Aug 07 2009
Another Pipe Breaks. How Many More Before we Fix This?
A water main installed in the 1870s- yes the horse and buggy 1870s- ruptured this morning in New York City, causing major flooding and transportation disruptions. The NY Times City Blog paints a pretty grim picture:
A 12-inch cast-iron water main installed in 1870 broke in Lower Manhattan early Friday morning, flooding about a dozen buildings, forcing the evacuation of several structures, and sending water gushing over the area at least three blocks around the site … The water was up to four feet deep in some buildings at the height of the flood, around 5 a.m. Service on the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 subway lines was interrupted for a while, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is continuing to warn of delays in service along those lines, as well as on the M20, M22 and X25 bus routes.
While I hate to say “I told you so” after a disaster, this rupture brings home the need to do two crucial things recommended by the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure:
1. (specific) Invest in modernizing the nation’s water infrastructure
2. (general) Plan, design, and operate resilient critical infrastructure systems to withstand and recover from disruptions.
It might not be much consolation to the people up in NYC today dealing with damages to homes and business or who are unable to travel, but there are some tools we can use to keep problems like this from happening again. 
Firstly, we need to support legislation that increases revenues for water infrastructure. The federal government’s share of water infrastructure investments has dropped dramatically over the last few decades and local governments are left shouldering a financial burden too big to handle. A new proposal in Congress, the Water Protection and Reinvestment Act raises revenues from a variety of sources to fund a Trust Fund for drinking and wastewater infrastructure. An easy thing for you to do is visit ASCE Report Card Action Center and send an email to your legislators instantly asking them to support the bill.
Second, the delays to vehicle, bus, and rail travel in a busy downtown area this break is causing illustrate how interconnected our infrastructure systems are. A new publication form ASCE Guiding Principles for Critical Infrastructure gives engineers and policymakers a framework for not only protecting infrastructure in a disaster, but making sure all systems (transportation, water, emergency services) work together to keep people safe and get things back on track.
Most of these problems won’t be fixed over night – NYC itself probably has hundreds of miles of century-old pipes – but we need to start somewhere. Infrastructure failures are often tragedies with both human and economic costs, but they also show us where we need to be doing better. Thankfully it looks like no one got hurt this time, but let’s not sit around and wait for another break to happen we need more money to build a safer, smarter system.
Most of the money in the water infrastructure bill is for wastewater, not drinking water. That wouldn’t have helped the failed 12″ drinking water main.
For too long we have held off on developing well thought out, prioritised, reasoned, rehabilitation plans for ageing infrastructure because the job is so difficult - much easier to blame others for failure to provide funding.
Yet simply spending money on infrastructure is not the answer - and if we have any doubt about that then we have not been watching in horror as millions have been hastily, and unwisely, spent on infrastructure in the name of economic stimulus.
Let’s stop using lack of funding as an excuse for lack of thinking. Develop - and publicise - the plans. If the public can see where the money is going, and what it will achieve, then support and funding will follow.
I am amazed at how people react when they are inconvenienced, as your article states, “for a while”. This watermain was built 140 years ago, and I’m sure has served the community well for a very long time. In fact, it would be interesting to know how often it has broken in those 140 years since that is the real test of negligence. I have been in this business for a long time, and I would venture that it has not failed often. Furthermore, strictly from a technical perspective, watermain breaks usually indicate a very localized weakness and this does not require overall replacement even though it may be 140 years old. This politicizes the process and results in wasting precious financial resources that could be used elsewhere. Things break, even newer things. The more “things” (i.e. services) we have in our lives, the greater the odds of one of them breaking: cell phones, cars, televisions, computers, even watermains and sewers. We need to accept that reality and those inconveniences, and not react like spoiled children. That ’s what happens when we have things that last for many generations, we take them for granted. In fact, this particular watermain may have many more decades of life left in it. Let’s not jump to conclusions and waste even more public money that we don’t have. We need to start rationalizing infrastructure decisions, and more importantly we need to obtain public buy-in to that rationale.