The day the water stopped flowing—a must read for Greensboro taxpayers

On Tuesday afternoon, May 24, 1994 after a heat wave and a frenzy of lawn irrigation, water stopped flowing from faucets in northwest Greensboro. Businesses were forced to close. The city and the news media went bonkers over the water outage. It was the "event" the Randleman Dam scammers had been waiting for.

“We knew this was going to happen sooner or later,” said dam scammer Tom Phillips, former Greensboro City Council member and member of the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority (PTRWA). Nobody seemed to know or care that this day's water failure was entirely preventable!
 

With dam fools like Tom Phillips hyping a water shortage, Utility Director Ray Shaw was able to take a calculated risk and allow his water works to fail. Phillips’ statement revealed both his ignorance of how a water system works and his marketing savvy for pitching an unnecessary dam. His and other city leaders’ comments insulated Shaw from any blame and paved the way for City Council to advance its dam agenda.

UTILITY DIRECTOR RAY SHAW SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRED! Why?—because had a fire broken out in northwest Greensboro that day, LIVES COULD HAVE BEEN LOST and PROPERTY WOULD HAVE BEEN DESTROYED—all because of the dam fantasy of a few city leaders and developer/profiteers like Robbie Perkins and Dick Grubar who sat on Greensboro’s City Council!

Ray Shaw knew that a small-scale distribution system failure would help him achieve his career dream and theirs too—the Randleman Dam. The "Shaw of Utilities" survived the system failure without a scratch. And boy did City Council love the result! Can you hear me now citizens of Greensboro? What part of conspiracy do you not understand?

 Not a single news reporter or city council member ever asked, “Could this water failure have been prevented?” Instead, city council put on its blinders and forged ahead with a re-action plan that included the start-up of a Water Conservation program—me, and the push for the approval of the Randleman Dam. Years of dishonest propaganda followed before the dam was finally approved. The past decade has revealed the city’s claim about “running out of water” was a fabrication.

This is how Greensboro government conducts business when no checks and balances are in place and spineless local news reporters and their editors refuse to investigate the politics, profits and pride behind every public works project. This forgotten event on May 24, 1994 is what helped secure an unnecessary and astronomically expensive new dam and reservoir for the City of Greensboro.

There were numerous cost-effective alternatives to the Randleman Dam that would have increased Greensboro’s water supply and reduced demand. But thanks to the dam scammers all of the better alternatives were scrapped to secure the Randleman Dam. And the result—the Greensboro water works monopoly is now radically overbuilt while real water use is less than it was 15 years ago!  

And to make matters worse, Randleman Dam has not attracted the industrial customers that were expected to relocate to Greensboro and swallow up the huge surplus of RanRez water that Greensboro has purchased. Residential water users must now pick up the tab for the industries that were supposed to relocate to Greensboro.

Now you know that one preventable water distribution failure in 1994 changed everything! It was the water failure the dam scammers needed to get their project moving.


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