exciting smart growth project; seven locations across the state are developing conservation-based affordable housing. The name essentially gives it away but the idea is that homeowners don’t need to be saddled with the choice between fiscal responsibility and environmental conservation, traditionally thought to be at odds.

Location site of one of North Carolina's conservation based affordable housing development plans

Could this be the wave of the future in North Carolina? Possibly. No idea was off the table this past June during the North Carolina Communities Summit, “Re-Think, Re-Design and Re-build.”

200 people trekked out to Charlotte, NC for this summit spanning the course of two days. The event had an array of big name sponsors: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, NeighborWorks America and the NC Triangle Chapter, US Green Building Council and the North Carolina Association of Community Development Corporations.

Aside from pros and cons of conservation based subdivisions, the summit also touched upon alternative community arrangements such as eco-villages and work-based cooperative housing. Which is not to say more traditional sustainable development techniques were neglected–also discussed were the possibilities for recycling underused real-estate sites through rezoning and transforming brownfields.

Keep a look out in UNC-TV for highlights from the summit in upcoming local Blueprint America specials.

Blueprint Indiana

In Indiana, the infrastructure buzz word this year is… water.

A new local documentary produced by Indiana local PBS WFYI’s Gary Harris, “Drop By Drop: Protecting Indiana’s Water Supply,” examines the state of Indiana’s water system, with disheartening results.

The documentary is a panoramic picture of the imperfections and deterioration of Indiana’s water system, and disasters loom as raw sewage bubbles out of the ground in one town and decaying septic tanks threaten to poison groundwater. Not only are we wasting gallons of water every day, but the infrastructure that cleans, recycles, and delivers our water is being strangled by its own poor planning and decay.

Watertower in Francesville, Indiana

For most of us, water is commonplace, spilling easily from our tap in the background of our daily lives. In its ubiquity, it’s easy to forget just how precious it is. By putting Indiana’s state water system under the spotlight, this documentary reminds us that we need to be more careful with our resources, and smarter about how we protect them.

Not only are people talking about water in Indiana, they’re also social networking about it! Or they will be… In October of this year WFYI held its first ever Public Media camp to talk about how to use it to their advantage to bring sustainability and green issues into the public eye. Thirty local citizens attended, including the owner/operators of two public community radio stations nearby, staff from WOSU, and others in the sustainability and media communities.

Blueprint Illinois

With the Climate Reduction Act of 2008, East Peoria, IL pledged to become a “cool city,” and set up a Green Team to push forward a sustainable development agenda. Their strategy has been to make incremental but significant tweaks throughout the community to lower energy output and increase the use of renewable technology.

For example, the city installed solar trickle chargers, which utilize energy from the sun to keep batteries at full charge, in cop cars thereby reducing the amount of times batteries need to be replaced over the cruisers’ life spans. WTVP outlined some more of these projects in the following video:

But the burden is not solely on the city’s shoulders to pave the way for greener future. With that in mind, the Green Team also encourages citizens to measure their own energy output in their homes to enable them to recognize their carbon footprint. The necessary equipment is made available to borrow for no cost at the local library.

Along those same lines, WTVP has produced this video of practical advice for committing yourself to a sustainable lifestyle through the power of your purse:

WTVP has been steadily working on several sustainable projects and videos over the summer. Their first opportunity to showcase their work was at the Central Illinois Green Expo on September 10^th and 11^th. Keep your eye out for the Green Team on upcoming WTVP Blueprint America stories!

According to the White House, more than $88 billion of the stimulus plan has been made available, while $28.5 billion has been spent. Still, as state revenues fall across the country, it may not be fast enough for local economies.

Where whisky’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin’, calls to regulate the use of ground water in California are being made.

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[click here] for more Blueprint America infrastructure headlines

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America’s aging water infrastructure systems–some in the ground for more than 100 years–are neglected and in dire need of national and local attention.

Though largely out of sight and out of mind, these drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems provide the basis for public health and safety, economic prosperity, and quality of life.

Liquid Assets: The Story of Our Water Infrastructure explores the looming crisis underneath our feet and how ten cities and towns (Atlanta, Boston, Herminie, PA, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C.) are trying to meet the challenges.  While the public takes system reliability for granted, cities must find the funds to rebuild eroding systems, separate sewer and stormwater flows, and protect the watershed.  Industry and environmental experts, government officials, front-line water workers and citizens reveal how their communities are working to ensure the viability of water infrastructure assets.

The 90-minute documentary, produced by Penn State Public Broadcasting (WPSU), will be available nationwide to all public broadcasting stations beginning October 1, 2008.

Visit www.liquidassets.psu.edu to view the trailer and to access the companion community toolkit, intended to help facilitate discussions that extend beyond the broadcast.

Download this audio report as an MP3.

