Old plumbing nourishes new scientists
By MELODY JAMESON
Melody Jameson photos
America’s carmakers have nothing on the Lennard High School Robotics Club members who also have built an electrically-powered race car. Here, Ashley Van Meter, a Lennard freshman and enthusiastic STEM student, demonstrates their one-seater for The Community Club in Valencia Lakes last week. The VL residents have donated nearly $9,000 to underwrite Robotics Club projects.
In what world do onerous outdoor water pipes nourish the ambitions of future astrophysicists and biological researchers and chemical engineers?
The short answer is: Ours. The long answer has been evolving for more than a decade.
The two twains met Monday evening (Oct. 8) in the Valencia Lakes Clubhouse when members of the Lennard High School Robotics Club learned they are to receive nearly $9,000 for new experiential projects to add to their award-winning list that ranges from electric race cars to a levitating chair occupied by a human to a robotic arm.
The money comes from some 1,400 melted down backflow preventers — aka backflow valves — retrieved from residential yards across the Valencia Lakes community after years of controversy and resistance in the first of a Hillsborough County multi-community program to replace the objectionable above-ground valves with much smaller below-ground devices.
The backflow backlash saga
The backflow preventer controversy, which has spread across the country and currently is raging in California, began in Hillsborough County in early 2007 when a Sun City Center resident received notice from the county’s water department mandating that he install a backflow valve on his property at his expense — somewhere between $600 to $1,000, depending on the plumber. The reason? The southside resident irrigated his landscaping through piping from a lake. Therefore, the county contended, it risked cross contamination of the public drinking water supply to his home with untreated lake water. The resident’s questions found their way to another SCC citizen, activist Dave Brown who had made a reputation insisting on updated, accurate county flood maps for the retiree center.
Brown recalled that as he probed for the background story on the backflow preventer installation mandate, he got more obfuscation than information, more deception than details. “I just got ticked off,” he said.
Spurred by that burr, Brown undertook to understand the county support of the large metal valves jutting up from the ground and touted to be a public safety matter. It led him, in turn, to disproving both the functionality and the so-called safety features of the preventers. In the course of his 11-year campaign, Brown calculates he put in “thousands of hours,” spent an estimated $10,000 in cash, traveled untold thousands of miles, created a dozen websites and uploaded 13 videos to the internet as he took on first the county administration and then the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). He remembers meetings too numerous to count, arguing pointedly that the expensive, unsightly preventers were subject to breakdown and prevented nothing. He demonstrated repeatedly with colored water how the valves actually aided – and did not prevent – contamination of the potable water supply. Governmental officials cried foul, plumbers complained and Brown patiently persisted.
After raising a total of $8,867 from scrapping out their discarded backflow preventers, Valencia Lakes residents donated the entire amount to the Lennard High School Robotics Club for future projects. Among the club members benefiting from the donation are: Victoria Rosa, Adrien Cagle, Alexis Cordova, Sauge Smith, Ashley Van Meter (kneeling) and Antonia Reyes-Garton, president of the Lennard club. Making the presentation on behalf of The VL Community Club is Bill Ruete. Behind the students are, from left, teachers Jordan Lujan and Jim Reve.
Over the years, Brown said he was visited without warning by an FBI agent and a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Deputy – who “never came back,” was refused an opportunity to describe his findings about the valves in public county meetings – an obstacle he overcame by speaking to many small groups such as homeowner associations, and was denied answers to even simple questions – which he countered by using Florida’s Public Records laws to obtain officials’ email communications about him and his efforts.
On the other hand, Brown points out he was given help at critical moments by officials such as Ronda Storms and Al Higgenbotham, then county commissioners, as well as Stacy White, a current commissioner, who worked to clear the way for public debate. And Brown credits The Observer News publications for their early and full coverage of the backflow issues, which “alerted both the public and the bureaucracy that all was not well in paradise.” He also points to the importance of a free press, recalling how county officials visited editors at both The Observer News and the Tampa Bay Times, suggesting the publications should ignore Brown’s endeavors. “Those editors listened politely and then upheld their First Amendment obligations,” he noted.
Despite the roadblocks and setbacks, Brown’s campaign began to bear fruit when Hillsborough County declared a moratorium on requiring residential property owners using alternative water sources for irrigation install backflow preventers. Then, in 2014, Florida’s DEP changed the state rule to allow the small below-ground “dual-check” valve connected to water meters to replace the larger, obstructive, unreliable RPZ above-ground apparatus. And, in 2015, Hillsborough County revised its ordinance to permit the same exchange at no direct charge to homeowners.
