Up Shit Creek...

[Lonestar]

Without a Paddle

Billions needed to upgrade America’s leaky water infrastructure

By Ashley Halsey III, Published: January 2

At first glance, the pizza-size hole that popped open when a heavy truck passed over a freshly paved District street seemed fairly minor.

Then city inspectors got on their bellies with a flashlight to peer into it. What they discovered has become far too common. A massive 19th-century brick sewer had silently eroded away, leaving a cavern beneath a street in Adams Morgan that could have swallowed most of a Metro bus.

It took three weeks and about a million dollars to repair the sewer, which was built in 1889.

Time and wear “had torn off all the bricks and sent them God knows where,” said George S. Hawkins, general manager of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority. “We have to find them and see if they’re plugging up the system somewhere farther down the line.”

If it were not buried underground, the water and sewer system that serves the nation’s capital could be an advertisement for Band-Aids. And it is not much different from any other major system in the country, including those in many suburbs and in cities less than half as old as Washington.

(Vote: How should we fix the systems? )

Although they are out of sight and out of mind except when they spring a leak, water and sewer systems are more vital to civilized society than any other aspect of infrastructure.

Rapidly deteriorating roads and bridges may stifle America’s economy and turn transportation headaches into nightmares, but if the nation’s water and sewer systems begin to fail, life as we know it will too. Without an ample supply of water, people don’t drink, toilets don’t flush, factories don’t operate, offices shut down and fires go unchecked. When sewage systems fail, cities can’t function and epidemics break out.

“All the big cities have these problems, and to me it’s the unseen catastrophe,” Hawkins said. “My humble view is that the industry we’re in is the bedrock of civilization because it’s not just an infrastructure that is a convenience, that allows you to get to work faster or slower. At least with bridges or a road, people have some idea of what it is because they drive on them and see them. ”

And just like roads and bridges, the vast majority of the country’s water systems are in urgent need of repair and replacement. At a Senate hearing last month, it was estimated that, on average, 25 percent of drinking water leaks from water system pipes before reaching the faucet. The same committee was told it will take $335 billion to resurrect water systems and $300 billion to fix sewer systems.

There is no better illustration of the looming national crisis than the District’s system.

The average D.C. water pipe is 77 years old, but a great many were laid in the 19th century. Sewers are even older. Most should have been replaced decades ago.

Emergency crews rush from site to site to tackle an average of 450 breaks a year.

Raw sewage flows into the Potomac, the Anacostia and Rock Creek whenever it rains hard — hundreds of times a year — an annual flush of about 3 billion gallons, according to D.C. Water.

Firefighters are equipped with computerized cue sheets to tell them which of the 9,157 hydrants in the District have enough water pressure to put out a fire.

The average water and sewer bill has gone up about 50 percent in just four years, to $65 a month for single-family homes. Unless there is federal regulatory relief, it may climb to $100 a month by the end of the decade.

The decrepit system has 1,300 miles of water pipe and 1,800 miles of sewers. The water pipes are being replaced at an average of 11 miles a year. At that rate, replacing them all will take more than 100 years.

There’s no money to do it any faster. And, Hawkins says, “if you did it much faster than that, you could paralyze the city in terms of traffic.”

* * *

A snowstorm had turned the District into a ghost town a couple of years ago when Hawkins trudged through the snow to check a break in a water main at 21st Street and New Hampshire Avenue.

The intersection isn’t far from several embassies, and a few foreign visitors came from a hotel on the corner to watch as snowplows dug down to find the leak’s source. Hawkins recalls telling the visitors that the old mains under New Hampshire Avenue burst fairly often. “They said: ‘You have pipes that were put in in the 1860s? We thought we had it bad in Ghana!’ ”

* * *

The good news? The District’s pipes are being replaced twice as fast as the average in other major water systems in America.

The gargantuan numbers tossed around during December’s Senate hearing as the cost of saving the country’s water and sewage systems have no more promise of connecting with the public than has the $7 trillion that transportation experts say should be spent to resurrect roads, bridges, aviation and transit in the next decade.

About $9.4 billion more per year is needed for water and sewer work between now and 2020, according to a study released last month by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Without that, many Americans should prepare for regular disruption of water service and a jump in contamination caused by sewage bacteria, the study said.

The price of water, always far below commodities like electricity and gasoline, can be expected to rise dramatically as the demand taxes the systems that deliver it, analysts agree.

