[progchat_action] Crumbling US infrastructure
 
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 09:49:55 -0500 (CDT)


US water pipelines are breaking

Water Pipelines Across the US Are Breaking; Repair Costs Put at Nearly $300
Billion

Colleen Long
The Associated Press
April 08, 2008

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked
70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking
water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a
larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to
the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more
than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to
drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically
higher, at about $480 billion.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced
improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the
majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water
Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems,
especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were
built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

"Our generation hasn't experienced anything like this. We weren't around
when the infrastructure was being built," said Greg Kail, spokesman for the
water industry group. "We didn't pay for the pipes to be put in the ground,
but we sure benefited from the improvements to public health that came from
it."

He said the situation has not reached crisis stage, but without a serious
investment, "it can become a crisis. Each year the problem is put on the
back burner, the price tag is going to go up."

Catastrophic problems can arise when infrastructure fails. An 84-year-old
steam pipe erupted beneath a New York street last year, creating a mammoth
geyser that rained mud and debris down on the city.

In Chicago, an 80-year-old cast-iron water main broke earlier this year,
spilling thousands of gallons and opening up a 25-foot hole in the street.

In Denver, up to 4 million gallons of water gushed from a ruptured
30-year-old pipeline in February, gouging a sinkhole across three lanes of
Interstate 25. The lanes were shut down for nearly two weeks.

Cleveland has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure in the
past 20 years but still must repair daily breaks. Last month, a break in a 2
1/2-foot-diameter water main turned a downtown square into a watery crater
and knocked out other utilities.

The amount of wasted water from these breaches is staggering.

The 36 million gallons a day that leak from the 85-mile Delaware Aqueduct in
New York state amounts to more than 1 billion gallons a month. That may be a
drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of billions of water consumed in
New York City every year, but the daily leak in the tunnel would meet the
daily demands of drought-ravaged Raleigh, N.C.

Residents in Wawarsing, about 100 miles from New York City, blame tunnel
leaks for the constant flooding in their yards and basements. Department of
Environmental Protection engineers are trying to determine whether the
aqueduct is really responsible for the soggy mess along Route 209 that has
gotten considerably worse over the last 10 years.

David Sickles said the water just bubbles up from the cracks in the concrete
in his basement - even when it doesn't rain.

"It's like there is too much water in the ground already," Sickles said,
showing off the water line on the concrete wall of his basement. "There's no
place for this to go."

Nearly every house has a black discharge hose running from the basement
through the yard, gushing water into already-soggy patches of grass.

The land around Laura Smith's house turns into a lake when the snow melts,
and her driveway is so muddy your feet sink when you walk to her front door.

Utilites currently spend about $10.4 billion annually on large-scale repairs
and improvements on drinking water infrastructure, a figure that has been
relatively flat during the past two decades, the EPA said.

Cities have a hard time convincing residents that they should spend money on
something they never see, buried hundreds of feet underground. And often,
public officials pawn the responsibility off on the next person elected,
Kail said.

Repairs tend to be long and costly, especially since many systems were built
nearly a century ago, deep underground, where buildings and major roads now
stand.

Even monitoring pipes for vulnerabilities can be expensive and tricky, since
it's not possible to shut down a city's water supply to test for leaks. If
New York were to do that to the Delaware Aqueduct, for example, the 13
1/2-foot-diameter tunnel might crumble under the crushing weight of the land
without the water to support the duct.

The Department of Environmental Protection monitors leaks by sending water
through the tunnel and measuring how much comes out at the end. The
department also sends robots that swim through the tunnels and collect data
on their condition.

The amount of water being lost is inconsequential, given that reservoirs are
so full, said Environmental Commissioner Emily Lloyd. But she said it is
important to fix the leaks now because there is no way to tell how the
system might deteriorate in the next 30 years.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/US_water_pipelines_are_breaking_0408200
8.html

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