America’s Twin Water Crises

A merica is facing two distinct disasters that have been developing for years. The worst drought in centuries has parched Western states and driven reservoirs dry. Water levels behind two of the nation’s largest dams are in danger of dropping so low that the dams might stop functioning. The federal government should urgently reallocate scarce water more efficiently, limit subsidies that discourage conservation, and better protect property rights.

But there’s an even bigger problem that exacerbates this situation — our aging water infrastructure.

Last week, a three-foot-wide pipe ruptured in the West Hollywood area of Los Angeles. A total of 17 million gallons of water flowed down the Sunset Strip and beyond Santa Monica Boulevard. More than 200 cars were destroyed, and Sunset Boulevard remains closed because of the sinkhole created by the break. The disaster shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. The burst pipe was 110 years old. The average age of the nation’s pipes is 45. The American Society of Civil Engineers reports that about 20 percent of all the water mains in the country — over 450,000 miles of pipe — have exceeded their useful life.

Water breaks and leaks cause the loss of 6 billion gallons of treated water each day. In a year, that’s enough to supply more than 30 million households. “These losses don’t just waste water — they also waste energy, chemicals, and dollars spent to treat and transport it,” reports the Conservation Foundation. These losses partially explain why the price of water and sewage for households has more than doubled in real terms since the early 1980s. Households in some large cities now spend more than $1,200 a year on water and sewage charges, even though per capita use has decreased.

The nation’s 150,000 local water systems are a marvel that helped transform the country. A third of Americans lacked indoor plumbing in 1950; by 1990, less than 1 percent did. Using filtration, chlorination, and proper sewage treatment, by the 1980s, the vast majority of Americans had safe, clean water. But the government neglected the maintenance of this infrastructure. Some major Eastern cities still use pipes installed in the 1800s. The total cost of replacing these pipes — which is now required by law in the next ten years — is estimated to be between $45 billion and $90 billion. But the federal government is moving slowly and often focuses on hugely expensive filtration upgrades that don’t do much good. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is setting water mandates that far exceed what even the most liberally governed cities consider necessary. These mandates drive up the cost of water, stymie housing construction, and burden city budgets.

Take New York City. For many decades, its unfiltered drinking water has been the best in the world — it comes from reservoirs in the Catskills via the Croton Aqueduct. But, in 1997, the EPA sued the city and required that it install a new filtration plant to reduce the presence of two minor parasites that could live in its water. Additional federal mandates were piled on top of that. The filtration plant wound up costing $3.2 billion and took 18 years to build. In 2013, the outgoing administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg estimated that it had spent $20 billion on water projects over a dozen years in office. New York City’s water debt payments now amount to 25 percent of its total city debt.

Despite all this spending, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection says the quality of the water from the reservoirs is basically the same. Recorded rates of infection from the two parasites the EPA was worried about in fact increased after the new filtration plant opened. In 2015, there were some 1,000 reported cases of infection — almost all of them involving minor gastrointestinal symptoms. This from a water system that delivered 360 billion gallons a year to 8 million New Yorkers, 2 million commuters, and nearly 40 million tourists.

The EPA’s own analysis has shown that, for many of the water issues it’s regulating, “the risks may be as low as zero.” But it nonetheless argues that any potential risks should be treated as probable ones. The precautionary principle in environmental regulation — which requires that measures be taken even if cause-and-effect relationships are not fully empirically established — has too often become a preposterous principle.

The Trump EPA has begun to reduce the number of overly burdensome regulations. But more needs to be done. Turning over water utility ownership or management to private companies would speed up the process and force systems to innovate rather than simply pass costs to taxpayers. One in six Americans already gets drinking water from privately owned, regulated utility systems. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, his EPA endorsed privatization as a way in which local governments could better meet environmental standards.

There is no doubt that the public is concerned about the pollution of drinking water. Polls show that it ranks as Americans’ No. 1 environmental concern, ahead of climate change, endangered species, and local air pollution. Whether the problem is Western droughts or obsolete pipes in America’s urban centers, market forces have been underused. It’s imperative that they be deployed if we are to avoid the worst: rationing.