Pipe dreams

Huw Thomas

In its 2009 Report Card for Infrastructure, The American Society of Civil Engineers scored drinking and wastewater a D minus. Wayne Klotz explains why the US water system is in such poor shape and what needs to be done to turn things around.

Quite simply, the biggest issue with our drinking water systems is that we are not even maintaining what we have, much less providing for the increased demands that are being placed by a growing population and a more water hungry economy. If you don’t take care of what you have and you’re putting greater demands on aging infrastructure, what happens is then we create more and more frequent failure. In the US about seven billion gallons of treated water a day leak out of pipes and we’ve seen some spectacular failures all making headlines and disrupting lifestyles all across the country. The one thing that people can’t live without is drinking water. We could even live without roads, as terrible as that would be, but if you can’t get water you’re not going to be here.

A lot of our current problems have to do with changing priorities over the last 30 or so years. Back in the 50’s and 60’s the United States spent a great deal of money building not just our water systems, but wastewater and roadway systems. We really built an exemplary infrastructure system. In those days governments would have investment in infrastructure anywhere from six to eight percent of their annual budgets. Somewhere along the line in the 70’s people began to feel like this work was pretty much done and we began to shift more and more of our public resources into other programs. We developed other priorities to the point where instead of investing six to eight percent of their budgets, most governments in the US, including the federal government, are investing just one to 1.5 percent.

It’s just not sustainable. On one hand people say they’re willing to pay for this investment, but on the other we were chasing increasingly scarce public resources. Currently, elected officials are just simply not giving water infrastructure the priority that it deserves. The fact of the matter is failing infrastructure cannot support a healthy economy. While we’ve had this massive debate on healthcare in the United States over the last two years I continue to contend that the number one conversation we should be having about healthcare has to do with clean water. In the history of the world, clean water is the primary reason that civilizations move from chronic illness to good health. While we’re all running around worrying about insurance, the real issue is are we maintaining our water systems so that there is a safe and dependable source of water.

Infrastructure underlies everything we do. We need to do a much better job communicating that and get the public then to demand better. We are literally to the point now where I believe that we’re not just compromising our quality of life, we’ve neglected this for so long that the health and safety of some people is being jeopardized because of our unwillingness to deal with the problem.

Massive costs

Aside from the potential risks to human health, broken water infrastructure has some concrete financial costs too. Water has to be collected and there is a huge cost there. There’s an energy cost in moving that water from its original source to a place where it’s treated. There is an energy cost and chemical cost and a labor cost in those treatment facilities.

Then you pressurize the water to put it into pipes to delver it to where it’s being used. That has a huge energy cost and an incredible capital cost in the pipe system. Every gallon costs a certain amount to produce. Take that seven billion gallons a day that’s literally just poured on the ground at a dollar per thousand in production costs and that’s how many dollars a day we’re just blowing away. Unfortunately we live in a time where if you can’t get your message down to a sound bite it’s very difficult to be heard over the shouting of everybody else who wants their message heard. The amazing thing is that when you have a chance to talk to the citizens, they get it. But we just haven’t been able to convert that into national action.

The US currently operates what we at ASCE call a ‘patch and pray’ approach to infrastructure planning, which is leave it alone, wait until it breaks, patch it up, and then you pray that nothing else goes wrong. That’s a fool’s errand, you’ll never get anywhere with that approach.

Partnership

The idea of private business getting more involved in these challenges is an interesting one. With regards to water, the reason that government is involved in most of these things is that the projects are so massive and the costs are so significant that usually it does take some sort of a public financing mechanism. It’s very difficult for private industry to be able to do that. However, if you look at the history in the United States almost every water system was developed initially as a private concern. They got bigger and demand kept rising, so slowly but surely all the private systems rolled over into being public systems.

Now that we’ve reached the point where the systems are now stressed and are beginning to show signs of failure, there’s a push back toward private investment and private enterprise. It’s been interesting to watch that ebb and flow over the last 200, 250 years, but there is certainly a place for private investment. I think that now public private partnerships are essential. It’s a way to get more capital into the systems.

The one thing that I think needs to be remembered is that there’s still a compelling public interest in not allowing the price of water to get so expensive that the average person or poorer people can’t access and adequate supply. That’s not good public policy. But at the same time if a private interest comes and invests millions and millions of dollars, it is only reasonable that they should expect a reasonable return.

Moving forward

As well as closing the funding gap, one of the things that really needs to happen is that there needs to be a better long range planning effort. Right now what happens is we have a lot of overlapping jurisdictions. For example, in Texas where I live the federal government establishes certain criteria, they provide urban funding, then the state government actually administers all of the dams and reservoirs. The state of Texas owns all of the surface water rights and they allocate those back out. Local governments then are responsible for building the facilities, the pump stations, the pipes, and all those sort of things. They don’t all work well together. We need to realize that if we want to improve our water delivery from source to tap, it’s a system. So we’re promoting a much better effort at working together in regional type planning.

We also have to be honest about maintaining the systems we have. Maintenance is a routine replacement program as systems reach their age. Even in Texas we’ve got places where water pipes in the ground are 100 years old, those pipes were not intended to last that long when they were put in. Nowadays we use much better materials and techniques and we all know that stuff lasts a lot longer, but nothing lasts forever.

We’ve got to build in and adequately fund a program to keep the systems that we have functioning properly in a dependable fashion. On top of that, we need to plan for where and how additional demand comes in; where are people moving to, how much water are they using and what is that doing to systems?

We are working diligently to come up with energy savings, so hopefully those dollars would be allowed to stay in the water systems and moved over into the capital side. Using new materials that are more environmentally sensitive that may be lighter and easier to handle, materials that have longer lives and less impact on the environment. We’re looking at all those sorts of things.

Wayne Klotz is past President of the ASCE and is President of architectural, engineering, planning and environmental firm Klotz Associates.

Relevant articles:

America's water consumption | The importance of US waterways | The California water crisis