Seven billion gallons. From dripping faucets to burst water mains, that’s the amount of potable water that’s wasted every single day from our country’s leaky pipes.
As the Huffington Post reports, that startling amount could meet all of the daily water needs of California — a state that’s now experiencing the most severe drought ever recorded.
Simply put, the nation’s water pipes are way too old. As ABC News puts it, “Much of the piping that carries drinking water in the country dates to the first half of the 20th century, with some installed before Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House.”
Aging pipes are precisely the reason why a 100-year-old water main recently burst in Los Angeles, spewing out 20 million gallons of precious water in the already drought-stricken Californian city.
MORE: What Can We Learn From the Horrific Harlem Blast?
So what’s stopping Uncle Sam from calling the plumber? Cost, of course, is one main reason. According to Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. will need to spend up to $200 billion dollars on water systems over the next 20 years to upgrade transmission and distribution systems, $97 billion of which will need to go towards water loss control.
The New York Times also points out a much more sinister reason why the country isn’t giving its aging water infrastructure a facelift. Mary Ann Dickinson, president of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, tells the paper, “Water loss is unsexy,” adding, “There’s no ribbon cutting for new plants. If you announce that you’ve recovered a million gallons a day, it looks like you weren’t managing your system right in the first place.”
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But this necessary (albeit expensive) fix could also mitigate much bigger problems. As the American Society of Civil Engineers says, if we do nothing about it, we’ll only have more water shortages to come, increased rates as water gets more expensive and even increased exposure to water-borne illnesses due to unreliable delivery and wastewater treatment services.
Our water systems are only getting older and the planet is only getting hotter, which means more droughts all around — and not just in the American southwest. Solutions are more crucial than ever to conserve this important resource.
Meanwhile, it may be a good idea for you to call your local plumber if you haven’t gotten around to patching up that leaky faucet.
DON’T MISS: The Silver Lining to California’s Terrible Drought
Tag: pipes
What Can We Learn From the Horrific Harlem Blast?
Bad pipes have big problems. Old pipes are less efficient and use more energy. Leaks from eroded pipes can also contaminate the environment and impact air quality. And in the most devastating of cases, problematic pipes can take down entire apartment buildings, cause serious injuries and even claim lives, as the horrific East Harlem natural gas blast (presumably caused by leaky pipes) demonstrated last week.
The problem with pipes is their finite lifespan. And while authorities are still trying figure out the exact cause of the Harlem blast, it has brought much-needed attention to New York City’s aging gas and water mains, some of which are more than 100 years old.
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Simply put, we need to replace, repair or upgrade our cities’ aging pipelines. It may sound like a dramatic fix, but when it’s a life or death situation, this action is critical. When there’s a gas leak, fumes escape and a room can become a ticking time bomb, ignited by anything — from a lit cigarette to a flickering light bulb.
The tragedy in Harlem is proof that we need to fix leaks before it’s too late, especially in older cities like New York, Boston or Philadelphia. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a proponent of infrastructure repair, has said that the federal government needs to provide more aid to cities for this problem.
But there are additional reasons why the whole country should be investing in pipeline upgrades. As Grist pointed out in a recent report, doing so would not only prevent future disasters, but the environment and the economy would be better off as a result, as well. According to the report, natural gas leaks cause methane, a potent gas that’s “between 20 and 85 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as [carbon dioxide]” to be released into the atmosphere, driving climate change.
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As for the economy, repairing the nation’s existing pipeline infrastructure — an estimated $18 billion investment — would create many more long-term jobs than the (controversial) Keystone XL pipeline, according to a study released by the Economics for Equity and Environment and the Labor Network for Sustainability (via HuffPo). That’s 300,000 total jobs across all sectors or nearly five times more jobs, and more long-term jobs than the KXL, the report states.
While it may not be easy or glamorous, it sounds like repairing the country’s pipelines shouldn’t be such a pipe dream.