An Ordinary Day for a Manager of a Manufactured Housing Community
Everyone should at least flip through Edward Tufte’s books once. The first book that Tufte published is called The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The second is called Envisioning Information and the third is Visual Explanations. They never get boring, but they all come back to the same central issue, i.e. there are good ways to present information and there are bad ways to present it. Good ways filter out the noise and make important information salient and a little strange to the viewer. Media that can be used to illustrate information include pictures, maps, charts, diagrams, tables, graphs and spreadsheets. An interesting website that examines current news data using Tufte-inspired methods can be found at visualcapitalist.com.
On the night of March 25, the water main in my park in northern New York sprung a leak. I learned about it the next day, when I received an automated email from Metron Farnier, the water metering service that we use in that park, that told me that the park had used thirty-five thousand gallons of water in the previous twelve hours. Ordinary usage in that park is six to seven thousand gallons per twenty-four hour period. Since the 26th was a Sunday, I did not initially want to bother Mike, the manager of that park. Then, I logged on to Waterscope and saw that the shit was, in fact, quite deep, so I texted Mike, Could you please find out what is going on? It looks like we have a serious leak. Two minutes later, my phone farted, ‘OK’.
My phone farted again shortly after four the next morning, with another text from Mike. Leak fixed. I am heading home. When we spoke later that day, he told me that he had driven to the park around five O’clock Sunday afternoon and had looked for the leak. At eleven thirty, after crawling under all of the homes looking for the source of the problem, he went into the pole barn to get new batteries for his head lamp. When he walked in the door, he heard a hissing sound and saw that there was a leak in an above-ground run of pipe in the back corner of the barn. He cobbled together a fix using parts he had in the barn and headed home around 4:00 AM. The pipe burst again Monday afternoon and he fixed it again. On Tuesday morning, he texted to tell me that the second fix had held. I asked him, ‘Any junkies?’
-No.
-Covid?
-No.’
-Locusts, floods or drought?
-Heh.
(Those pipes shouldn’t even be there. There is no water service in the barn. The pipes are a vestige of the water system put in by the guy who developed the park during the seventies. Before the town brought water service out to that location, the park was fed by a well that was located on the spot where the pole barn now stands, across the access road from the inhabited portion of the park. A pipe from the well was run underneath the road to feed the water mains, which ran in a series of loops under the homes. When town water became available, it was connected to a corner of the park far away from the pole barn – but the old guy did not bother to cap the T that led from the barn to the water mains. So the pipe from the old well to the water mains is still live. Like an appendix made out of galvanized steel, it serves no purpose any more but still can cause trouble.)
There are four ways to represent what happened. The first is shown in Table 1, which is a screen shot of water usage in that park during the applicable time. The blue area represents water that passed through the master meter. The green area represents water that passed through meters located on residents’ homes. Any blue area that is not contiguous with green area represents water that leaked from the mains without being consumed by a resident. The blue mesa that starts during the night of 03/25-03/26 and ends in the early morning of 03/27 represents the initial leak. The blunt obelisk that starts around noon on the 27th and ends in the afternoon of the same day is the second leak:
Table 1:
Illustration 1 is a picture of the leak. It does not depict the total volume of water lost, but it is an image of the strength of the flow at a single moment. Video 1 conveys the sound and strength of flow over several seconds.
Illustration 1:
Video 1:
Water is usually measured by volume. In this country, the most common measure of volume is gallons. It is also sometimes measured in cubic feet (cfs), or hundreds of cubic feet (ccfs) One cubic foot is equivalent to 7.48 gallons, and one ccf is equivalent to 748 gallons. In the past week, park residents consumed 33,957 gallons (i.e., there were 33,957 ‘gallons consumed’) and 94,357 gallons passed through the park master meter (94,357 ‘gallons used’). The difference between those two indicates that 60,400 gallons were leaked, or wasted. If you convert to cubic feet, 4,539 cfs were consumed, 12,613 cfs were used and 8,064 cfs were wasted. Punctis motis, 45.38 ccfs were consumed, 126.15 ccfs were used and 80.77 ccfs were wasted.[1] Most of the wasted water is attributable to the two leaks that occurred between the night of 03/25 and the afternoon of 03/27.
Readers who live outside the United States, Liberia and Myanmar can convert the foregoing into metric units.
Water can also be measured in dollars. The town charges me $5 per ccf. Residents pay me the same amount for water that they consume, but nobody reimburses me for water that seeps into the ground. The 80.77 ccfs that were leaked over that thirty-six hour period cost me $403.85. That will not put me out of business, but it is big enough to notice. The final, and most important, representation of the leak will appear on the water bill that the town will send me early next month. I am glad that Mike was able to plug the leak when he did.
[1] Pedants should ignore differences attributable to rounding effects.