The drought has Californians feeling the pressure to conserve water, but some century-old pipes may be thwarting these efforts. The government’s bank account is also running dry trying to fix it.

Leaking water pipes lose an estimated ten percent of the bay’s potable water every year.

Many of the system’s pipes have aged well beyond their expected retirement, causing an average of three breaks every day in the entire Bay Area and tens of millions of gallons of water lost. Local water companies have beefed up their proactive replacement efforts, but with 5000 thousand miles of pipes from the north bay to San Jose, it’s tough to keep up.

Old City, Old Pipes

San Francisco has many historical buildings- and that means historical pipes. Out of the 1,200 miles of pipe running under its streets, about 20 percent of that is over a century old.

JB Alegiani’s 120-year-old San Francisco house had a leak earlier this month from the water main that dates back to 1883. He didn’t have full water pressure for several days while crews fixed it.

“Here in San Francisco, we definitely have an aging infrastructure,” Alegiani said. “And now that we have a drought and it’s the new normal, we’re going to have to really change our policies as to how we look at water.”

According to the city’s public utilities company (PUC), leaks like that at Alegiani’s house cause the loss of 3 to 8 million gallons of San Francisco water every day. That’s a rate of 4 to 8 percent of the 70 million gallons of water San Franciscans use each day.

NBC Bay Area followed a repair crew for a day as they fixed leak after leak.

At one point, crews dug out a broken cast-iron water main first installed in 1863- pipe first put in the ground during the Civil War.

“Some of those pipes are in pretty good shape, but a lot of them are brittle,” said Katie Miller, who oversees water distribution at San Francisco PUC.

Miller says the PUC replaces 15 miles of pipes each year at a cost of $40 million. Miller says this rate will have to get more aggressive soon.

“If we don’t invest, it will cost us a lot more in the long run,” Miller said. “Even though we have 100 to 120 breaks a year, it’s far lower than a lot of other cities.”

Gallery: Historical Bay Area Pipes Still in Use

Materials Matter

Across the bay, East Bay Municipal Utilities District oversees the delivery of water to 1.3 million customers in 28 different cities. The system has 4,200 miles of pipe, more than three times the amount in San Francisco. Last year alone, East Bay MUD had 800 breaks.

“One of our goals is to keep that leak rate stable,” Xavier Irias, Director of Engineering and Construction, told the Investigative Unit. “With an aging population of pipe, that means we really need to keep on the pipeline replacement.”

The pipes are made with different materials, depending when they were installed.

According to Irias, the oldest pipes in the system are made of cast-iron and were installed in the 1800s. Now, some 150 years later, they cause the most leaks of any type in East Bay MUD’s system.

“Half of the leaks are cast-iron even though it is only about one third of the total population of pipes. That’s partly just because it’s older. It’s prone to corrosion,” Irias said.

However, the newer pipes have problems too. In the 1950s and 1960s, the East Bay switched to asbestos cement.

Getty Images

“The cast-iron, while it may be breaking, it’s older, but the [asbestos cement] doesn’t seem to last nearly as long as cast-iron,” Irias told the Investigative Unit. “We do anticipate those leak rates are going to go up with time and actually that’s what we’ve seen in the last few years as we started taking a really close look at [asbestos cement].”

San Jose’s pipe system is younger but still prone to leaks. The area’s largest provider, San Jose Water Company, had 182 breaks last year. On average, the broken pipes were 55-years-old.

New Technology

East Bay MUD has a team of six leak investigators whose only job is to proactively uncover leaks using new technology. The teams use sound-sensitive machines to precisely detect where unseen leaks start underground in order to replace them sooner and minimize water loss.

Irias says the drought seems to be causing even more leaks that can be hard to detect. He says a drought can cause the earth to contract and that can cause abnormal stress on the water delivery pipes.

“As that soil dries, it shrinks. So if there was a pipe, that maybe without the drought, would have failed in the next couple of years, the drought just gives it that extra nudge and it breaks early,” he said.

The sound-sensitive technology can help discover those leaks deep underground.

East Bay MUD currently replaces about 10 miles of pipe per year, up from seven miles per year several years ago. But officials admit they need to start replacing 40 miles per year just to keep up. It costs about $2.4 million a mile to replace water deliver pipes.

