Sanitary Commission Research Articles

In Service to the Fifth Wheel: Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Her Experiences in the United States Sanitary Commission

In Service to the Fifth Wheel: Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Her Experiences in the United States Sanitary Commission

Maryland water agency bans polybutylene pipes

A water and sewer agency in Maryland is the most recent government entity in the U.S. to ban use of polybutylene pipes in water distribution systems. Breaks in plastic water pipes costing homeowners thousands of dollars in damage spurred a ban on installation of new polybutylene plumbing, taking effect June 20, by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. The commission is a public water and sewer utility serving the suburban Maryland counties of Montgomery and Prince George's, which border the District of Columbia. Marjorie L. Johnson, commission communications director, believes her utility may be the first on the East Coast to ban polybutylene. A handful of Texas and California municipalities already have bans in effect, she notes. Her commission's ban extends to all underground, aboveground, and in-wall uses of polybutylene water pipes. Unlike copper—which may crimp, reducing water pressure, or develop pinholes, causing small leaks—polybutylene pipe fails catastrophically, splitting or breaking sud...

Effect of Temperature Changes on Water‐Main Breaks

The principles of temperature‐related stresses are discussed. Statistical evidence of temperature effects on water‐main breaks are also presented from the Washington (D.C.) Suburban Sanitary Commission's experience. A strong correlation was found between water temperature and main break activity. The temperature drop was shown to be a significant factor. A new low in the water temperature resulted in a sharp increase in the number of main breaks. The breaks were mostly circular and occurred on grey cast‐iron pipes ranging in size from 76 mm (3 in.) to 203 mm (8 in.) A failure mechanism is presented to explain the complex nature of temperature related main breaks. The mechanisms explains why break activity is not uniquely related to the temperature. It also shows how different break activities may occur under similar temperature‐drop conditions. The complex nature of temperature‐related water‐main breaks does not lend itself to a simple forecasting model. However, a practical and simple procedure is presented that may be used to provide advanced warning of high break activity. This information helps the utility manager to prepare for the heavy repair demand on the maintenance crew.

The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California, 1861-1864

The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California, 1861-1864

From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 , and: The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845-1871 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS343 Not surprisingly, the most illuminating of Fremont's letters are those covering the Civil War years. While John Fremont served in St. Louis as commander ofthe Union's Department ofthe West, "General Jessie," as she was known to critics, became her husband's "secretary and other self," participating in staff meetings, seeing visitors, and presiding over Fremont's headquarters in his absence. In August of 1861, John Fremont issued his controversial emancipation proclamation, freeing the slaves of Missouri Rebels; for the rest of the war, Jessie Fremont publicly defended her embattled husband, writing a novel and even meeting personally with President Lincoln to justify John Fremont's actions. At the same time, she contributed to wartime relief efforts, most notably the Western Sanitary Commission. Her wartime letters shed light not only on her and her husband's activities, but on the general conduct of the war in the West. When paired with editor Pamela Herr's fine biography ofJessie Benton Fremont , the new volume makes a strong case for the historical significance of a remarkable woman but leaves the reader wanting to learn more—about Fremont 's abolitionism, the 1856 campaign, her thoughts on women's suffrage and on Reconstruction, and her unusual marriage, among other subjects. Despite the extensive documentation of her life, Fremont proves surprisingly difficult to get to know; thanks to the efforts of Herr and Spence, she is no longer difficult to meet. Elizabeth R. Varón Yale University From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880. By Joseph P. Reidy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pp. 360. $45.00.) The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 18451871 . By Vicki Vaughn Johnson. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 328. $39.95.) In each of these books the trauma of the Civil War serves as a central event that forced change upon the South. Reidy looks at the development of new economic and social relationships in the agrarian economy that emerged from the destruction of slavery. Johnson examines the South's commercial leaders as they formulated their vision for the region before and after the war. Reidy's study moves back and forth between a tightly focused case study of the five counties surrounding Macon in Central Georgia to a larger world stage on which we see the emancipation of slaves in the Americas and serfs in Russia. Though grounded in the particular events, places, and people of a local empirical study, Reidy grapples with big questions about the transforming experience the war imposed on slaves, planters, and yeomen. In the early chapters he traces the development of central Georgia, comparing it to 344CIVIL WAR HISTORY Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. No sooner were the Creek Indians dispossessed of the land than a swarm of land-hungry settlers transformed this backcounty first into a crude yeoman's economy of subsistence and trade and, then rapidly , into a prosperous cotton plantation economy in which the planters' wealth and power rested solidly on their command of land and slaves. "The Thomas Sutpens were coming, with the Will Varners close behind," Reidy tells us early on, summarizing much of the story that is to follow. (15) The so-called Old South, in this vivid picture of its expansion, was a young, dynamic society constructed within a generation of its frontier beginnings . Lines of authority that evolved among planters, slaves, and yeomen were all defined by ongoing struggles for power. The depression that followed the Panic of 1 837 allowed the planter class to consolidate its wealth and position . It was this class, Reidy contends, that imposed its ideals of social hierarchy and patriarchy over slaves and yeomen. Planters employed the power of the lash and political control of the state to enforce its will and advance its interests. Whatever tension remained in the contests of power between master and slave, planter and yeomen, the planters, Reidy argues, had "largely succeeded in constructing a patriarchal world" and, by the time of the secession crisis, were able, "politically and ideologically," to rally "both smallholders and nonslaveholders behind the essential principles of plantation slavery" (57, 56). This planter...

Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission Implements GIS

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) recently completed a cooperative pilot project with Montgomery and Prince George's counties, Md., in which a complete 59‐layer geographic information system (GIS) data base was developed for a portion of its service area. During the pilot project described in this article, planimetric and parcel data were developed, and water and sewer facility maps were digitzed. The procedures and approach defined during the pilot project will be used to develop a full‐scale data base. This article describes and evaluates the design process, the conversion methods, and the application developed.

Developing and Utilizing Data Bases for Water Main Rehabilitation

Managing the maintenance and rehabilitation of a water distribution network can be greatly improved with the aid of an automated data‐manipulating system. The building blocks of a data‐base system are described in this article. When appropriate, examples are cited from the practical experience of the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Volume V, The California Frontier, 1863-1865 (review)

274CIVIL WAR HISTORY a foothold in California. Thompson's belief that a "Confederate Manifest Destiny" could have ever become reality is tenuous at best. Nevertheless, this is a useful book for anyone interested in Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley's New Mexico campaign. The actual text of the diary is only sixty-five pages, covering the period from April 1861 until July 1862, and many of Private Howell's entries only inform the reader how far the command went on any given day. Even the battle of Glorieta, where the Texans were buried in a mass grave, consists of a six sentence entry. Thompson has compensated for the lack of substance in the diary by using the first fifty-one pages to summarize the campaign and write a historiographical essay describing lesser-known works, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers that relate to it. Unfortunately , many of these tantalizing sources are unpublished and accessible only to the most diligent researcher. Still, this is a useful work and would be valuable to anyone with an interest in Sibley's New Mexico campaign. Anne J. Bailey Georgia Southern University The Papers ofFrederick Law Olmsted: Volume V, The California Frontier, 1863-1865. Edited by Victoria Post Ranney. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xxvi, 848. $48.50.) The fifth of twelve projected volumes in this fine series finds Olmsted in California, away from his New York home and his wartime work at the Sanitary Commission. In August 1863, Olmsted was offered the superintendency of the Mariposa estate gold mines in California and at such a salary that he thought his financial security would be permanently assured. The paradox of this volume of the Olmsted papers is that although a business interest took Olmsted out of the war effort, he nonetheless found the time to think and write most carefully about some of the great issues of the war. The correspondence and manuscript fragments in this volume show Olmsted writing about the relationship between three of the great social dramas of nineteenth-century America: immigration and urbanization; the frontier and the westward movement; and the struggle between slavery and freedom. Editor Victoria Post Ranney and her colleagues have produced a volume in which Olmsted's concern for the fate of American civilization outweighed his narrow pecuniary considerations. Specifically, Olmsted wrestled in the later years of the war with the following question: Could a democratic republic produce a form of civilization higher than that of a monarchy or slaveholding oligarchy, or was democracy destined to produce a mudsill society? In his earlier writings Olmsted faced this BOOK REVIEWS275 problem, but never so squarely as in the writings contained in Volume V. The contents of this volume show the range of Olmsted's wartime interests. In addition to correspondence about the workings of the gold mines at Mariposa, Olmsted undertook several landscape design projects in California, including a plan for the Berkeley campus of the University of California and a plan for opening public access to Yosemite Valley. He continued to correspond with New York friends at the Sanitary Commission and also maintained a lengthy correspondence with Calvert Vaux about Central Park affairs and about the design of Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Some of the most interesting correspondence is with E. L. Godkin, mainly about the launching of the Nation magazine, but also about Olmsted's interest in heading the Freedmen's Bureau. Editor Ranney and her associates saved the best item for last: heretofore unpublished manuscript fragments of a book Olmsted intended to write on the civilization question, "The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America," written mainly in 1865 when the Mariposa estate had gone bankrupt. The "Pioneering Condition" amounts to a sort of frontier thesis, but one that scarcely anticipated Turner. Quite to the contrary, Olmsted wrote in the New England tradition of seeing the frontier as a source of disorder, even barbarism. The violent racial and class antagonisms of Mariposa represented the worst of the frontier. His pre-war southern trips convinced him that slavery perpetuated the frontier stage of civilization , and Olmsted linked the violence of the mining frontier to the violence of the Old South...

Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855-1870 (review)

276CIVIL WAR HISTORY president, a "... low-bred Southerner, consequently an essentially uncivilized man ..." (354). The editors and the press deserve commendation for the splendid work on this volume. The statement on editorial policy clearly lays out how the editors went about their work. The notes fully identify persons mentioned in Olmsted's correspondence. The contemporary illustrations and maps of California are carefully matched to Olmsted's observations of such places as San Francisco, Yosemite, and Mariposa. Victoria Ranney's introduction concisely explains Olmsted's business affairs at Mariposa, and Charles E. Beveridge, in a short comment, helpfully links Olmsted's "Pioneer Condition" to his earlier social survey work at the Sanitary Commission. The editors also took great care to explain how they reconstructed the fragments of "The Pioneer Condition." This is an important series, and libraries should make every effort to collect all the volumes. Those interested in western history should also take note of a side to Olmsted they may not have known existed. James W. Oberly University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855-1870. Edited by Philip N. Racine. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Pp. x, 597. $49.95.) "The journal will be as a looking glass into & to see the past as far as my farm & means are concerned," David Golightly Harris exclaimed on New Year's Day 1868 (454). Harris, a small slaveowner from the South Carolina Upcountry, kept a series of journals between 1855 and 1870. Wofford College professor Philip N. Racine has produced a beautifully edited edition of them, adding an edifying introduction, complete annotations , genealogical charts, maps and photographs. Never as successful as his wealthy father, David Harris lived with his wife Emily and their seven children in a small three-room house, located in Spartanburg District, S.C. Harris, a piedmont farmer, raised mostly foodstuffs with the aid of ten slaves. Piedmont Farmer traces the family through the coming of the war, the war, and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction. When the war came, Harris's first priority was to his farm and family. Taxes, inflation, and shortages soon took their toll. Forced to speculate in the selling of yarn, Harris explained in April 1863, "I do not like to be called a speculater, but I want to make some thing to live upon" (286). Age forty-five, he was able to avoid service until the Conscription Act of July 1863. "Parting with my family will be worse than meeting the yankeys," he predicted in March 1862 (238). He served only six months and later hired a substitute. At one point Harris won a furlough home by capturing a notorious deserter. BOOK REVIEWS277 If most white Southerners, like Harris, went to war to protect their families, then the war itself undermined their rationale for going. Particularly moving are the passages in the journal written by Emily. The task of running the farm fell squarely on her shoulders. Her travails included sickness, a troublesome overseer, recalcitrant slaves, escaped Yankee prisoners in her gin-house, and the threat of an attack by deserters. "A few more years of this kind of life will wear me out," she wrote in November 1864. "I feel old and miserable and ugly. ... I expect no more rest this side [of] the grave. The wants of the family are never satisfied and their wants weigh heavily on me" (350). She even began doubting her sanity, recalling that one of her mother-in-law's objections to their marriage was insanity in her side of the family. The Piedmont Farmer deals with a whole host of important issues, including the treatment of slaves, the adjustment to Reconstruction, and the impact of taxes on white families before, during, and after the war. Harris did not free his slaves until August 1865. He was subsequently unable to find suitable renters, white or black. For Harris one thing remained constant: the burden of taxation. He ended his journal on March 5, 1870 with: "Taxes has come again & as usual, little or no money" (496). We are indebted to Philip Racine for making these important journals available to us. Edmund L. Drago College of Charleston The Creation of...

The Western Sanitary Commission.

Eighty years ago, in addressing the Mississippi Valley Historical As- sociation, Roland G. Usher remarked: Probably the name Western Sanitary Commission connotes little more to most students of the Civil War than the fact, so naturally inferred from the name itself, that it was a western philanthropic society engaged on a small scale in that humane work for which the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission were so noted. Usher reported that histories of the period gave it, at most, one or two lines. Regrettably this still holds true today. Only three works of recent vintage, other than local histories, have given the WSC more than scant attention. William Quentin Maxwell's Lincoln's Fifth Wheel (1956) discusses it as a thorn in the flesh of the USSC and gives a fleeting paragraph or two to the scope of its work. Robert Bremner's monumental study The Public Good (1980) acknowledges it as a separate organization and gives passing recognition to certain aspects of its work, primarily that with refugees. Louis Gerteis in his study From Contraband to Freedman (1973) cites the efforts of the WSCs president, James E. Yeatman, among blacks in the lower Mississippi Valley but says nothing about the broader role of the WSC in that area.' Yet the Western Sanitary Commission played a critical role in helping to alleviate suffering by troops and refugees in the Mississippi Valley and the Trans-Mississippi Theater during the Civil War while fiercely asserting its independence from its better known counterpart, the United States Sanitary Commission. Arising out of the peculiar circumstances of the war in Missouri, before war's end the WSC would receive and

