To the editor:

By alerting us to the proposed demolition of the 114 year-old Child Street pumping station, Ned Connors and Patrick Malone’s letter “BCWA’s Historical Buildings Deserve Better Than This” has opened the door to the community’s imagination for how, rather than demolition, the existing buildings might be put to good use. Here is one idea.

But first, ask a typical person where their food comes from, and they’ll answer: Dunno.

Ask where their electricity comes from, and they’ll answer: Dunno.
And where their water comes from: Dunno.

To the typical person, the land of “Dunno” provides all the resources we depend upon. Magically.

But of course that’s not true. Our resources come to us from very specific places, delivered by very specific means.

And so one purpose to which the old pumping station might be put is as a water museum (I don’t believe a water museum currently exists in Rhode Island). As a museum it could serve as a great educational resource, “un-Dunnoing” the answer to the question where does our water come from?

But more, if properly conceived, it could serve as a great hands-on, interactive, inter-disciplinary educational resource, not only for our district students but for students state-wide.

If, as Connors and Malone claim, the 1908 facility was at the time “the most scientifically advanced water pumping and treatment facility in Rhode Island,” all sorts of doors open to explore what that statement means.

For example:

Engineering: What preceded the new facility, and how was water provided to the community prior to 1908? What machines and flow systems were designed and implemented in 1908 to deliver 2.6 million gallons of water a day?

History: How did the water system prior to 1908 affect the community, its farming, trades, general commerce, as well as public facilities? Then, after 1908, how did the new pump station improve the community’s relationship with its water?

Biology: What micro-organisms or pollutants might have been present in drinking water prior to 1908 (and their sources) that the new pumping and treatment plant removed?

Chemistry: Assuming water went untreated prior to 1908, what were the new processes water was treated by before leaving the pump station, and how did those treatments work to purify the water?

Human health: If the State Department of Health declared prior to 1908 that the Bristol-Warren water was the worst in the state, what did that mean from a human-health perspective (were people getting sick from the water?), and how did the new pumping and treatment station improve public health in the years that followed?

Further, a museum could tell us about our access to (and disposal of) water today: where it is sourced, how it gets here, what keeps it flowing, what happens to it once it’s down the drain.

Those are just some tangents. Surely there are others. But given the existing site, and its proximity to our schools, this facility could be turned into a first-rate museum for our students (and their parents) to explore the various scientific and cultural threads that were woven into and spun out of the 1908 structure.

If repurposing the former National Grid building for commercial use has merit, surely repurposing the former pumping and treatment center for educational use has merit as well. To whatever use it may be put, the town should envision something creative within that Child Street building, and not see it demolished for lack of imagination.

Jerry Blitefield
Beach Street
Warren