Nation's Water Infrastructure Is Crumbling

"Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

The amount of wasted water from these breaches is staggering.

The 36 million gallons a day that leak from the 85-mile-long Delaware Aqueduct in New York state amounts to more than 1 billion gallons a month, enough to change the ecology of the area, say scientists from the Riverkeeper environmental watchdog group. That may be a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of billions of gallons of water consumed in New York City every year, but the daily leak in the tunnel would meet the daily demands of drought-ravaged Raleigh, N.C."