Drinking Water Is Staying in Pipes Longer

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/05/water-pipes-infrastructure-shrinking-cities-health/590752/

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

99 65 7 years ago

assblaster• 7 years ago

Isn't the solution to this just to have a connection from tap to sewer if a certain flow rate is not maintained?

natermer3• 7 years ago

You would just shift the costs away from maintaining pipes to treating massive amounts of water that would never get used by anybody.

And you will still have to maintain the pipes. Your solution would reduce costs per mile, but you still have a lot of mileage to maintain with a shrinking population.

amluto• 7 years ago

I would believe that there are areas where something like this, perhaps for groundwater recharge, wouldn’t be totally crazy.

rayiner11• 7 years ago

Our water infrastructure isn’t in a shambles just in shrinking cities. It’s a disaster everywhere: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. It’s an archetypal example of how the government is bad at setting prices. Water boards respond to public pressure, and as a result set rates too low to be sustainable in the long run: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/stretching-water-dollars-f....

Despite the challenges posed by shrinking federal investment and rising costs, America’s water systems strive to maintain affordability. As such, many water systems have historically underpriced the services they provide to keep water rates low.

The result is a backlog in investment approaching a trillion dollars.

natermer3• 7 years ago

This is just a microcosm of problems governments are going to face with shrinking populations.

Another, related problem, is the issue of maintaining state pensions and other entitlement programs.

Social Security in the USA, for example, has a negative ROI. For it to work the government has to take money from younger working people in order to pay for older retired people. As the population shrinks you have less and less young people being forced to support the larger number of retired people.

All these sorts of programs have the same problems. They were designed in a era were it was assumed that people died off as a higher rate and people were born at a faster rate. As those trends gradually reverse then all welfare/entitlement programs are becomingly increasingly insolvent.

....

This sort of stuff is why the Soviets had to institute travel restrictions and a sort of passport system in the USSR; you can't have effective long term government planing with a rapidly shifting population.

vkou2• 7 years ago

Social Security in the USA, for example, has a negative ROI. For it to work the government has to take money from younger working people in order to pay for older retired people. As the population shrinks you have less and less young people being forced to support the larger number of retired people.

You can solve that entire problem with a few years of inflation. There's nothing, in principle, wrong with a guaranteed return-until-you-die investment, as part of a retirement strategy.

It's a smart part of a diverse retirement portfolio (Especially when compared with a 100% commitment to the guaranteed-contribution, variable-return investments of 401ks). I wish I could invest more than 3% of my income into SS - and I expect to take a haircut on that investment.

rayiner11• 7 years ago

The situation with water infrastructure isn’t sustainable even ignoring cities with shrinking populations. Many cities, like DC, are growing but have bad problems with their water systems, because of the extreme aversion to raising rates to the necessary level.

sametmax2• 7 years ago

Yeah no. We have plenty of shrinking cities in France. The water system is still in perfect shape.

My old grand mother city is one of them: streets are full of closed shops, but the infrastructures are in perfect shape. Roads are pristine. Water is clear. Electricity is never ever missing.

JohnFen2• 7 years ago

This is just a microcosm of problems governments are going to face with shrinking populations.

I don't think it's that simple. If it were, then why do we see similar problems in the areas where the population is growing?

Jweb_Guru2• 7 years ago

You realize that it is possible to pay for water infrastructure from taxes, without directly charging for water usage, right? The reason this is a problem (as stated in the article you linked) is because the federal government has slashed funding, not because the government is bad at setting prices; the only reason to interpret it in that way is if you are looking to privatize the water infrastructure.

ip263• 7 years ago

That's a rather uncharitable interpretation. Your parent may just feel like people should pay for the water they use, and not for the water they don't. Which only works properly if the pricing is set right.

See complaints about how rooftop solar customers don't pay their fair share of fixed grid overhead. Wouldn't be a problem if you billed people an accurately priced fixed charge, plus usage charge.

rayiner11• 7 years ago

The model that has universally been adopted in the US (and in most of the developed world), is based on usage fees. And that requires the government to set prices. (For reasons that have nothing to do with privatization. Almost all water infrastructure in the US is publicly owned and maintained.) And because the government is bad at setting prices, that model has resulted in failure, at least in the US.

One can imagine a different model, which does not require the government to set prices. But that doesn’t mean the government isn’t bad at setting prices. And it would be a dramatic and fundamental change to the wide variety of government services based on usage fees. There are also intensely good reasons to have usage fees. Otherwise, you encourage waste and sprawl.

Federal funding is a red herring. Water is an archetypal municipal issue, like local roads. The federal government has targeted programs for disadvantaged communities, but in general cities (and certainly states) should be able to handle their own water and sewer systems.

rgbrenner2• 7 years ago

Are they bad at setting prices, or are they acknowledging the fact that people need water to live.

The last thing a city wants is a bunch of people who can't afford water, and decide to drink from the local stream, and the city has to pay to treat cholera or some other outbreak.

There are other ways of paying for infrastructure. Not everything needs to be fully paid with usage fees.

wefarrell2• 7 years ago

Lawns, golf courses and swimming pools consume hundreds of thousands of times more than what people need to live.

Heavy users of water currently pay far less than what they should and are receiving taxpayer subsidies.

