America's Crumbling Water Infrastructure

The country's aging water infrastructure is growing more wasteful and expensive to fix with every year. What will it take to re-engineer our drinking water supplies?

1 minute read

November 3, 2014, 9:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


David Schaper examines the state of water infrastructure—especially how much drinking water is lost due to aged infrastructure: "Imagine Manhattan under almost 300 feet of water. Not water from a hurricane or a tsunami, but purified drinking water — 2.1 trillion gallons of it….That's the amount of water that researchers estimate is lost each year in this country because of aging and leaky pipes, broken water mains and faulty meters."

Schaper goes on to examine a couple high profile instances of busted and inefficient water systems and cite studies about the state of water infrastructure:

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