The Boston Flood Emergency and What it Represents for the American People

This Saturday, a major flooding emergency began in downtown Boston. The flood was not the result of a natural disaster, however. Instead, the cause of the overflow that shutdown several local area businesses, crippled transportation, and left nearly 2 million Boston area residents without access to clean drinking water was a broken water main. You might expect that a disaster of this magnitude occurring in a major American city would merit comprehensive coverage by the major news networks. But you would be wrong. Most mainstream networks merely mentioned the event in passing, if at all. One could speculate that the lack of coverage was due to overextended resources already devoted to coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. More likely, though, is that the story was simply not newsworthy because this sort of thing HAPPENS ALL THE TIME.

This week alone, the cities of London, Austin, Toronto, and San Diego have all experienced similar pipe failures, though with less severe outcomes. All told, 240,000 water main breaks occur in the United States alone each year. The cost of the lost water, without including costly damage repair and other harmful economic effects, totals 2.6 billion dollars annually. Why are these phenomena so common? The answer is simple- our nation’s water infrastructure is long overdue for an overhaul. A recent EPA survey found that in systems that serve 100,000+ people, about 30 percent of pipes were between 40 and 80 years old and 10 percent were over 80 years old.

About one-third of the drinking water in the United States never makes it to end-use because of leaky pipes. In older cities like Chicago, the number is closer to 50-60 percent that doesn’t make it to the consumer. This is completely unsustainable in the face of a global water shortage.

The problem is lack of capital investment and political will. In the 2002 Clean Water and Drinking Water Gap Analysis Report released by the EPA, it was estimated that if the level of investment in water and wastewater infrastructure doesn’t drastically increase there will be a funding gap of up to $122 billion for Clean Water capital costs and $102 billion for Drinking Water capital costs.

The US Senate is currently reviewing a bill, the Sustainable Water Infrastructure Investment Act of 2010, which would remove caps on private activity bonds (PABs) for water and wastewater projects. Eliminating these caps would encourage investment into these projects and would raise significant tax revenue for states and communities across the country. Many, including the National Association of Water Companies (NAWC) see this bill as an important first step to averting this crisis.