Rorschach sent me a link to an ABCNews.com story about how the big cities in the northeast are facing a serious breakdown in their potable (i.e.: drinking) water delivery systems. Seems that they’re getting old and crumbling, leading to some serious water leaks. New York probably has the worst. Bear in mind when you read this, that NYC has to draw water from hundreds of miles away, incuding resivoirs in the Catskills and the Delaware river, through huge pipelines, 40+ feet across.

The oldest, largest cities in the country — Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York — are all showing signs that their distribution systems are in need of repair, said Eric Goldstein, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group.

In New York City, for example, the biggest leak in its system loses 1 billion gallons of water a month, he said.

Frankly, someone’s got to be misplacing a decimal point. I remember seeing an episode of 60 Minutes (back when it did respectable TV news journalism), in which an inspector was fighting an uphill battle against laziness and shoddy workmanship in the new lines. I would have to assume that the leak is somehwere in those lines, which supply raw water to the city’s treatment plants; anything else would result in half of Manhatten washing away. There are 1440 minutes in a month, which means that the leak would be losing nearly 700,000 gallons per minute. That might be possible if one of the major supply lines is breached, right next to a river that can accept the flow….

Their biggest problem is that they’re not replacing lines fast enough. According to this article, NYC is replacing only forty miles of water main per year. I don’t know how many they have, but bear in mind that Houston, a city smaller in population, but much less dense, has over six thousand miles of mains.

The overall health of our utility system is an issue I’ve kept a bit of an eye on over the years, because it impacts the health of Houstonians in general.

EPA rules require that water leaving a city’s water plant be tested for microorganisms like cryptosporidium and legionella that thrive in degraded water systems. (The) EPA also requires tests for a slew of other contaminants, including lead, copper and arsenic, which can lead to any number of gastrointestinal or other illnesses.

But once water has been purged of such impurities, different ones can enter the water supply as it courses through miles of old pipe.

“Investigations conducted in the last five years suggest that a substantial proportion of waterborne disease outbreaks, both microbial and chemical, is attributable to problems within distribution systems,” the National Research Council said in a study for the Environmental Protection Agency released in Decembe

Such was the cause of a lawsuit by some Houston homeowners, alledging that the high incidence of cancer in their neighborhood was caused by broken water lines running through a hazardous area containing toxic waste. They failed in their lawsuit only because while they could prove that lines had broken, and contaminants had entered the system, they coulndn’t prove how much, on which occasions, and establsih a direct causal link between specific breaks and their increased cancer. For what it’s worth, water used in my household is filtered; I generally will no longer drink plain tap water straight from the faucet.

Fixing this problem is going to be expensive, nationally.

“We estimate in the next 20 to 30 years water utilities will have to invest $250 to $350 billion just to replace the pipes that are in the ground today,” said Jack Hossbuhr, executive director of the American Water Works Association, the industry’s trade group.

How does Houston fare? I can’t claim to have a lot of inside information, but I’d say I’m a very well-informed layman at the minimum. The summary: we have some minor problems now, and will be facing increasing problems in the next 20-30 years, I think, but not a total system collapse — if we continue to spend steadily on maintenance and line replacement each year. If we get another Mayor Brown slashing spending on both, all bets are off. The biggest headache over the next generation: older inner-loop neighborhoods (especially minority) and the southwest side. A lot of the city’s infrastructure on the SW side was built in the 60’s, and I would assume its estimated lifespan to be somewhere in the range of a half-century to 75 years. I’m not really certain; I can’t find any projections on it. Overall though, I don’t see us as having near the issues of the NE cities; for one thing, our system is a lot younger than theirs — parts of which are well over 100 years old. We’ve also been aggressive about rebuilding and upgrading the system (at least in non-minority neighborhoods…) so most neighborhoods are supplied by water mains built within the last 20-30 years, even if the smaller distribution mains within those neighborhoods are older. The mandated switch to surface water has also impacted our system. Most of our main trunk lines from the new treatment facilities are only 25 years old (and in some cases, less than five).