Nationwide, an estimated 1.7 trillion gallons of water leaks from pipes each year before it can be put to use. About 900 billion gallons of raw sewage flows into waterways.

Those leaks and untreated flushes aren’t just a problem in creaking Eastern cities that date to colonial times. Oklahoma, which didn’t become a state until the 20th century, has estimated it needs to invest $82 billion in water and sewer infrastructure over the next 50 years.

“I remember when they used to consider us out in the newer states like Oklahoma as not having the infrastructure problems of older states,” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said, “but that’s not true anymore.”

Although suburbs that have appeared or expanded since World War II have newer systems, they’re showing age. Even in this relatively mild year in which there have been fewer breaks — more mains break when there are severe temperature swings — the Washington suburbs have had problems. There have been more than 1,440 leaks or breaks in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties this year. Fairfax County has had 300.

“People count on turning on the faucet and having clean water come out,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of the subcommittee on water. “Our nation’s water infrastructure is reaching a tipping point.”

But with the economy sputtering and Congress eager to slash a burgeoning deficit, selling Americans on the need to pay billions more in water bills or taxes to salvage a system they didn’t even know was breaking may be impossible.

“The customer base really doesn’t know,” Hawkins said. “Like when I turn on the faucet, what on Earth is needed to deliver that water? It’s like magic. And then it goes down the drain. It’s like magic again.”

* * *

Hawkins was awakened on a Friday night in October 2010 to news that water was erupting all over the place at Constitution Avenue and Ninth Street.

“When a water main breaks, all hell breaks loose because it’s under such high pressure,” he said. “We dug an original hole that wasn’t in the right place because at first you can’t really tell” where the break is — the water can work its way to the surface through any fissure.

Pressure from the 24-inch main buckled the pavement a foot high. Water flooded the basement of the Department of Justice. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History had to shut down the next day.

The torrent was unleashed by a water main that had been installed in the 1890s, when Grover Cleveland lived a few blocks away in the White House.

This is particularly painful for me, because every now and again when the weather is cold a water main will burst under the Beltway bringing all traffic to a halt. What a wonderful system the DC Region has.

[weemadando]

Has there seriously been no ongoing modernisation program for this?

Rugged individualism? States rights? Invisible hand? Socialist water programs?

[Simon_Jester]

When you start cutting taxes and budgets, maintaining the water and sewer lines can be one of the first things to go, because it's invisible. Let potholes develop in the roads or cracks in the bridges and people see it every day and complain. Let a water pipe quietly go twenty years overdue without replacement and no one complains directly, not until it explodes of its own accord.

It's not hostility to the idea of a water system, it's local politicians looking for the most expedient way to make ends meet when they're under pressure to spend less overall while spending more on other things.

And when you neglect this on an institutional level, simply not bothering to plan for replacement of water mains and the like for ten or fifteen years, you get a huge backlog of aging pipes like we're seeing now.

[Sea Skimmer]

This has little to do with present day tax and budget cuts, I wish it did, but in fact the problem is far older then that, large scale investments stopped fifty years ago. Since then nobody has wanted to raise water rates at anything more then the level required to keep pace with the energy costs of operating the treatment plants, which has been very low. Money for upgrades was simply never ever factored in, in large part because water pipes do in fact last a very long time. Now that's catching up with us.

Some upgrades happen all right, all the 85 year old water mains in my old home town got replaced a few years ago for example, amusingly the water pressure got so much higher it burst out repairs on older pipes, but it’s on nothing like the required scale. Philadelphia still has extensive networks wooden water pipes, but they do work so nobody cares, and the city water supplies are near unlimited without a massive drought so nobody cares about the leaks either. The dumping raw sewage issue largely stems from all the cities in the US which had hybrid storm and sanitary sewer systems, which means every single rainstorm the system overflows the treatment plants. Some places like NYC just dump raw sewage all the time though. 635 billion is an understatement of the problem what what I've heard before. I assume that is simply to repair systems we already have. The real cost for giving the US the water and sewer systems it should have is more like 2 trillion dollars. Do it over 25 years and that's 80 billion a year.

[madd0ct0r]

is screaming 'infrastructure modernization program will generate economic stimulus' too subtle?

I mean, most of the American infrastructure seems to date back to the last recession.

