Drinking Water in America 2021

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card for America’s Infrastructure reviews and evaluates the condition and performance of American infrastructure. Below are highlights culled and clipped from thereport on the nations Drinking Water infrastructure.

Our nation’s drinking water infrastructure system is made up of 2.2 million miles of underground pipes that deliver drinking water to millions of people. Though there are more than 148,000 active drinking water systems in the nation, just 9% of all community water systems serve 78% of the population- over 257 million people. The rest of the nation is served by small water systems (about 8%) and private wells (about 14% of the population). There is a water main break every two minutes and an estimated 6 billion gallons of treated water is lost each day to leaks and water main breaks.

This sounds bad, but the grade for water infrastructure has gone up in the past four years from a D+ to a C-. The ASCE tells us there are signs of progress as federal financing programs expand and water utilities raise rates to reinvest in their networks. This action was spurred in large part by the growing public awareness of water system problems like Flint, Michigan, increasing incidents of broken pipes, boil water advisoried and others incidents that has made the public aware that water infrastructure cannot be ignored.

 The ASCE estimates that more than 12,000 miles of water pipes were planned to be replaced by water utilities across the country in 2020. That is still less than 1% of the water pipes. To maintain these systems properly around 1.3% of pipes should be replaced each year. In 2019, about a third of all utilities had a developed and implemented what they label a robust asset management program to help prioritize their capital and operations/maintenance investments. This is an increase from 20% in 2016.

Funding for drinking water infrastructure has not kept pace with the growing need to address the aging infrastructure. Despite the growing need for drinking water infrastructure, the federal government’s share of capital spending in the water sector fell from 63% in 1977 to 9% of total capital spending in 2017. We do not know how to maintain our equipment and infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

The U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) provides low-interest loans to state and local drinking water infrastructure projects, and states provide a 20% funding match. From 2013 to 2018, the DWSRF program grew from just over $2 billion in 2013 to nearly $3 billion in 2018, providing loans of increasing sizes to the states. This is all necessary because decades old drinking water infrastructure systems, stagnant or declining per capita water use, costs of regulatory compliance, and stagnant federal funding has resulted in many water utilities struggling to fund the cost of operations and maintenance of these systems. In our region the story is different- population growth along with demand from growing industry is expected to increase drinking water demand in the WMA. However, we have seen WSSA struggle do development a program to maintain their piping infrastructure and DC Water famously announced in 2012 (when their average pipe was 78 years old) that they had tripled the replacement rate for their pipes to 1% per year so that in 100 years the system will be replaced.

A recent survey found that 47% of the maintenance work undertaken by utilities is in reaction to a failure or water main break and not part of a preventive maintenance plan. This is no way to maintain an essential system. The EPA has regulates public drinking water supply through the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The EPA sets national health-based standards and determines the enforceable maximum levels for contaminants in drinking water. In 2019, the number of public water systems with health-based violations was 15% lower than in 2017.

Water utilities face the increasing challenge of keeping pace with emerging contaminants such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) which would require additional treatment to remove, lead and copper in drinking water, and the regulatory requirements needed to remain in compliance with the SDWA. Utilities in more rural communities and shrinking urban areas have a smaller rate-payer base, which results in less revenue and more difficulty in meeting the requirements of the SDWA and to maintain aging systems.

In addition, as the nation faces more frequent extreme weather events due, water utilities are taking action to increase the resilience of their systems to ensure safety and reliability. The America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 required community water systems serving more than 3,300 people to develop or update risk assessments and emergency response plans. The law sets deadlines, all before December 2021, by which water systems must complete and submit the risk assessment and emergency response plans to the EPA. Hopefully, this will push water utilities to improve their operations further.