EWEB and the Typhoid That Made a Utility
Near Eugene, Oregon
In the first decade of the twentieth century, a typhoid epidemic hit Eugene. When investigators traced the outbreak, they found the source in the city's privately owned water supply company. The water was contaminated. People had gotten sick and some had died. The private company had not fixed the problem.
The residents of Eugene responded in a way that was straightforward and, for its era, somewhat unusual. In nineteen eight they voted to buy the water system from its private owners and run it as a publicly owned municipal utility. They were going to control their own water.
To power the pumps that would move water from the McKenzie River into the city, they needed electricity. In nineteen ten, voters passed a bond measure to build a hydroelectric plant at a site called Walterville, sixteen miles east of downtown on the McKenzie River. A four-mile canal was dug to feed the plant. When the Walterville plant came online in February of nineteen eleven, the City Council transferred control to a new citizen-governed board, which met for the first time on March eleventh, nineteen eleven. That was the founding of the Eugene Water and Electric Board, known ever since as EWEB.
The plant produced more electricity than the water pumps needed. The city started using the surplus to power streetlights. Then it began selling electricity to residents. The logic was incremental and civic: a public problem had produced a public solution, and the solution had generated a surplus that could serve the public further.
EWEB still operates today, providing water and electricity to more than eighty-six thousand customers. The McKenzie River, not the Willamette, has been the water source since nineteen twenty-seven.
