Mary Springowski has been obsessed with microchips ever since the accident in 2016. That was the year a loaded parts cart at a Ford plant in northeastern Ohio rammed into her leg and tore her Achilles tendon, laying her up for weeks.
A 25-year veteran of Ford and the United Auto Workers (UAW), Springowski was a team leader at the Cleveland Engine Plant, building 4-cylinders for a few different vehicles. She was also a member of her hometown city council in Lorain, Ohio, about 25 miles to the west along Lake Erie. Lorain, a city of about 65,000, used to thrive on factories: plants that built ships and cars, forged steel and bronze. One facility made close to 16 million Ford vehicles over nearly 50 years—Thunderbirds, Fairlanes, Falcons—before it closed in 2005. Lorain is still dominated by the campuses of two huge steel plants: One of them had just gone idle earlier in the year of Springowski’s accident, and the other had just laid off some 800 workers, citing distant fluctuations in the international market. Lorain, Springowski said, is "not okay."
So, after the injury, Springowski spent a lot of time on the couch with her laptop open and her leg elevated, trying to solve Lorain’s problems. The city had recently been ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do tens of millions of dollars in repairs to its aging sewer system. The town was proposing to raise water rates, and people were complaining. All that got Springowski thinking about the value of water: Lorain sits on Lake Erie and at the mouth of one of its major tributaries, the Black River. She Googled, “What industries use the most water in their production?"
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