Our theme for the month of March is “cities.”
When I think about cities I think about sewers. I think about water mains and electric services and road repaving projects.
It wasn’t always this way; when I was a kid all I thought of was traffic and people. Growing up in rural Oregon, cities were very foreign and intimidating. I gave almost no thought to the services and communities that can make cities more convenient, to Young Lillie it was just too daunting.
Adult Lillie still finds cities daunting, but for different reasons. At my day job as an engineer for the local utility, I live by the motto “don’t do work in the city if you don’t have to,” and it’s probably not for the reasons you would think. It’s not because it’s unsafe, or too busy, or because traffic control is a nightmare (though all of those things might also be true). It’s because after decades of adding more and more infrastructure, there’s just no place to put anything new.
Most things people don’t even notice—gas mains are occasionally marked with a valve box, underground electric has handholds every 500 feet that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t tripping over them, and we only notice sanitary manholes when they’re adjacent to a pothole. Fire hydrants are probably the most visible marker of the spaghetti-mess of utilities, and even those are so mundane I bet you can’t remember the last hydrant you saw.
But for me, for forty hours of my week, that tangled web consumes my every moment. There are lots of little nuances that make my job complex in general, and are only more challenging within the city limits where finding a place to run a new gas main feels like sending a camel through the eye of a needle.
Recently, I was handed a partially complete project in the city of Rochester, where I work. My supervisor said “the drawing is easy, the work will be a nightmare.” She was right. Every two weeks I attend a meeting with eight different utilities, the city, the highway department, and a handful of others. We always have some conflict to discuss, and no one ever leaves very happy with our outcomes.
Today, I got called out to the job site to answer some questions, and was struck by how truly brilliant the infrastructure is. Sure, it’s a pain in the butt to make changes, but how wild is it that thousands of people have water and power, sewers and phone lines and fiber, just quietly working right under their feet? Despite the chaos that I looked down at in my tie-in hole, I was impressed to think so many resources are right at our fingertips, and most people don’t have to lift a finger to make it possible.
It’s so different from how I grew up, where I remember the summer my dad repaired our septic leach field because everything smelled terrible and I couldn’t use the toilet at our house for a week. Even this year, when I went home for Christmas, there was a leak in our water line somewhere so we only had water in the house for an hour or so a day, trying to conserve the little water we had in our cistern.
Gas service, trash service, and fire hydrants were only dreamt of in my small farming community, and more than once we were without power for days on end. It was normal for us, but I can’t help but notice how convenient it is to be able to turn on my shower whenever I want and not worry about taking my trash to the dump myself.
Undeniably, there is plenty of city infrastructure that could do with some improvement: the urban heat islands created by the concrete jungles, the increased carbon emissions from idling vehicles, the lack of public transportation, hostile architecture designed to make trouble for people experiencing homelessness, to name a few things. And don’t get me wrong, a lot would have to change for me to abandon my “don’t do work in the city” mantra.
But there are lots of things in cities that we don’t notice until they go wrong. They’re hidden beneath the streets and working diligently behind the scenes, easy to be taken for granted.
Lillie grew up on a forty-acre hay farm in Central Oregon, making the trek to Michigan to study mechanical engineering and sustainability. After graduating in 2020, she moved to Rochester, NY, where her day job as an engineer for the local gas utility funds her outdoor adventures, love of books, various craft projects, and investment in her new community.
What an interesting perspective! Thank you, Lillie, for opening our eyes to the systems and people that keep our cities running that we tend to take for granted.