It still takes a village
Hillsborough’s backflow preventer exchange program got underway in 2017, according to Todd Pratt, a county spokesman for the water department, and is expected to continue through 2026. A total of 23 communities are on the exchange list, nine of them – or nearly 40 percent – in the South County.
Using principles of physics, Lennard Robotics Club members dreamed up the levitating lawn chair powered by a leaf blower, which Adrien Cagle, another Lennard science student, powered around the stage in the Valencia Lakes clubhouse for The Community Club.
Valencia Lakes topped the list and the old valve removal, new valve installation began in mid-2017, said Bill Ruete, a Valencia resident and active member of its VL Community Club to which all residents there belong. Ruete asserts that one of the first questions to arise in Valencia was “what to do with the old valves? The county didn’t want them, individual homeowners were not equipped to deal with them, the trash collectors were not interested and tossing them in the lake didn’t seem like a very good idea.”
During a VL Community Club meeting, members began tossing around the limited options and lit upon a scrap metal recovery, Ruete said. Along with fellow resident Don Gabin, he approached the onsite representative of GL Homes, Valencia’s developer, to ask for help. The developer joined in the effort, collecting the discarded valves as the county crew removed them and storing the old metal in a rented pod. Ruete noted. “Were it not for GL Homes, this (metal meltdown into dollars for donation) probably would not have happened,” he added.
Ruete said a scrap metal dealer in East Tampa, Edge Metals Recycling, was contacted and ultimately Edge workmen picked up four loads of the old valves, melting them down for the most valuable brass and copper content and finally giving the VL Community Club a total of $8,857 for about 1,400 valves. What to do with the money was not an issue.
Scrap metal molds young dreams
Club members had read of the Lennard Robotics Club, which must pay for all of the materials and parts it uses in the advanced learning projects students undertake and knew it lives on donations, Ruete said. They were determined to donate the $8,857 to Lennard High School specifically, rather than to the county school district, so that the club could access it as needed, he adds.
The monies will be applied to the parts and materials, which must be purchased when they cannot be sourced from the scavaging and repurposing techniques the club practices whenever possible, according to Jim Reve, a retired Lockheed-Martin engineer who worked on NASA’s Titon, Atlas and Saturn missile programs. Reve, along with Lennard Biology Teacher Jordan Lujan, lead the Robotics Club of about 25 members, all of them aiming for advanced degrees in the STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Jim Reve, Lennard High teacher and leader of the school’s Robotics Club, had everyone’s attention as he explained how club students designed the battery compartments in their electric race car. Listening closely are Dave Brown, left, and teacher Jordan Lujan, center, along with student Ashley Van Meter, seated in the vehicle.
The Lennard Robotics Club may operate on the proverbial shoestring, but its inventive young members have racked up an enviable record of accomplishments from “shoestrings.” Reve describes their unparalled “enthusiasim and eagerness to learn” as he talks about the multifaceted educational process that transpires as the young scientists-to-be build projects based on the principles of physics, advanced mathematics and engineering as well as the natural and applied sciences. For example, he cites a precisely designed and fully functional tabletop trebuchet or catapult, they built. It was not only a challenging mathematical experience, he points out, but also a history lesson about the mechanism that was a primary tool of war a thousand years ago.
In the seven years since the Robotics Club formed, its members have designed and constructed electrically powered one-seater racing cars and at least one robotic arm and a plastic lawn chair mounted on wood blocks that will carry someone seated in it through the air with the help of a leaf blower and bots large or small. The club has entered - and won – many local as well as regional STEM-related competitions, recently besting graduate mechanical engineering students at the University of South Florida in a battle of the bots. And, Reve asserts, invariably club members after high school get onto demanding college and university science, engineering and technology degree tracks.
Meanwhile, in Sun City Center where the next backflow valve exchange will be focused, Brown is thinking aloud about best use of the proceeds from melting down its old preventers. “There will be just 56 valves decommissioned,” he notes, “producing about $300 from the scrap metal sale. It is hoped we can give the Robotics Club a gift certificate in that amount from one of the parts houses where they buy some of the gears and motors they need.” A little more nourishment for tomorrow’s scientists.