ThrustVectoring• 7 years ago

It's an issue with how municipalities are allowed to budget on a cash basis, rather than on an accrual basis. This has allowed a vast misallocation of resources - allowing a developer to put up houses for a one-time setup fee will, under a cash basis, create a paper "profit" for the increased tax burden and income that is more than wiped out by the eventual costs of maintenance. But since they used cash accounting, this was allowed, even though the initial set-up fees should have been higher to convince marginally cost-effective public service provisions to use well water and/or septic tanks instead (or just not have a permit issued in the first place).

cascom• 7 years ago

One easy fix would be to shift municipalities to an accounting system that actually reflected the true state of affairs. That way you could see the chronic underinvestment and ongoing cost of infrastructure.

lern_too_spel• 7 years ago

In California, anti-tax zealots have made it nearly impossible to change water rates, so it is not possible to keep water rates low for most users and put the cost of maintenance and upgrades on the heavy users.

https://www.latimes.com/socal/glendale-news-press/news/tn-gn...

https://lbpost.com/news/city-settles-lawsuit-over-water-rate...

https://www.sdcwa.org/adoption-illegal-mwd-rates-forces-four...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Millionaires-sue...

myself248• 7 years ago

As I commented on their own comments section:

The only graphic in this article is "city shrinkage", which is then conflated with water age, which is then related to water problems. But I suspect these things may not be as linearly connected as the authors imply, specifically because of factors like the chemistry of incoming water, as exemplified by the Flint situation.

Also, water systems can have vastly different flow rates, pipe sizes, and other parameters that influence water age, not just population change.

So, is there better data? Can we actually show a relation between city shrinkage, water age, and water problems? If this data exists, why wasn't it presented? If this data doesn't exist, why is a relationship suggested?

thomas• 7 years ago

Water data is hard to come by, not updated frequently, and generally not sampled at the place there want it to be from unfortunately. Lots of water data here: https://mytapwater.org and https://www.waterqualitydata.us

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

This may be a short-term issue, versus the long-term issue of not having enough fresh water to drink. Scientists have been warning about this for a while now. We can probably advance the technology of purifying water to make it cheaper and more widespread, but we can't solve getting enough fresh water just by inventing a new gadget.

To keep from running out of fresh water, we'd need to stop growing the population, or stave off the amount of water used for agriculture, or re-engineer all our wastewater systems for treatment and reuse, or build massive amounts of expensive desalination plants along with a massive global distribution network. All of these are possible, but we also have to actually start the process before it becomes too painful.

sbierwagen• 7 years ago

The article doesn't specifically say how much time water spends in pipes, (Minutes? Weeks? Months?) but the linked paper does:

A utility in North Carolina serving 300,000 customers with 1,100 miles of main calculated water ages ranging from 2 to 75 hours throughout the distribution system using a fluoride tracer study (DiGiano, Travaglia and Zhang 2000).
A Midwest utility with a service population of 800,000 and 2,750 miles of main recently found based on a hydraulic model that the water age in the distribution system was typically less than 80 hours while several sites exhibited a water age up to 150 hours (Vandermeyden and Hartman 2001).
One California utility found water ages exceeding 400 hours in certain areas of the system, particularly dead end areas, under minimum day and average day demand conditions (Acker and Kraska 2001).
A Canadian utility serving 24,000 people with 86 miles of main estimated water age using a hydraulic model and found that dead-end nodes had a water age ranging from 300 to 600 hours under average day demand conditions (Prentice 2001).

"How long is too long?" It depends, apparently, on what the pipes are made of, how old they are, how corrosive the water is, (Which is what caused the Flint disaster) etc.

nullwasamistake• 7 years ago

Wow. 600 hours is 25 days, that's far too long. The chlorine used to sterilize the supply will be long gone by then.

zackmorris• 7 years ago

Not necessarily. Many municipal water treatment plants are adding or switching to chloramines, which can be more stable than chlorine gas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine

The main problem is that they are potentially more carcinogenic.

The rarely talked about, but potentially more serious problem, is that chlorine and chloramine are difficult to remove from water by letting it stand or boiling it:

https://www.sfwater.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentID...

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/does-boiling-water-rem...

https://www.morebeer.com/articles/removing_chloramines_from_...

It looks like activated charcoal filters are the best way to neutralize it, but I'm having trouble finding numbers for how effective they are at it.

https://homebrew.stackexchange.com/questions/3447/what-are-t...

lbutler• 7 years ago

I build hydraulic models of water systems for UK utilities (but live in Canada), one of the things we look at in the model besides the performance of the network is the age of water.

In the UK, pipes are sized based on the needs of the domestic demand, while capacity for fire flow is not considered. While in North America the opposite is done, where the network, including capacity in tanks and pressure within the network, must take into account fire flow requirements. (The attached EPA document goes into this in more detail)

While a UK residential street may be supplied by a 100mm main, the same street in the US may need a 200mm main. That's a four-time increase in volume that needs to be turned over in the pipe for just a little street!

I have seen design documents for North American towns requiring flow rates of 50-90l/s to protect a single house. When I tell my colleagues in the UK about this they laugh and ask if I'm joking and if the fire bridge is aiming to simply flatten the house to stop the fire.

Pressures in North American networks are also higher than in the UK, once again to meet fire flow requirements, which leads to higher background leakage and bursts within the network.

High age of water is an issue that will affect most North American water systems regardless of if they are shrinking or growing.

Drinking Water Is Staying in Pipes Longer

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