In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave water infrastructure across the country a D-minus. Four years later it handed out the same grade. In 2007, an increase in giant sinkholes in cities and towns all over the country coincided with the EPA's launch of its Aging Water Infrastructure Research Program.
Now it's nearly 2012, yet water systems in Washington, Alaska and North Dakota still use wooden pipes. This past summer, pipelines burst across the country due to record heat. Oklahoma City's utilities department recorded 685 main breaks from July to early September.
The ASCE says leaks cost us seven billion gallons of water each day—nearly 2 trillion of gallons of water, worth nearly $3 billion, every year. The EPA estimates 700 water mains break every day, or nearly one every two minutes. And a study by UCLA and Stanford found that more than 1.5 million people in Southern California get sick every year because of bacteria from polluted water released by broken pipes.
Jeffrey K. Griffiths, professor of public health at Tufts University and chair of the drinking water committee on the EPA's Science Advisory Board, says that aging pipes should be replaced at a rate of 2 percent each year. But the current rate across the U.S. is less than half that. “We're going to have increasing numbers of breaking pipes; the infrastructure is not going to last much longer,” says Griffiths. “The longer we delay replacing the pipes, the cost will be higher. Plus there's the public health problem that contaminants in the ground get in the water and people get sick.”
I still remember how surprised I was when I was told that some cities still had wooden water mains in service. Joining the American Cast Iron Pipe Association Century Club, for cities with water mains (cast iron) in service for over 100 years, may be good publicity for pipe manufacturers, but it doesn't say much about how well we have kept up on infrastructure investment. Now, when we can least afford it, we're going to have to spend trillions just to keep from losing ground. We've got an extremely daunting future, mainly because we didn't want to invest the money when we should have. We've got crumbling roads and bridges, leaky sewers, ancient water lines, an undersized electric transmission system and old power plants and oil refineries. It's hard to pay for all that when we can't make our mortgage payments.
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