Why American Water Infrastructure Needs Fixing All at Once

(Photo : Luis Tosta on Unsplash)

The Replacement Era is here.

Over twenty years ago, the American Water Works Association said that a Replacement Era was imminent. A three-decade stretch was coming, it warned, when much of the water and wastewater infrastructure of the United States would become unusable if nothing were done.

Well, it's here. With failures of water systems much in the news, it's clear that we're now in the middle of this reckoning. Although decentralized treatment and new ways of paying for infrastructure are helping, we're not out of the woods quite yet.

Why is everything everywhere -- or at least a lot of things in a lot of places -- falling apart all at once? Why now?

Different Kinds of Pipe

In 2021, the American Society of Civil Engineers warned that our 2.2 million miles of drinking water pipe were losing six billion gallons of drinking water every day and that water mains were breaking every two minutes.

The problem has been a long time coming, but it's been unavoidable thanks to an unfortunate happenstance of materials and timing. The cast iron pipes of the late 1800s were made to last about 120 years. By the 1920s, such pipes had become significantly less durable, now able to last only a century. After World War II, further decline in pipe durability resulted in production of pipe networks that could last only about 75 years.

What this means is that instead of being able to follow a staggered schedule when replacing worn-out pipes, with decades between deadlines, the U.S. must renew more or less all of its pipe networks at roughly the same time. Whether the pipes were laid 75 years ago or 120 years ago, they all have the same expiration date: right about now.

Wastewater infrastructure is also at the breaking point. The average wastewater treatment plant is operating near capacity or even above capacity. Meanwhile, growing populations and stricter environmental regulation are making it harder to manage wastewater and more expensive to replace the infrastructure.

Averting Water Infrastructure Crises Instead of Reacting to Them

Though life-sustaining, water is often taken for granted. The plants and pipe networks that deliver drinking water and remove wastewater are largely underground or somewhere at the edge of town, out of sight and out of mind.

Moreover, memories of how much water cost when water was more plentiful may often keep water prices artificially low for political reasons. When substantial repairs are then needed, the coffers may be bare, and politicians must ask skeptical constituents for tax hikes.

The cost of reacting to a water crisis already happening is about five times the cost of averting one. When the taps run dry or water becomes unsafe, what had been out of sight and out of mind suddenly becomes a Godzilla-sized disaster.

New Solutions

Many water managers continue to rely on ways of doing things that are becoming obsolete. Large, centralized plants that connect customers with long runs of pipe were once the most feasible approach. But today they are usually much more expensive to build, maintain, and operate than smaller, decentralized operations that are strategically placed to handle the same volume.

Because of the frequent difficulty in securing traditional financing, leaders have often seen no choice but to kick the infrastructure-renewal can down the road. That's unnecessary. Under newer financing arrangements, water companies can pay for, build, own, and operate their infrastructure for decades, relieving municipalities of the burden. A town simply pays a company for water and the water company delivers, bound by contracts that lock in cost, quality, and volume.

Another major development is the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a sign that significant attention is finally being paid to the water infrastructure crisis.

For a century or more, water managers have been great at keeping taps flowing while keeping water infrastructure out of sight. But now the problems of this infrastructure may have to be front and center for some time.