[weemadando]

If people really wanted clean water, they'd pay for their own water collection, purification, piping and pumping systems rather than relying on state welfare to bring water to their front door.

[Sea Skimmer]

In fact a large portion of the US does exactly that. Even close to major cities large areas use private well water and septic tank systems; and given the terrain in many places that's the only realistic option. Its either too hilly or too flat for sewers to be very viable, and laying water pipes while always possible given water towers gets stupid expensive too. Southern New Jersey across the river from me for example, very heavy on well water because its all dead flat and spread out. In fact so heavy that the salt line from the ocean is rapidly moving inland and turning wells brackish.....

[MKSheppard]

Also, serious infrastructure repairs mean a lot of streets are dug up for an indeterminate period of time for pipe replacement. That does not endear yourself to voters.

[Sea Skimmer]

To put a number on it, the CDC says 15 million US house holds normally use private wells
http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/wells/

At an average of four people per household that's 60 million Americans; about a fifth of the population. This is one of the issues with repairing water systems, all those people are not paying for the public system and have little reason to expect to do so. So in many areas you can't just tax the whole population, you've got to pass it on by water rate fees. In fact I've seen it claimed that in areas not affected by drought the US is being counter productive at encouraging water conservation, because all that really does is reduce the amount of money that exists for maintaining the water system, but it does nothing to actually reduce ware and tear on the water distribution systems and lots of the water will leak no matter what.

[weemadando]

Is that people who solely rely on independent infrastructure due to lack of communal availability? And how does that number mesh with remote/regional population numbers? Is it a geographical issue or just "PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!"

Because even towns that struggle to have four figure population will often have municipal water infrastructure in Australia. But even in inner Melbourne a lot of my neighbours use rain water and bore water in addition to the municipal infrastructure.

[Simon_Jester]

This has little to do with present day tax and budget cuts, I wish it did, but in fact the problem is far older then that, large scale investments stopped fifty years ago.

Yes. And... "taxpayer revolts," if you will, started in the 1970s. I know the problem is more complicated than that, but I'm pretty sure that contributes to the problem- the more we needed it (and we did start to need it by the '90s), the less the money was there.

[Count Chocula]

I'm one of the 15 million that uses a private well for water; however, mine's primarily for watering and there in case we have a hurricane for drinking and washing water. Our muni system has both chlorine and ammonia in it (the ammonia's a new addition and plays hell with rubber gaskets and the water softener) so we purify our drinking water.

I suspect highly populated areas, with decades-old water systems that run under and around buildings, subways, roads, runways, would face relatively HUGE expenses and disruptions to replace buried pipe. Think about a 5 year highway project on surface streets and under buildings! Ouch. Our utility replaced our water and sewer main lines a few years ago, but in our suburb most of them run under yards and sidewalks. A couple of neighbors got new grass after their right-of-way was dug up to replace the old lines.

I'm sure lazy politicians doing lazy political things is a factor, but I bet it is also a logistical nightmare for any large city. Fix on breakage causes more localized disruption over a smaller patch of real estate, and guess what is cheaper on the yearly budgets too.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd blame it on cars, in the 1950s government at all level began making roads and highways the number one building priority,and that displaced what had been the pride and joy before, water systems and massive subsidies to the railroads. Since then the government has mainly improved water by regulating polluters; and this has been about the only way the federal government has ever been involved in the process. That involved very large amounts of money in its own right, but not in the form of government spending. When the clean water act first when into effect for example the EPA could order anything it damn well wanted, and did, because it didn't have to perform costbenefit analysis by law like it does today.

Is that people who solely rely on independent infrastructure due to lack of communal availability? And how does that number mesh with remote/regional population numbers? Is it a geographical issue or just "PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!"

Mainly lack of availability, but it can be very spotty. Places within 12 miles of Phily I know of have communities using private well water, but on the other hand places 40 miles away do not. In this area like many parts of the US, outside of the cities development took place in highly decentralized manner, long before 'urban sprawl' was ever an issue and when you had people building single houses 300 yards apart installing water pipes never made sense. Most towns would have public water systems, but among the areas which do have such systems they are often well based, and sometimes decentralized with a web of wells pumping into the pipes. In many suburban areas you have houses with wells and houses with pipes almost side by side, it just depended on what the developer felt like paying for and how well sewers would drain. If you have to bury them 40 feet deep to get them to drain, I've seen this being dug up not that long ago, well, its not too attractive to go to the trouble.