[Transcript]

If you visit Laura Smith’s house on Smith Road in Wawarsing, N.Y. on a crisp, autumn morning, you might think she has it pretty good. The house is cozy, and the setting is gorgeous: Catskill hillsides blazing with fall color, her lawn still green and thick. But then, she opens the garage door that leads to the lower level of her house and you’re nearly bowled over by the ammonia stench of mold and mildew. She steps inside and shows off her nine-horsepower water pump.

“When we know we’re flooding, we get it set up, make sure we have fuel, we get the hoses out,” she explains. Outside, the hose is about 30 feet long and four inches wide. Smith calls it “the Loch Ness Monster.”

All it takes is a few inches of rain, Smith says, and her basement and garage are suddenly full of feet of water. The pump can run for weeks before the basement’s dry. Her water problem got really bad during a storm in the spring of 2005: Flooding knocked out the furnace, so she and her family relied on a wood stove, up on blocks, in the basement. And they worried that the foundation might collapse.

“Sometimes I think maybe it would’ve been best for my house to collapse at that time,” she says, “so I could’ve saved myself the past three years of horror.”

Smith laughs at this. She says she laughs because that’s the only way she can handle the situation. The water is relentless. On the morning that I visited, there hadn’t been significant rain in Wawarsing for days, yet Smith’s basement walls were damp. She and her husband watch the Weather Channel with dread. The neighborhood’s lawns are pocked with sinkholes. They can be big – up to five feet deep – but they start small. At a neighbor’s house a few doors away, on U.S. Highway 209, Smith pointed to a spot in the lawn where, she said, a sinkhole was coming.

“I mean, step in here – look at that!” Smith turns to her husband.

“It’s spongy! Oh, my God! That’s a hole — that’s a sinkhole,” he exclaims, his foot sinking eight inches into the ground. “That’s not just coming – that’s there.”

The source of the sinkholes — and all of the flooded basements in the area – is 700 feet underground. The Delaware Aqueduct is leaking, badly, in two places – one directly beneath Wawarsing. The tunnel loses up to 35 million gallons a day, enough to supply tap water to the entire city of St. Louis. And a lot of it is soaking into the ground beneath the neighborhood, and under Highway 209 – the only highway in town.

U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey, the Democrat who represents Wawarsing, says there’s a possibility that the structure of the road could erode.

“Without that road, it would be very difficult for people to move from one place to another. And the longer this goes on, the greater the likelihood that there will be larger problems that will come about, and that those larger problems are potentially likely to affect larger numbers of people,” Hinchey says.

For example, sinkholes could topple a high-tension line, or floods could destroy buildings. Hinchey’s been putting pressure on the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which owns the Aqueduct, to fix the leaks. But the DEP won’t confirm that its tunnel is the source of the water – despite the fact that it issued a paper this past June titled, “Wawarsing Leak Report.”

More importantly, Hinchey says, the tunnel’s a symbol of what’s wrong with infrastructure nationwide: It’s decades old and falling apart. If it fails completely, Wawarsing could be inundated – and eight million people in New York City would lose half of their water supply. Sometimes it seems like a problem from hell is seeping upwards from the underworld into the lives of Laura Smith and her neighbors. On a fall night, they gather around her kitchen table to eat zucchini bread and talk.

“Bottom line is, we all own homes that are worthless,” says Richard Eisinger, the guy with the brand new sinkhole in his yard.

“When I bought this home, it was so our daughter could finish school. And eventually we planned on retiring and moving away from the areai¿½ Now we have a couple hundred thousand dollars tied up in something that’s worthless,” Eisinger says.

“Our assets are now liabilities,” his neighbors agree.

His neighbor Julianne Lennon nods. “We’ve done so much work on our home that we’ll never get a return on,” she says. “Never.”

Money’s the problem for government officials, too: It’ll cost billions to fix the leaks, if they can be fixed at all. Some engineers think that the water itself may be the only thing that’s keeping the tunnel from collapsing completely. The neighbors in Wawarsing hope that the leak under their houses won’t get as bad as the other leak in the Aqueduct, like one near the banks of the Hudson River. That one’s turned a small valley into a swamp and seems to be opening up a sinkhole on the shoulder of a nearby road. Water rushes out through a ditch and then flows under a power plant.

This weekend, the DEP will “blow off” the tunnel – in other words, let most of the water drain from it. Residents in Wawarsing say they’ll be checking to see if their basement walls dry out.

Mexican farmers depend on this water, especially now as the country is experiencing a drought. Mexico’s infrastructure also has problems getting water to residents.

“For decades, the United States has allowed Mexico to receive more water from the Colorado River than it was assured under a 1944 treaty. The excess water came from those occasions when more water was surging down the river than Imperial Valley farmers could use.”

Mexico will, however, still receive water from the Colorado River – but only at the level determined by the treaty.

The reservoir, a 23-mile stretch of the All-American Canal that will be lined with concrete to prevent seepage, is scheduled to be completed in August 2010.