Water: A Billion Gallons A Month Down the Drain
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.14.08
High Bridge Aqueduct, Harlem River, New York City. Edwin Levick, Hulton Archive, Getty Images
Delivering safe, healthy water has been one of the main functions of government for as long as there have been governments, building aqueducts in Roman times and more recently across the Harlem River. Water is also political, as we have seen from Atlanta to Wisconsin this year. But that hasn't stopped our current governments from letting the infrastructure fall to ruin.
Two hours north of New York City, there is a lovely stream and marsh where people come to drink the cool, fresh water; in fact is is a leak of 36 million gallons a day from the Delaware Aqueduct, a billion gallons a month. (nor is this news, Andy Revkin wrote about it in 2002)
Croton Reservoir, 5th Ave and 42nd Street, New York, 1898 Hirz/Getty Images
All over America, pipes are breaking. According to the New York Times:
"In Chicago, an 80-year-old cast-iron water main broke earlier this year, spilling thousands of gallons and opening up a 25-foot hole in the street.
In Denver, up to 4 million gallons of water gushed from a ruptured 30-year-old pipeline in February, gouging a sinkhole across three lanes of Interstate 25. The lanes were shut down for nearly two weeks.
Cleveland has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure in the past 20 years but still must repair daily breaks. Last month, a break in a 2 1/2-foot-diameter water main turned a downtown square into a watery crater and knocked out other utilities.
The amount of wasted water from these breaches is staggering."
The fact that it has come to this, where half the nation doesn't know where its water is going to come from, and the other half is pissing it down the drain, is even more staggering. ::New York Times
View of the Croton Dam on the Hudson River, Croton, New York, twentieth century. (Photo by Frederic Lewis/Getty Images)
More TreeHugger on Water:
How to Green Your Water
Water Weirding: American Southwest on Uncertain Ground :
Water Running Out in Atlanta
How is water wasted if it goes back into the Earth? I'm not being antagonistic; I really don't get it. Is it a waste of the energy used to clean the water? I guess I don't know how this all works...
Such waste is common when public utilities are starved of capital funds because revenue goes into the general budget or prices are held at average (not marginal) cost. Private water companies are not the obvious answer. (Read More)
Such waste is common when public utilities are starved of capital funds because revenue goes into the general budget or prices are held at average (not marginal) cost. Private water companies are not the obvious answer. (Read More)
The Croton Dam is not on the Hudson as the caption would suggest (you have to go pretty far north on the Hudson to find one). The Croton Dam is on the Croton River near Croton-on-Hudson, NY. It's a nice day trip, and an astonishingly beautiful example of hand hewn masonry. Another nice example is Kensico Dam in Valhalla, NY.
"How is water wasted if it goes back into the Earth? I'm not being antagonistic; I really don't get it. Is it a waste of the energy used to clean the water? I guess I don't know how this all works..."
Water is wasted whenever it is rendered unusable by some activity that isn't worth the water it used. Yes, the water runs into the oceans where the sun evaporates it and etc in the water cycle, but that just means that we have a de facto solar powered water purifier that runs at a certain speed. That means that, barring heavy use of desalination plants, we have a budget of fresh water that we have to operate within. After all, without fresh water we cannot drink and neither can the plants that feed us.
Charging water consumers the full price of water delivery is the answer, at which point public versus private delivery become irrelevant. This goes for garbage collection, electricity, and all the other grossly non-green services that receive taxpayer subsidy.
As an aside, re David Zetland`s comment, the reason the private sector is *always* the correct (and obvious) fix to any given problem is that the private sector MUST run in the black, with the consent of the involved parties, or not at all.
The state can (and inevitably does) run any program or service as far into the red as it wants, because taxes will cover the difference and taxpayers can`t refuse the bill (no matter how wasteful). With no cost constraint, there can be no competition; with no competition, there is no upward pressure on quality; thus public services are inevitably overpriced (as measured by the taxpayer) and inevitably underperform.