America is running out of fresh water fast, and the powers that be are looking for solutions in all the wrong places. Maybe all we need is a plumber…

photo by Ian Boyd

In the spring of 2007, Jennifer Campbell and her husband received a shockingly high $375 water bill. Their house, which was a mere 800 square feet in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee had somehow generated a bill that was twenty times higher than their neighbors were paying. Either the whole block was poaching their water, or they were footing the bill for a serious leak somewhere in the system. “It took the utility company three trips to our house to convince them we weren’t operating a water park in our backyard,” Campbell said. “There was just one hell of a leak right outside our house that they conveniently overlooked.” The 100 year-old pipes that connected their house to the municipal water supply were worn out and leaking, but the city had no system in place to either prevent or detect leakages. The city’s wasteful and irresponsible inaction is not unique to Nashville. In fact, cities across the country with similar attitudes are costing Americans billions of gallons of water every single day.

The U.S. population is outgrowing its water supply. Water shortages are rampant across the country, and more and more states are looking for new sources to exploit. Georgia has tried accessing four different rivers to feed a thirsty Atlanta. Las Vegas is in a constant crisis and is trying to access more of the Colorado River, and several small townships in Massachusetts north of Boston have all but drained the Ipswich River and are desperately looking for better options. What they have all failed to recognize is that the solution might be flowing under their backyards.

Rather than updating the infrastructure that’s already in place, states are looking into exploiting more resources. Despite their desperation, they have failed to recognize that conservation is the best and most responsible way to cope with the problem at hand. There are a number of effective methods out there for conserving water — storing storm water, planting native plants and using drip irrigation systems –, but perhaps the most important thing urban areas can do is look inside the system they’ve already built. If cities concentrated more on efforts to update the plumbing infrastructure and promoted water conservation, perhaps they could avoid having to find other water sources altogether.

Many states haven’t bothered to estimate how much water they waste because of leaky pipes; but for the cities that have, the numbers are staggering. Every day, Atlanta loses 14% of the water it pumps. That’s roughly 17 million gallons, enough water for 170,000 people, according to the City of Atlanta Bureau of Water’s website. According to the USGS, this percentage is average compared to other major cities across the country. Yet for most cities, fixing leaky pipes never has been a top priority.

The current philosophy is that as long as pressure in the pipes is high enough to prevent bacteria from growing inside of them, the pipes are perfectly functional, said Randy Gentry, a hydrologist from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. As far as the water utility companies are concerned, healthy, high-pressure pipes are happy pipes, regardless of how much they leak from the system. The philosophy with the plumbing infrastructure has always been to “throw the pipes in the ground, cover them up, and forget about them,” said Gentry, but in a time of increasing water shortages nation-wide, that philosophy is no longer practical. In most parts of the country, Gentry said, the existing plumbing was designed for much smaller populations, and isn’t appropriate for supporting populations of this size. Inadequately sized pipes are being pushed to their limit, which is decreasing their life spans. But rather than installing more adequately sized pipes, cities are allowing the old pipes to accrue damage and develop significant leaks. In order to adequately and efficiently provide for a population, plumbing systems must evolve with the populations they support.

Fixing pipes is expensive and inconvenient. For a city the size of Atlanta, a large-scale repair on the system would cost billions of dollars – not far from the cost of building a pipeline to Tennessee, said Eric Evenson, Coordinator of the Water Availability Initiative at the U.S. Geological Survey. Additionally, no one wants to deal with the inconvenience of large-scale, citywide construction. Fixing all of the plumbing that needs to be fixed in the city could mean ripping up all of its roads, which might take years. Fixing municipal plumbing could very well be a project that could outlast a politician’s entire term in office. It would increase citywide traffic and be a daily reminder to all citizens that their tax dollars are going towards something that seems like a long-term inconvenience. Approving such a project would hurt any politician – it’s a more tactful political decision to build a 100-mile pipeline that avoids Atlanta, which is home to over half of Georgia’s population. But diverting money into projects that access other water sources is what Gentry calls, “a band aid, not a solution.” It completely lacks foresight.

Fixing the plumbing infrastructure has proven to be an effective remedy in the past. During the 1960’s, a massive drought in the mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey and Maryland caused the states to focus a lot of energy toward drought-proofing the area. States created new reservoirs for water storage, began accessing and storing alternative water resources such as storm water, and interconnected public water systems so adequate supplies could be moved to inadequate ones. Since then, these states have been able to cope with large droughts. Responsible systems like these reservoirs need to be employed in more areas of the country.

But responsible plumbing practices aren’t necessarily what dictate how most voters cast their ballots. A $20 monthly water bill is, for the average American, not large enough to complain about. As long as bills are low, a quickly dwindling resource will continue to be treated like a limitless commodity. As long as voters are happy, there is little motivation for the government to think more about the big picture and correct this problem that is quickly growing into a disaster. Jennifer, her husband and the average American cannot fix this problem – only the government can.