This bit from a news item:
"The U.S. EPA’s WaterCARE program — the acronym representing “Community Assistance for Resiliency and Excellence” — is providing 10 communities around the country with money and technical assistance to revamp their drinking and wastewater infrastructures" reminded me of when I worked for the Johns-Manville Corporation during their bankruptcy filed in response to all of the asbestos personal injury lawsuits.

Toward the end of asbestos personal injury part, we had to look at other pending lawsuits against the company to determine their status, not all of the to do with asbestos. One of them was a breach of warranty and negligence case for up to $6 million (in 1977 dollars) brought by the small town of Moosehead in Maine.

Back in the late 1960s and early 70s, the company marketed what they called a moving bed filter system for sewage treatment. The town of Moosehead obtained federal funding to build a new treatment plant that used the Johns-Manville system.

Up until then, the town of Moosehead didn't treat its sewage. Residents and businesses released their raw sewage directly into the lake. It's a very large lake, so they probably figured that was okay. Out of sight plus dilution equals out of mind.

The reason the town sued the company was their sewage plant never worked. One of the reasons given by Johns-Manville was there wasn't enough volume of material going through the filtration system for it to properly do its job.

The paperwork in the file I was looking at described how at one point, the interim solution was to put a very long pipe out into the middle of the lake to carry the sewage away from the town. It was winter, and the pipe was placed on ice, slated to drift to the lake bottom once spring came. Townspeople were very upset about this visual reminder of their sewage treatment problem - not so out of sight out of mind.

I never knew how many of those moving bed filtration systems Johns-Manville sold, and if any of them were successful, but they dropped it from their product line, and Moosehead might have been the only one.



My job was to summarize the case then turn it over to the attorneys so they could hire local counsel in Maine to determine if the case was still viable and should be processed through the bankruptcy court proceedings to get some kind of pennies on the dollar settlement.

I googled it this morning, and you'll be glad to know that Moosehead now has a functioning sewage plant.