Replace Sooner, Pay Less Later

Post-doctorate researchers at UC Berkeley’s Water Resource Center, Jennifer Stokes and Tommy Hendrickson, have been looking for ways to make water systems more energy efficient.

They found that cities can save more money in the long run if they spend on pipe replacement sooner.

“If you were able to maintain lower leak rates, it was going to be more cost effective to dramatically increase your pipe replacement rate than to keep up with these 100-200 a year replacement levels we see across California,” Dr. Hendrickson said. “Eventually somebody is going to have it pay for it.”

“Some of these infrastructure systems are massive,” said Dr. Jennifer Stokes. “It takes a long time to put them in place, and if we go into it without a lot of planning we could find ourselves in a really tough situation in 10 or 20 or 30 years.”

Increasing the replacement rates in cities across the country could cost as much as a trillion dollars in taxes and higher water rates.

“If we don’t start that investment process now we could be in big trouble,” said Dr. Hendrickson.

California congressman, Jared Huffman, is proposing legislation this year to force congress to spend more money on this problem now.

“We’re going to have to try to get to get ahead of this,” said Congressman Huffman, who represents Marin County and serves on the US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “If we don’t update and modernize that infrastructure, we’re going to see massive failures.”

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During the 20th century, water project developers relied on engineered infrastructure to serve Californians’ economic aspirations and lifestyle choices in a region that doesn’t have regular rainfall.  Principal examples:

• The Los Angeles Aqueduct moves water to Southern California from the eastern side of the Sierras, originally for agriculture and later for urban development..
• The Colorado River Aqueduct and the All American Canal serve urban Southern California and agriculture in the Imperial and Coachella valleys.
• The federal Central Valley Project (CVP) system of dams, reservoirs and canals serves mostly Central Valley agriculture, but also the Central Coast and urban users in Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties.
• The Hetch Hetchy Project, originating in Yosemite, delivers Tuolumne River water across the San Joaquin Valley to the greater San Francisco Bay Area. 
• The Mokelumne Aqueduct delivers water to urban users in the East Bay Area.
• The State Water Project (SWP) system of dams, reservoirs, and canals moves water originally identified as “surplus” in the north to meet varied demands occurring in coastal areas, the San Joaquin Valley, and Southern California. 

The last four of these projects impact the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary. In 2008, the State Water Resources Control Board reported that the water rights they managed in the Bay/Delta Watershed exceed mean annual natural flow: for every acre foot of water in the Delta Watershed, 8.4 acre feet of water have been promised on paper. 

Ongoing water battles between regions, and between urban and agricultural users, reflect “paper water” or other unrealistic expectations that actual supplies cannot reliably meet.  When supplies have fallen short of expectations, the Water Board has been pressured to deliver water anyway, even at the expense of endangered species and the health of the people and ecosystem of the Delta and Estuary. When there is no surface water to deliver, users have turned to groundwater, overdrafting it to compensate.

Each of the major water projects faces supply, environmental, and climate challenges that planners did not anticipate.  It is no longer clear that more infrastructure is the answer.

Jane Wagner-Tyack, Co-chair, LWVC Water Committee

_____________________________________________

The next in our series of articles on California water is available for publication in your local League Voter at this link.

Coming up next: The Water-Energy Nexus – Moving, heating, and treating water and treating wastewater all together represent one of California’s largest end uses of electricity and of natural gas.

The post LWVC – “California Plumbing” by the LWVC Water Committee appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Nine states have signed a joint agreement to accelerate the transition to residential building electrification by significantly expanding the use of heat pumps to meet heating, cooling, and water heating demand.

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by directors of environmental agencies from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island. These states set a shared goal for heat pumps to meet at least 65% of residential-scale HVAC and water heating shipments by 2030 and 90% by 2040.

Participating states will collaborate to collect market data, track progress, and develop an action plan within a year to support the goals. The agreement emphasizes collaboration with key stakeholders, including heat pump manufacturers and HVAC installers.

The states also committed to promote installation of zero-emission, grid-interactive technologies in existing state buildings. States will aim to direct at least 40% of efficiency and electrification investments to benefit low-income households.