Our primary disadvantage is that we’re spread out, meaning that for a city of our population we have a huge amount of pipeline; six thousand miles of it, as I said. When we do have to replace it, it’s going to be a lot to do, which is why constantly doing some replacement is crucial. That brings us to our second major disadvantage: the lack of maintenance starting in the Brown years. It only takes a few years of slacking for the problems to snowball; in drought conditions that occurred during his administration, we had 1500-2200 leaks on report. That doesn’t even include the collapsing sewer system, which was blamed on “cold weather.” Having atrophied the city work force, and faced with an angry public, the last years of his tenure were marked by increasing the amount of work farmed out to contractors; the city now keeps several of them on retainer and dispatches them to problems almost as if they were city repair crews. The exception to this is the Kingwood area, which has been wholly contracted out — to Severn Trent. (I seem to recall that one of the reasons we annexed them was to “offer” them city services. Doesn’t contracting those services out suggest the city couldn’t make good on that “offer” to Kingwood?) Whether or not this has been enough to make up the difference, I am not certain, but it appears to be so for now.

What I don’t have access to is information on the average age of the system; how much of it is how old, and so on. The older it gets, the more water we lose, and the more contaminents that enter the lines–or sometimes, the more the old lines contaminate the water themselves, with rust. I can say that the amount of lost water in Houston ran around 11-15% a decade ago, with spikes of up to 18% in drought conditions. “Lost water” is a lot more complicated subject than it seems, as by AWWA definition, it includes all water not sold. This means city facility use, firefighting, free giveaways (such as to the Zoo Development Corporation, which doesn’t have to pay for any water used at the zoo for fifty years), flushing lines, theft, leakage, and administrative error.) That’s actually not too bad; Philly, which takes the subject much more seriously, was routinely losing about 17-21% at that time. Houston, with its “plentiful” water, is not as rigorous in pursuing this subject, and doesn’t even track some categories. It’s a problem with interdepartmental cooperation, and isn’t wholly within PW&E’s control.

We’ve been blessed since the Lanier administration with a strong series of PW&E chiefs who were nuts & bolts guys, and more interested in getting & keeping the city’s house in order than in poltics and graft. That was not true under Whitmire, with two caveats; I can’t point to anyone at the top I know was bad (though some middle and lower managerial ranks barely escaped prosecution), and the housecleaning did start in her last term, when it became obvious how badly the Utilities Group had been mis-managed. For a while, the water and sewer divisions were spun off into their own department, which gave Director Fredrick Perrenot time to start the cleanup. My take on him is that he was not a bad Director, but not much better than middling; interested in his own advancement, and willing to play politics to get it. Then James Schindewolf came back on board with Lanier, at which point Public Utilities was reunited with PW&E, and Perrenot became second fiddle. JS concentrated on both training and system infrastructure, when he wasn’t busy running the city for Lanier. Early on, he paid lip service to the Whitmire administration’s plan to reach as far east as Toledo Bend for future water supplies, but that plan got quietly swept under the rug when it was clear there was no backing in Austin for it. Then things backslid badly under Brown, who brought Perrenot back — until he had to throw him to the wolves after several years of slashed budgets and no maintenance blew up in his face during 2000-2001. Loyally carrying out the orders of his master to chop spending and staffing had left Fredrick with no choice but to fall on his sword when ordered to do so. (Edit: Argh. King was the director under Brown who had to retire, Perrenot had a subordinate position. I think he was in charge of the “Utilities Group” in PW&E — hence the confusion.)

PW&E’s current director, Michael Marcotte, seems to be adequate, but is evidently much more of a manager than an engineer. (Although, for the record, he is a P.E. and D.D.E.) Beset by the loss of a major portion of its institutional talent, he may be exactly what the department needs when it needs it. His insistance on what is called the Continuous Management Improvement process has paid dividends with a department that is much more process-oriented than before. Unfortunately, much of his time has been taken in the last year or two with sorting out the mess in Code Enforcement, so I have no idea if he’s been able to watch the long-term strategic situation. Only time will tell us whether another nuts-and-bolts engineer will be needed to ensure the health of Houston’s water supply in the 21st century, but I can say for certain that future directors will not lack for the information necessary to make decisons. Hopefully, they’ll still have a few employees left to locate and analyze it. 🙂