The Decline of Aging Water and Sewer Piping Infrastructure

Imagine that you are driving home, the street begins to buckle under your car, and now your car is falling nose first in a 20-foot deep hole. Water begins pouring over your car.

How would you feel? What would you do?

You are imagining it. Pamela Knox experienced it as she was driving down a street in Toledo, Ohio. She came face to face with the impact of aging infrastructure.

This is not an isolated incident in one community. Increasingly, communities across the nation are being impacted by aging infrastructure, from roads to bridges to electrical grids. The most important infrastructure problem is hidden from our sight, aging water and sewer piping. This serious nationwide aging water and sewer problem may become a crisis if federal, state, and local governments are too slow to develop a strategy and fund effective solutions.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report called “Addressing the Challenge Through Innovation” details mind-boggling statistics showing the shocking overall state of water and sewer system infrastructure:

• There are 240,000 water main breaks per year nationwide
• Breaks in the Midwest have increased from 250 per year to 2,200 per year during a 19-year period
• 75,000 sanitary sewer overflows per year nationwide result in the discharge of 3–10 billion gallons of untreated wastewater
• The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that water lost from water distribution systems is 1.7 trillion gallons per year at a national cost of $2.6 billion per year.

Overall these staggering numbers show us that the problem of aging infrastructure goes deep into the roots of local communities, that the problem is increasing dramatically, that there could be health implications from discharging 3–10 billion gallons untreated wastewater, and that the causes of the water being lost needs to be solved so that the water can be used more effectively. Most importantly, these numbers show that the nation and local communities across the country must choose to address aging infrastructure much sooner rather than later.

The American Water Works Association (AWWA) produced a report called Buried No Longer (BNL), described as the most thorough and comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the nation’s drinking water infrastructure renewal needs.

The financial magnitude and challenge of the aging infrastructure is overwhelming. The investment needs for buried drinking water infrastructure is projected to total more than $1 trillion nationwide over the next 25 years. That does not include new treatment plants to meet new standards or wastewater, stormwater, and many other investments that need to be made. Nationwide the country is facing a crucial decision point, as described in Buried No Longer. The BNL states, “We can incur the haphazard and growing costs of living with aging and failing drinking water infrastructure. Or, we can carefully prioritize and undertake drinking water infrastructure renewal investments to ensure that our water utilities can continue to reliably and cost-effectively support the public health, safety, and economic vitality of our communities” (Page 14). Postpone the problem is not a solution. It only makes the matter worse and putting more and more financial stress on communities across the United States.

In the long run, we will have more sewer and water piping failure, and the more breaking the more we have to pay to fix. This decreases the likelihood of facing the problem because it requires a huge financial investment. Ignoring investment in solutions will make the problem worse. The severity of the problem of aging infrastructure piping for sewer and drinking water are major issues, with the biggest concerns being the repair, replacement, and extension of the existing buried water infrastructure. Since water mains are the blood veins that bring life to the community, a broken vein will not support the thousands of lives that depend on it. The integrity of piping used to transport drinking water or sewage will be compromised more and more with huge financial costs to pay for repairs, which simply put a band-aid on festering wounds and disrupt the daily life of our community.