America’s Slow-Motion Water Crisis

This…

…is the world’s most boring miracle.

Every day, roughly 150,000 local systems across the country are pushing clean water into Americans’ homes.

And let’s be clear: That’s an insane accomplishment.

Because if you took all the fresh water on the surface of the entire planet — every river, every lake, every reservoir — it would form a sphere just 35 miles across, barely the width of New York City.ⁱ

And yet: None of us ever worry about whether anything’s going to come out of the tap.

That we built this system for a nation of over 340 million people is a staggering accomplishment.

Also pretty staggering? We’re screwing it up.

[OPENING SEQUENCE]

You are different than the vast majority of people who’ve ever lived.

Not because of your age-inappropriate puppet shows, though … we should talk about that.

You’re different because you almost certainly have reliable access to clean, safe drinking water — which is something that has been unavailable to most people in most places for most of human history.

And we tend to forget just how recent a development this is. In 1950, it was still the case that more than a third of American households didn’t have indoor plumbing.ⁱⁱ By 1990 that number had dropped to one percent.ⁱⁱⁱ

For an idea of what we just barely escaped, rewind the clock to 1900.

If you lived in a major American city in that year … there was a pretty good chance it’d be a death sentence.

The death rate from infectious diseases was 75 percent higher in the largest American cities than in rural areas. And 40 percent of those deaths were caused by pathogens that often spread through the water system — things like cholera, typhoid, and dysentery.^iv

What happened over the next few decades was a revolution in how cities handled water safety: Filtration. Chlorination. Sewage treatment. Often at a heroic scale.

In Chicago, for example, a massive engineering project actually reversed the flow of the Chicago River to push away waste, successfully cleaning the city’s water for the first time.^v

So … not totally foolproof.^vi

The result of all those efforts? Researchers estimate that in the early 20th century half of the reduction in overall deaths, two-thirds of the reduction in the deaths of children and three-quarters of the reduction in the deaths of infants came from clean water.^vii

The people who built that infrastructure handed us a system so successful that we can’t imagine the world without it. All we had to do was maintain it.

And, here’s the thing: We’re not doing a great job of maintaining it.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, nearly 20 percent of all the installed water mains in the country — over 450,000 miles of pipe — have already exceeded their useful life.^viii

In some parts of the country, water is still delivered through the infrastructure built in the 19th century.^ix In fact, as of just a few years ago Philadelphia’s water system included pipe that dated to the 1820s.^x

What does that mean in the real world?

Well, for one thing it means less water.

Because aging pipes leak or break, we lose over 33 trillion gallons of water a year^xi — which, for comparison, is pretty close to losing Lake Tahoe.^xii

And that’s not even the worst part. In many cases, this aging infrastructure is putting people’s health at risk.

You probably remember the headlines that came out of Flint, Michigan, in 2016, when citizens were told not to drink the local water because it had been contaminated by lead pipes.^xiii

And you may have wondered how that’s possible in America — which is a reasonable question, because at the time of the Flint crisis it had been illegal to install lead water pipes for 30 years.^xiv

But here’s the thing: The average age of the country’s water pipes is 45 years.^xv

How old were the pipes in Flint? Well … no one really knows.

Because when work started on replacing them, researchers discovered that all the records were kept on over 100,000 hand-written index cards in the basement of the city’s water department^xvi — cards which dated all the way back to 1910.^xvii

Fortunately, that crisis passed. Flint eventually replaced all those pipes — although it took a decade.^xviii

Unfortunately, however … this is probably not the last time we’ll hear this story. Because, as of the end of 2025, the EPA reported that there were still at least four million lead service lines throughout the country.^xix

Now, at this point you may be wondering “OK, why don’t we just replace all of them?”

And … there are a bunch of answers to that question.

One of them is that we don’t know where a lot of this stuff is.

A 2021 survey found that only 10 states were able to provide estimates of the number of lead pipes they have. And in fact, 23 states admitted that they don’t even track that number.^xx

Which is why the federal government subsequently mandated that states start counting.^xxi

But even that doesn’t solve the problem. Because the biggest factor here is that all this work costs money.

Like a staggeringly large amount of money.

The total cost of replacing these pipes — which is now required by law to happen in the next ten years^xxii — is estimated at between $45 and $90 billion.^xxiii

And while Congress has provided a small fraction of that money,^xxiv the rest will have to come from the water utilities themselves^xxv — 80 percent of which report that they already don’t have enough money to cover their basic operations.^xxvi

In other words, Washington has told them to fix the problem — but no one has any idea how we’re going to pay for it.

And here’s the irony: At the same time that we’re scrounging to find money to pay for vital upgrades to our water system, we’re also spending enormous amounts on those same systems … for things that do nothing.

For the past 50 years or so, the federal government has taken the dominant position in making sure that local water supplies around the country are safe.^xxvii Which sounds pretty reasonable.

But here’s the thing: A lot of it was extremely expensive — and had basically no effect. The Environmental Protection Agency’s own analysis has shown that for many of the water issues it’s regulating “the risks may be as low as zero.”^xxviii

To give you a tangible example of this, in 1997 the EPA sued New York City to force it to build a new filtration plant targeted at reducing the prevalence of two minor parasites that could live in the water. Sounds plausible enough — until you get into the details.

Like that of the approximately 50 million people who would have consumed New York City water over the course of a year there were only about 1,000 recorded cases of exposure to these parasites.^xxix

And that exposure typically resulted in minor stomach pain.

And that the filtration plant cost over $3 billion.

And that the city’s own environmental commissioner said that even with the plant in place the city’s water quality would be the same.

And that the infections from these parasites actually went up after the plant opened.

In other words, we made a priority of going after 1,000 tummy aches. We did not make a priority of replacing 4 million lead pipes.

The people who built our water infrastructure created something just short of a miracle. And despite the fact that we live in a wealthier, more technologically advanced society than they did, we’re letting it decay.

All of which suggests that it’s time for us to start getting serious. That it’s time for us to set priorities. And that it’s time to focus on what really matters.

Also probably time to end the puppet shows.