Of course in places which do have traditional large reservoir and pipe systems very very little of the water is actually being used by homeowners, let alone for drinking. Its industrial and commercial use that sucks it all up. Hoards of people in the US simply wont drink tap water either, no matter how good or bad it actually is, so they care even less about what comes out of the tap even though they no doubt are washing dishes in it. I'd expect it to be a bigger deal in a country with endless droughts and that is mostly desert!

[madd0ct0r]

you can actually replace old pipes without trenches:

http://www.dontdig.com/pipebursting.php

asically you force the new pipe down the inside of the old pipe, bursting it open as you go along.

[Sea Skimmer]

..and in the process you’ll wreck every connection into that pipe so such a method can only be used on pipe runs which are not directly feeding customers, or in the case of that article they seem to have in mind replacing the specific feeder pipes themselves. I doubt it will work on much larger pipes.

You can also recondition old pipes with a resin soaked cloth inner liner, which is then baked hard by pumping boiling water through the pipe for several hours. A little machine then goes through the pipe and drills out holes to connect the lines to each home back up. But likewise, this will only work in specific situations and only if the system can afford the loss of pipe diameter. It also likewise, has diameter limitations. Useful, but as far as the US goes some of the biggest concerns are the really big pipes as they are often the oldest and breaks can be near catastrophic. Both from loss of service and the scale of floods they can cause (very bad when it’s a six foot diameter sewer line)

In fact in Europe many water lines were put in without digging trenches in the first place. The British put in lots of sewers with the clay kicking method, by which two men dug a trench laying down and installed a pipe as they went. Worked well in clay, and was later used for tunnel warfare in WW1 but certainly not OSHA compatible today.

[madd0ct0r]

well for sewers it should be only straight runs between manholes, with all connections made at manholes.
(rodding for cleaning was near impossible otherwise). Just chip the concrete around the old pipe, bust the new pipe through the hole and grout back up.

And if you get to six foot diameter brick sewers (monsoon season?), you've got space to walk and work inside them.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... Uz1ykkemGQ

gives a good overview of the different methods available - I didn't actually know all of them. I'm not so sure about their cost data, espcially as it's ten years out of date.
One of their findings make sense to me though:

The cost to rebuild a failed sewer is three times the cost to repair it. And that's not including the extra cost to city residents of having a cave open up in the street.

[Sea Skimmer]

well for sewers it should be only straight runs between manholes, with all connections made at manholes.
(rodding for cleaning was near impossible otherwise). Just chip the concrete around the old pipe, bust the new pipe through the hole and grout back up.

That is certainly not the case at my house in the suburbs. Major junctions of the laterals will be at manholes, every last house connection is not and could not be without massive amounts of redundant pipe. You have a manhole at each street intersection, and 200-300 yards of street in-between intersections. The sewer pipes do not run long diagonal runs to the intersection, they go straight from the house into the lateral pipe out front. The homeowner is responsible for this piece of pipe; but if the water company wants to replace the lateral then it must take care of the connection itself. .

And if you get to six foot diameter brick sewers (monsoon season?), you've got space to walk and work inside them.

Many are that big because they are both sanitary and storm sewer, but in Phily it gets better because many of the sewers are in fact diverted creeks that were buried, as the paths they took are of course natural grades to ensure a flow (also, allows creek to turn into paved street), and when they got built a lot of the fill used around them was coal ash... not good situation. At the up stream ends the setup (gravel traps I believe) for collecting the natural creek flow isn't fully effective, and what happens is you end up with the creek flowing both through and under the brickwork, and then all the sewer leaks make it worse... and worse and worse. The undermining in many has reached the point that complete replacement is the only long term option; and in some cases its not a matter of ripping up the street so much as, the resulting hole will be so big it might require larger buildings along the way to be propped up. This was actually done in the first place to put some of these sewers, and some of the subway lines into the ground in the first place. But that was back when a huge mass of timber framework and expendable labor to nail it together was dead cheap.

[Broomstick]

Has there seriously been no ongoing modernisation program for this?

Nope.

Rugged individualism? States rights? Invisible hand? Socialist water programs?

Yep, yep, yep, and yep.

is screaming 'infrastructure modernization program will generate economic stimulus' too subtle?

