Last week the Biden Infrastructure Plan was released. The plan would allot $111 billion to drinking water, water pipes, waste water and sewer pipes and storm water. $45 billion would go to eliminating lead pipe laterals and $56 billion would go to modernizing drinking water, waste water and stormwater systems. That is woefully inadequate to restore and improve our water infrastructure. Let's take a look at some of the drinking water system needs.
Let’s start with lead because the Infrastructure Plan has a lead pipe line ite.. Lead in drinking water is a national
problem. Flint Michigan was not an aberration nor was it the worst incidence of
lead in drinking water supplies. The lead in drinking water is predominately
coming from the pipes. Lead does not exist in in most groundwater, rivers and
lakes. Instead, lead in drinking water is picked up from the pipes on its
journey into a home. In older homes the water service lines delivering water
from the water main in the street into each home were commonly made of lead.
This practice began to fade by the 1950’s but was legal until 1988.
There are about 75 million homes across the country built
before 1980, meaning they’re most likely to contain some lead plumbing. It was
estimated by the American Water Association that there are 6.5 million lead water distribution pipes still in service in the United States while the EPA estimates that number
at around 10 million. Based on the experience in Lansing, Michigan that replace
all 14,000 lead laterals in the city, that cost is about right to finally
eliminate lead water distribution pipes from our water delivery system if the nation as a whole is as efficient as Lansing, Michigan was in their program. Unfortunately, that leaves
almost nothing to the rest of the water delivery system and inadequate money to
upgrade the water treatment systems of the nation.
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. 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 is water we can no longer afford to waste. There are
5,280 feet per mile and it costs between $100-$500 a foot to replace a water
pipe and repair the road. Most of the nation’s largest water systems are old,
very old. If only 5% of the water pipes were in need of replacement at this
time, and the cost were $100 per foot that would be another $70 billion. 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. According to their report, in 2019 alone the annual
water infrastructure capital investment was $81 billion less than would have
been necessary just to maintain the nation’s water systems. That does not
include any upgrades and once the system was brought into repair, the annual expense
to keep it that way would be around $21 billion.
There are more than
148,000 active drinking water systems in the nation, although just 9% or 13,320
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). The amount of money allotted for water
infrastructure will not bring the nation’s water systems into repair or expand
the treatment to meet the demands of emerging contaminants like PFAS that EPA is just beginning the process to develop a Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) maximum contaminant level (MCL). Our water treatment
plants should be more robust as more and more contaminants begin to appear in
our national water supplies. Our modern world is filled with chemicals, they
exist in pharmaceuticals, household products, personal care products, plastics,
pesticides, industrial chemicals, human and animal waste; they are in short,
all around us.
All the water on Earth has been here since the earth was
formed 4.5 billion years ago (or so). There is no mechanism on Earth for
creating or destroying large quantities of water, the water here continually
cycles through the water cycle. Contaminants are building up in the waters of the earth. In their study
of surface water used for
drinking water supplies the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found a diverse
group of contaminants in the source water used by our cities and towns. The
concentrations were low, but the contaminants were ubiquitous; nonetheless, the
most commonly detected contaminants in source water were generally detected in
finished drinking water at about the same frequency and concentration- Our current water treatment is not removing these chemicals. Our
drinking water treatment systems do not remove these trace contaminants and we
need to change that.
According to EPA's 6th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs
Survey and Assessment released in 2015 $472.6 billion is needed to maintain and
improve the nation’s drinking water infrastructure through 2035.
Most water system needs are not directly related to
violations of, or compliance with, SDWA regulations. Most needs, such as the
replacement or rehabilitation of leaking water mains, are ongoing investments
that systems must make to continue delivering safe drinking water to their
customers.
EPA’s assessment shows that improvements are primarily
needed in:
- Distribution and transmission: $312.6 billion to replace or refurbish aging or deteriorating pipelines this excludes lead pipes.
- · Treatment: $83 billion to construct, expand or rehabilitate infrastructure to reduce contamination only to meet current standards not improve them.
- Storage: $47.6 billion to construct, rehabilitate or cover water storage reservoirs to meet forecast demand without accounting for changes in climate.
- Source: $21.8 billion to construct or rehabilitate intake structures, wells and spring collectors
That is just the needs for the nation's drinking water without even looking at the needs of waste water and
storm water systems. The Biden Infrastructure Plan allocates
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