The Rupture: US faces $300 billion water infrastructure crisis

The nation's drinking water infrastructure is on the fritz...

Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion. [AP]

Comments

[Eric Jaffa]

I hope this problem is solved with government workers doing the repairs.

Not by giving billions to private companies, which give most of the money to their executives.

[Milliorad]

oh brother, you people never learn do you. Privatising public services is the only real solution, having deadbeat public employees and local government bodies who have to respond to dumb bunnies like you will just result in more breakdowns in service. Letting smart and properly motivated people deliver these services will equal lower costs and better quality. God, I can only imagine what the world would look like letting someone as dim witted as Dr. Beyerstein run things. Oh, we do know. Zimbabwe.

Eh, meanwhile I am on holiday here in Karlovy Vary, banging a very nice girl who is inappropriately younger than me.

[shrimplate]

After establishing private no-bid contracts for profiteers on friendly terms with government procurers, perhaps we could also free up industrial employees from troublesome laws such as those forbidding rape. Like in Iraq.

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Smith says.

http://suzieqq.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/second-more-horrific-kbrhalliburton-rape-case-revealed/

If only we could have such freedom here. But no. Angry Bush-hating communist dirty hippies fight freedom at every step. America is lost.

[americangoy]

Add to that the cost of overhauling other infrastructure that is aging - like bridges.

Wasn't there a bridge that just fell down into a river?

And a study that concluded that over half (if my memory is correct) bridges need heavy duty repair work?