Winter Worries: Why Do Water Mains Break?

Unraveling the mysteries of pipe failures allows the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission to make cost‐effective, sound engineering decisions on ways to prevent breaks. Further, by tracking break patterns and trends, the Commission will be better able to identify mains that are likely to fail, and to rehabilitate or replace them before they actually break. The article analyzes a study being conducted by the Commission on main failures which emphasizes analyzing samples of broken mains and soils from trenches of failures.

Private Organizations, Public Purposes: Nonprofits and Their Archives

From time of Revolution onward, Americans have used nonprofit organizations for purposes most European nations assign to state. Indeed initially, as Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin demonstrated in their classic study of state economic policy, American legislators and courts drew an uncertain distinction between public, government agencies and what later came to be seen as private corporations, whether for-profit or nonprofit. In case of nonprofit organizations, distinction remains unclear. The Dartmouth College case (1819) went far to establish autonomy of private charitable trusts, but it did not end American practice of assigning state powers to nonprofit organizations; as Daniel Webster put it in his brief, Dartmouth was private charity controlled by private trustees: the use being public, in no way diminishes their legal estate in property. The powers granted private United States Sanitary Commission by surgeon general during Civil War found counterparts of a sort in mail-policing authority granted by federal postal authorities to Anthony Comstock and other agents of Society for Suppression of Vice and authority over children assigned by nineteenth-century states to private orphanages and humane societies. The phenomenon continues to this day, for example, in delegation of arrest powers by city of Cleveland, Ohio, to security officers employed by such private, nonprofit,

Jane Turner Censer (editor), The papers of Frederick Law Olmstead, vol. IV, Defending the Union: the Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission 1861–1863, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 8vo, pp. xxv, 757, illus. £26.50.

Jane Turner Censer (editor), The papers of Frederick Law Olmstead, vol. IV, Defending the Union: the Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission 1861–1863, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 8vo, pp. xxv, 757, illus. £26.50.

Privies, Progressivism, and Public Schools: Health Reform and Education in the Rural South, 1909-1920

NONE OF THE SOUTHERN SOCIAL REFORMS OF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA were individually more important or together more coherent than the modernization of public health and public education. The two reform movements began in similar ways: with the creation of the Southern Education Board in 1901 and, eight years later, with the establishment of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission. I These organizations, coalitions of middle-class activists, reforming professionals, university presidents, and northern philanthropists, espoused methods practiced by progressives elsewhere: exposure and publicity, manipulation of public opinion, and bureaucratic and interventionist social policy. Historians agree that studies of health and education are central to understanding southern social reform, but they disagree about the role of Rockefeller philanthropy. 2 Some historians stress the humani

Medical advances during the Civil War.

The contributions to medical care that developed during the Civil War have not been fully appreciated, probably because the quality of care administered was compared against modern standards rather than the standards of the time. The specific accomplishments that constituted major advances were as follows. 1. Accumulation of adequate records and detailed reports for the first time permitted a complete military medical history. This led to the publication of the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, which was identified in Europe as the first major academic accomplishment by US medicine. 2. Development of a system of managing mass casualties, including aid stations, field hospitals, and general hospitals, set the pattern for management of the wounded in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. 3. The pavilion-style general hospitals, which were well ventilated and clean, were copied in the design of large civilian hospitals over the next 75 years. 4. The importance of immediate, definitive treatment of wounds and fractures was demonstrated and it was shown that major operative procedures, such as amputation, were optimally carried out in the first 24 hours after wounding. 5. The importance of sanitation and hygiene in preventing infection, disease, and death among the troops in the field was demonstrated. 6. Female nurses were introduced to hospital care and Catholic orders entered the hospital business. 7. The experience and training of thousands of physicians were upgraded and they were introduced to new ideas and standards of care. These included familiarity with prevention and treatment of infectious disease, with anesthetic agents, and with surgical principles that rapidly advanced the overall quality of American medical practice. 8. The Sanitary Commission was formed, a civilian-organized soldier's relief society that set the pattern for the development of the American Red Cross.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV: Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U. S. Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV: Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U. S. Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV: Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863. Frederick Law Olmsted , Jane Turner Censer

