Far underneath America’s major cities, a crisis is brewing.  I speak not of earthquakes or volcanoes, but of sewers and water mains.  Much of the essential infrastructure that keeps our water supply safe and consistent has already reached an expiration date.  In many cases, over a century of wear and tear has taken its toll, and with each year that this critical infrastructure is left derelict it becomes more wasteful and more costly to repair.

At least, that is the conclusion reached by Ashley Halsey III at the Washington Post after chronicling the daily disasters befalling Washington, DC’s water system.  She starts off her article by telling the story of how a pizza-sized hole in DC’s pavement revealed a cavern in a 19th-century sewer line just big enough to swallow a truck.  Though no one was hurt and the problem was caught in record time, sewers all over our nation’s capitol are literally crumbling to pieces.  As Halsey notes, “Emergency crews rush from site to site to tackle an average of 450 breaks a year.”  Even in the newer suburbs of northern Virginia, infrastructure repairs are growing in number and cost.  Across the country, up to 25% of drinking water is lost before it reaches our faucets.

What does this mean?

“Rapidly deteriorating roads and bridges may stifle America’s economy and turn transportation headaches into nightmares, but if the nation’s water and sewer systems begin to fail, life as we know it will too. Without an ample supply of water, people don’t drink, toilets don’t flush, factories don’t operate, offices shut down and fires go unchecked. When sewage systems fail, cities can’t function and epidemics break out.”

NCF recently held an event on our nation’s infrastructure challenges, looking at what we want and what we need to repair and build.  The result of the event and our subsequent research yielded a paper that shows how we can tackle these critical infrastructure issues through innovative partnerships between the public and private sectors.  Halsey rightfully states in the title of her article that “billions [are] needed to upgrade America’s leaky water infrastructure.”  Tighter budgets at all levels of government will not make fixing that infrastructure any easier.  Combining public and private funds and know-how might just yield a way forward.

While the need for infrastructure repair is great, we have solutions at hand.  Some small comfort for the next time you sip from the tap.

[NOTE: This is cross-posted from the National Chamber Foundation's blog.]