SHIT, PISS and Other Waste Coming Soon To Your Residence! Who Will Fix America's 150-Year-Old SEWERS?

[DeathDealer]

"Billions needed to upgrade America’s leaky water infrastructure"

By Ashley Halsey III
January 2, 2012





AT FIRST GLANCE, the pizza-size hole that popped open when a heavy
truck passed over a freshly paved District street seemed fairly minor.

Then city inspectors in Washington, D.C., got on their bellies with a
flashlight to peer into it. What they discovered has become far too
common. A massive 19th-century brick sewer had silently eroded away,
leaving a cavern beneath a street in Adams Morgan that could have
swallowed most of a Metro bus.

It took three weeks and about a million dollars to repair the sewer,
which was built in 1889.

Time and wear “had torn off all the bricks and sent them God knows
where,” said George S. Hawkins, general manager of the District of
Columbia Water and Sewer Authority. “We have to find them and see if
they’re plugging up the system somewhere farther down the line.”

If it were not buried underground, the water and sewer system that
serves the nation’s capital could be an advertisement for Band-Aids.
And it is not much different from any other major system in the
country, including those in many suburbs and in cities less than half
as old as Washington.

Although they are out of sight and out of mind except when they spring
a leak, water and sewer systems are more vital to civilized society
than any other aspect of infrastructure.

Rapidly deteriorating roads and bridges may stifle America’s economy
and turn transportation headaches into nightmares, but if the nation’s
water and sewer systems begin to fail, life as we know it will too.
Without an ample supply of water, people don’t drink, toilets don’t
flush, factories don’t operate, offices shut down and fires go
unchecked. When sewage systems fail, cities can’t function and
epidemics break out.

“All the big cities have these problems, and to me it’s the unseen
catastrophe,” Hawkins said. “My humble view is that the industry we’re
in is the bedrock of civilization because it’s not just an
infrastructure that is a convenience, that allows you to get to work
faster or slower. At least with bridges or a road, people have some
idea of what it is because they drive on them and see them. ”

And just like roads and bridges, the vast majority of the country’s
water systems are in urgent need of repair and replacement. At a
Senate hearing last month, it was estimated that, on average, 25
percent of drinking water leaks from water system pipes before
reaching the faucet. The same committee was told it will take $335
billion to resurrect water systems and $300 billion to fix sewer
systems.

There is no better illustration of the looming national crisis than
the District’s system.

The average D.C. water pipe is 77 years old, but a great many were
laid in the 19th century. Sewers are even older. Most should have been
replaced decades ago.

Emergency crews rush from site to site to tackle an average of 450
breaks a year.

Raw sewage flows into the Potomac, the Anacostia and Rock Creek
whenever it rains hard — hundreds of times a year — an annual flush of
about 3 billion gallons, according to D.C. Water.

Firefighters are equipped with computerized cue sheets to tell them
which of the 9,157 hydrants in the District have enough water pressure
to put out a fire.

The average water and sewer bill has gone up about 50 percent in just
four years, to $65 a month for single-family homes. Unless there is
federal regulatory relief, it may climb to $100 a month by the end of
the decade.

The decrepit system has 1,300 miles of water pipe and 1,800 miles of
sewers. The water pipes are being replaced at an average of 11 miles a
year. At that rate, replacing them all will take more than 100 years.

There’s no money to do it any faster. And, Hawkins says, “if you did
it much faster than that, you could paralyze the city in terms of
traffic.”

* * *

A snowstorm had turned the District into a ghost town a couple of
years ago when Hawkins trudged through the snow to check a break in a
water main at 21st Street and New Hampshire Avenue.

The intersection isn’t far from several embassies, and a few foreign
visitors came from a hotel on the corner to watch as snowplows dug
down to find the leak’s source. Hawkins recalls telling the visitors
that the old mains under New Hampshire Avenue burst fairly often.
“They said: ‘You have pipes that were put in in the 1860s? We thought
we had it bad in Ghana!’ ”

* * *

The good news? The District’s pipes are being replaced twice as fast
as the average in other major water systems in America.

The gargantuan numbers tossed around during December’s Senate hearing
as the cost of saving the country’s water and sewage systems have no
more promise of connecting with the public than has the $7 trillion
that transportation experts say should be spent to resurrect roads,
bridges, aviation and transit in the next decade.

About $9.4 billion more per year is needed for water and sewer work
between now and 2020, according to a study released last month by the
American Society of Civil Engineers. Without that, many Americans
should prepare for regular disruption of water service and a jump in
contamination caused by sewage bacteria, the study said.

The price of water, always far below commodities like electricity and
gasoline, can be expected to rise dramatically as the demand taxes the
systems that deliver it, analysts agree.

Nationwide, an estimated 1.7 trillion gallons of water leaks from
pipes each year before it can be put to use. About 900 billion gallons
of raw sewage flows into waterways.

Those leaks and untreated flushes aren’t just a problem in creaking
Eastern cities that date to colonial times. Oklahoma, which didn’t
become a state until the 20th century, has estimated it needs to
invest $82 billion in water and sewer infrastructure over the next 50
years.

“I remember when they used to consider us out in the newer states like
Oklahoma as not having the infrastructure problems of older states,”
Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said, “but that’s not true anymore.”

Although suburbs that have appeared or expanded since World War II
have newer systems, they’re showing age. Even in this relatively mild
year in which there have been fewer breaks — more mains break when
there are severe temperature swings — the Washington suburbs have had
problems. There have been more than 1,440 leaks or breaks in
Montgomery and Prince George’s counties this year. Fairfax County has
had 300.

“People count on turning on the faucet and having clean water come
out,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of the
subcommittee on water. “Our nation’s water infrastructure is reaching
a tipping point.”

But with the economy sputtering and Congress eager to slash a
burgeoning deficit, selling Americans on the need to pay billions more
in water bills or taxes to salvage a system they didn’t even know was
breaking may be impossible.

“The customer base really doesn’t know,” Hawkins said. “Like when I
turn on the faucet, what on Earth is needed to deliver that water?
It’s like magic. And then it goes down the drain. It’s like magic
again.”

* * *

Hawkins was awakened on a Friday night in October 2010 to news that
water was erupting all over the place at Constitution Avenue and Ninth
Street.

“When a water main breaks, all hell breaks loose because it’s under
such high pressure,” he said. “We dug an original hole that wasn’t in
the right place because at first you can’t really tell” where the
break is — the water can work its way to the surface through any
fissure.

Pressure from the 24-inch main buckled the pavement a foot high. Water
flooded the basement of the Department of Justice. The Smithsonian’s
National Museum of Natural History had to shut down the next day.

The torrent was unleashed by a water main that had been installed in
the 1890s, when Grover Cleveland lived a few blocks away in the White
House.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/billions-needed-to-upgrade-americas-leaky-water-infrastructure/2011/12/22/gIQAdsE0WP_story.html

[Nancing Prancer]

One-hundred-fifty year-old sewers?

I doubt Billah Graham is a day over 110.