On May 2nd, the EPA announced they will award over half a billion US dollars to water and wastewater treatment plants hit by Hurricane Sandy. Now that may seem laudable (if a bit slow), but further understanding exposes the silliness.

The plants that will get the awards either lost power or were flooded during the storm. These aren’t funds to repair damaged plants, for the most part, but to help plants in these areas of NY and NJ be better prepared for the next 100 year storm.

As you may know, under conditions of extreme flooding, most wastewater treatment plants don’t work well. They are designed to overflow in the worst flood situations, knowing that raw sewage gets so diluted in a huge flood that the actual pollution level is about the same as normal operations. That seems like reasonable design to me, when we understand we only have limited resources to solve our many societal problems.

The Federal Government, though, instead awards huge projects to plants that happened to be in the path of a certain storm. The next 100 storms will likely take different paths, so awarding all these upgrades based on geography just seems silly.

When governments make decisions to help certain projects for economic development, I sometimes see real value added. Projects that otherwise wouldn’t get done sometimes happen with a little government stimulus. Even these projects are hard to evaluate, since it’s impossible to know the project outcome had the government incentive not occurred.

So I think governments have a place to play in helping some construction projects, I just don’t like poorly made decisions.