Value of Water Coalition Takes Lead in National Infrastructure Week

With a special day devoted to water infrastructure, National Infrastructure Week 2014 focused attention on the need to provide safe and clean water to every community through investment to repair and replace infrastructure that is aging and facing risks from a changing climate.  The Value of Water Coalition hosted a discussion in Washington, D.C. on why addressing the nation’s water infrastructure ought to be a national priority and released a white paper, “From Invisible to Invaluable: Changing the Way We Think About Water Infrastructure.” The paper compiles new and existing research about the current state of investment in water infrastructure.

The May 14 event was moderated by Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who specializes in climate change and sustainable development policy.  She emphasized that water infrastructure remains vital for the economy, is in dire need of repairs, and is facing increasing risks from climate change, including increased heat waves and heavy precipitation events in the Northeast as well as decreased water availability in the Southeast, Southwest and Great Plains.

DC Water General Manager George Hawkins said his city already is seeing more extreme weather with four flooding events in 2013, twice as many as the historical norm. He cited the city’s $700 million investment in a tunnel system 23 feet in diameter and 13 miles long to store combined sewage and stormwater during torrential rains and keep it from flowing into local rivers.

Kenneth Kopocis, senior adviser to the EPA Office of Water, said water infrastructure has often been treated as an afterthought in infrastructure investment. Acknowledging that federal discretionary spending in water infrastructure has declined over time, he urged greater investment in public and private partnerships and cost-effective approaches such as green infrastructure to address gaps in investment.

Other panelists included Mark Strauss, American Water’s senior vice president for corporate and business strategy, and Edwin Pinero, Veolia North America’s senior vice president for sustainability.

The white paper included a wide range of compelling facts about water infrastructure:

• the massive network of pipes, which provide Americans with clean drinking water, spans more than three million miles—more than four times the length of the National Highway System.
• aging water pipes are responsible for the loss of about 1.7 trillion gallons of treated drinking water each year, while crumbling wastewater pipes are responsible for the loss of three billion gallons of largely untreated wastewater to surface waters.
• American businesses will lose an estimated $734 billion in sales between now and 2020 and about $416 billion in cumulative loss in the gross national product, owing solely to deteriorating water infrastructure.
• deteriorating water infrastructure will cause American households to earn a cumulative total of $541 billion less in 2020 than they earned in 2011.
• the U.S. economy will lose almost 700,000 jobs by 2020 and 1.4 million jobs by 2040 without improved infrastructure.

The Coalition also sent a letter to President Obama thanking him for his acknowledgement of the importance of water infrastructure to the nation’s economy in an Infrastructure Week speech and urging him to continue to highlight the importance of this often “invisible” infrastructure.  In his speech, the President observed that U.S. water infrastructure loses billions of gallons of drinking water every day.