What Frequent Water Main Breaks Reveal About America’s Aging Infrastructure
The drinking water in the United States is among the safest and most reliable in the world, yet the aging infrastructure nationwide presents significant challenges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, a water main breaks every two minutes. To explore why these issues are so prevalent, Shannon Marquez, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, joins John Yang for a discussion.
According to PBS, well, in fact, if you think about what it’s going to take to overhaul these systems, the amount of finance, the reality is that water utilities are faced with just being able to do what they can, patch the holes as they come, patch the main breaks as they come, and there’s not enough resources. It really is going to require federal level efforts. And although we have the infrastructure bill, it’s not nearly enough to really overcome these challenges.One of the other challenges is the diversity of water systems. The reality is that the governance and regulations around publicly owned treatment works versus community water systems. You know, there is just a huge array of regs, and the structure of that makes it very inefficient. So the reality is, depending on the size and the age of it, there are going to be different problems. There’s not a one size fits all solution to this problem.