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV: Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863. Frederick Law Olmsted , Jane Turner Censer Bonnie Ellen BlusteinBonnie Ellen Blustein Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 78, Number 4Dec., 1987 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/354607 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1987 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV. Defending the Union: The Civil War and the Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863 (review)

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV. Defending the Union: The Civil War and the Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863 (review)

The Union Cavalry in the Civil War: Volume 111, The War in the West, 1861-1865 (review)

184CINTL WAR history may surprise the modernreader; it should remind us, particularly before Second Bull Run, that McClellan was regarded as the army's savior to many in the North who wanted a vigorous prosecution of the War. Two other features of this volume of the Olmsted papers bear mention . Jane Turner Censer's introduction is excellent, particularly in attempting to place the work of the Sanitary Commission in historical perspective. She makes the interesting argument that the Civil War marks the tentative beginning of the "organizational society" that historians normally associate with the Progressive era. Attention to administrative setup and the use of questionnaires and other social science methods are the hallmarks of the twentieth-century expert, but at least in Olmsted's work, we see some of this appear in 1861. The endnotes to each document are the other outstanding feature about the editors's work on Volume IV. An enormous amount of solid research has gone into identifying all the correspondents and names and events that appear in Olmsted's writings. This volume continues the high standard set by the first three, and readers of Civil War History should make sure that their libraries have made a commitment to purchase this important series. James W. Oberly University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire The Union Cavalry in the Civil War: Volume III, The War in the West, 1861-1865. By Stephen Z. Starr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Pp. xv, 616. $32.50.) With this volume, completed before his death in 1985, Stephen Z. Stancrowned his trilogy on northern horse soldiers in the Civil War. As with the preceeding volumes, Starr deeply mined the rich Official Records and found many insights through his close study of regimental histories. The result is a lively and detailed narrative covering raids, skirmishes, depredations, and patrols, as well as the role of cavalry and mounted infantry in the major battles from the Alleghenies west to Missouri, and from the Ohio River south to Mansfield, Brice's Crossroads, Nashville, and Selma. Starr analyzes a number of major points. For instance, he contends that the consistent lack of cavalry equipment and arms hampered the outfitting and training of Yankee horsemen throughout the war, indicating "the fallacy of the commonly accepted notion that northern industry, going into high gear as soon as the war broke out, supplied Union armies . . . with a superabundance of all the weapons and gear they needed to overwhelm the agricultural South" (p. 9). As late as the winter of 1863-64 some Union horse units in the West still were armed with several different types of carbines and were shy of other basic accouterments . Starr concludes that "the greater the distance [from Washing- BOOK REVIEWS185 ton, D.C], theworse the weapons" (p. 592). Furthermore, the poor quality and low numbers of horses obtained by the Union restricted the training and professional development of the arm blanche. Despite these problems, senior field commanders claimed time and again that they never had enough cavalry regiments or mounted infantry units. (It is interesting to note that the Civil War commanders' call for more cavalry sounded quite similar to pleas from army district and department commanders in the South during Reconstruction.) U. S. Grant, William S. Rosecrans, Don Carlos Buell, and others all complained to higher headquarters about their need for more cavalry, which they then misused , diverting horsemen to guarding depots or wagon trains rather than screening operations or reconnaissance. For example, Grant at Shiloh failed to order mounted units to scout southward toward Corinth, and thus deprived himself of information about the Confederates that cavalry could have given him. Learning more about cavalry later, Grant authorized Benjamin H. Grierson's Mississippi raid, a turning point showing "that the Confederate cavalry no longer had a monopoly on the ability to conduct raids deep into enemy territory and that, indeed, the time had come when the hitherto despised Union cavalry was to be taken seriously, at least in the West" (p. 185). Surprisingly, none other than John Pope—"surely not one of the major intellects of the Regular Army," as Starr points out (p. 26)—first recommended combining scattered units into more forceful divisions...

Water Utility Makes Use of National Weather Service Radar

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) has tied into the National Weather Service radar system to take measures against the disruptions in water service caused by power outages during frequent severe summer thunderstorms. Advance warnings of potential outages enable the utility to fill elevated storage tanks to maximal capacities, and pumping can be done during offpeak periods when electric rates are lower. In addition, repair crews can be stationed at strategic locations in advance of storms so that they do not have to travel long distances to reach affected facilities. The WSSC purchased receiving equipment for the weather information, but the information itself is furnished free of charge by the National Weather Service.