I mean, most of the American infrastructure seems to date back to the last recession.

No, around here a lot of it dates back to the 19th Century. Especially in regards to the water and sewer systems.

If people really wanted clean water, they'd pay for their own water collection, purification, piping and pumping systems rather than relying on state welfare to bring water to their front door.

In fact a large portion of the US does exactly that. Even close to major cities large areas use private well water and septic tank systems; and given the terrain in many places that's the only realistic option.

Yo - that's my place.

We have a well and septic. The system appeals to many because of a lack of monthly water bill. Our water is "free". Well, no, not really, aside from the initial coast of putting the system in, which is not trivial, there is the cost of running the pump and occasional maintenance. And a BIG repair bill if something goes wrong (or you get to spend a cold winter's days digging through 2 meters of snow then a half meter of mostly frozen dirt, freezing your ass off, and digging the problem out of the septic tank yourself. Which actually happened last February. Not fun.) So, you don't have a monthly charge but those episodic charges are MUCH larger than that monthly bill and over 20 or 40 years there's not that much difference in cost.

Of course, people are idiots about the septic systems, too - they flush stuff that shouldn't be flushed. They pour chemicals down it clueless that that will enter their drinking water given time. They don't get the sludge tank pumped regularly (you don't have to do it yourself - there are people who do this as a living) which avoids 90% of problems.

Then you have the "property rights" idiots who seem to think it's OK to allow industry to dump whatever they want into the ground right next to their well and septic system. Then, when the well goes bad, they bitch about not being able to afford city water and sewer.

There's nothing inherently wrong with well-and-septic. There's nothing wrong with a large municipal water system. The biggest problem in the US is that no one maintains the fucking systems. We build then ignore it until it falls apart.

[CJvR]

Philadelphia still has extensive networks wooden water pipes...

Wooden pipes? Wow, that's like daring a cholera epedemic to come knocking.

[Broomstick]

Chicago still has wooden water mains in some places, too. How many are left they aren't sure as no one kept good records. Every so often there's a major break and when they get to the scene they find wooden pipes instead of concrete, clay, iron, etc.

[Sea Skimmer]

Wooden pipes? Wow, that's like daring a cholera epedemic to come knocking.

Well the city London had and still has wooden pipes even longer then Phily, and they aren't overrun by cholera anymore last I checked. Hard wood pipes are fine as long as they always have water pressure in them which prevents decay, for a few hundred years anyway. In fact they can last better then early clay pipes in many situations because they don't crack so easily, but now everyone is hitting the limits of the wood.

The fun thing is when these wooden pipes were first put in, the reason it was done was not just cost but because city water systems were important for fire fighting as well as drinking water; in fact many predate germ theory anyway so fire fighting could have been seen as more important. With a wooden pipe if you had a fire, the fire fighters would dig up the street, drill a hole in the wooden pipe and then let the water fill the hole as a source of fire fighting water. When they were finished they'd jump into the muddy water and pound a wooden plug into the hole; thus the term fire plug was created. Modern hydrants only came much later but they still get called fire plugs in some parts of the world. As you can imagine deliberate muddy holes in the water system were not the best thing for quality, but it beat having whole cities burn down.

Even more fun is the fact that some US and European oil refineries still have wooden pipes underground that are in use.

[FSTargetDrone]

Incidentally, the man who has the first patent for a fire hydrant in the US was Frederick Graff, a civil engineer who later designed the Fairmount Water Works which once provided water for Philadelphia:

[Sea Skimmer]

I love those water works, water wheels pumping water is such a great concept.

[FSTargetDrone]

I love those water works, water wheels pumping water is such a great concept.

Yep, very interesting solution.

For those of you who don't know what Sea Skimmer is referring to and/or are curious, in the above picture that I took you are seeing the Water Works on the east bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. They are the light-colored structures. Upriver is behind the camera. River water was originally pumped by wood-fired steam engines to a reservoir on top of some elevated land (where the large, darker Philadelphia Museum of Art now stands) which fed a system of wooden pipes that supplied the city with water. But the steam engines were costly and dangerous to operate, so they were eventually replaced by waterwheels. Water from the river was diverted by a wooden dam to the wheels installed in a mill house. The waterwheels powered the pumps, filling the reservoir. The water driving the wheels then flowed back into the river through the 8 arched openings at the waterline. This facility was used from 1815 to 1909.