The post 9 states pledge to transition to warmth pumps for residential HVAC and water heating appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The drought has Californians feeling the pressure to conserve water, but some century-old pipes may be thwarting these efforts. The government’s bank account is also running dry trying to fix it.

Leaking water pipes lose an estimated ten percent of the bay’s potable water every year.

Many of the system’s pipes have aged well beyond their expected retirement, causing an average of three breaks every day in the entire Bay Area and tens of millions of gallons of water lost. Local water companies have beefed up their proactive replacement efforts, but with 5000 thousand miles of pipes from the north bay to San Jose, it’s tough to keep up.

Old City, Old Pipes

San Francisco has many historical buildings- and that means historical pipes. Out of the 1,200 miles of pipe running under its streets, about 20 percent of that is over a century old.

JB Alegiani’s 120-year-old San Francisco house had a leak earlier this month from the water main that dates back to 1883. He didn’t have full water pressure for several days while crews fixed it.

“Here in San Francisco, we definitely have an aging infrastructure,” Alegiani said. “And now that we have a drought and it’s the new normal, we’re going to have to really change our policies as to how we look at water.”

According to the city’s public utilities company (PUC), leaks like that at Alegiani’s house cause the loss of 3 to 8 million gallons of San Francisco water every day. That’s a rate of 4 to 8 percent of the 70 million gallons of water San Franciscans use each day.

NBC Bay Area followed a repair crew for a day as they fixed leak after leak.

At one point, crews dug out a broken cast-iron water main first installed in 1863- pipe first put in the ground during the Civil War.

“Some of those pipes are in pretty good shape, but a lot of them are brittle,” said Katie Miller, who oversees water distribution at San Francisco PUC.

Miller says the PUC replaces 15 miles of pipes each year at a cost of $40 million. Miller says this rate will have to get more aggressive soon.

“If we don’t invest, it will cost us a lot more in the long run,” Miller said. “Even though we have 100 to 120 breaks a year, it’s far lower than a lot of other cities.”

SFMTA Photo Archive | sfmta.com/photo

Market Street between 1st & Sansome streets after earthquake. Trench work.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

San Bruno Avenue streetcar, Dwight Street to 5th and Market via Bryant Street and San Bruno Avenue. Board of Public Works

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Dwight Street to 5th and Market via Bryant Street and San Bruno Avenue. Board of Public Works

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Earthquake damage to street. Marina district. Water Department crew working to repair water main damage.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Crew working to repair water main damage after an earthquake.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Yerba Buena Island: Installation of two 12″ pipe connections. One pipe belongs to SFWD. Second pipe belongs to East Bay Mud. 09/16/2010.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Water seller in San Francisco, 1855.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

After the Earthquake and Fire, City Distribution Division. Howard & 6th Streets. 5/18/1906.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

After the Earthquake and Fire, City Distribution Division, City Pipe System. 26th Street & Sanchez Street. 6/6/1906

Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

After the Earthquake and Fire. City Pipe System. Valencia Street between 18th and 19th streets.

Materials Matter

Across the bay, East Bay Municipal Utilities District oversees the delivery of water to 1.3 million customers in 28 different cities. The system has 4,200 miles of pipe, more than three times the amount in San Francisco. Last year alone, East Bay MUD had 800 breaks.

“One of our goals is to keep that leak rate stable,” Xavier Irias, Director of Engineering and Construction, told the Investigative Unit. “With an aging population of pipe, that means we really need to keep on the pipeline replacement.”

The pipes are made with different materials, depending when they were installed.

According to Irias, the oldest pipes in the system are made of cast-iron and were installed in the 1800s. Now, some 150 years later, they cause the most leaks of any type in East Bay MUD’s system.

“Half of the leaks are cast-iron even though it is only about one third of the total population of pipes. That’s partly just because it’s older. It’s prone to corrosion,” Irias said.

However, the newer pipes have problems too. In the 1950s and 1960s, the East Bay switched to asbestos cement.

“The cast-iron, while it may be breaking, it’s older, but the [asbestos cement] doesn’t seem to last nearly as long as cast-iron,” Irias told the Investigative Unit. “We do anticipate those leak rates are going to go up with time and actually that’s what we’ve seen in the last few years as we started taking a really close look at [asbestos cement].”

San Jose’s pipe system is younger but still prone to leaks. The area’s largest provider, San Jose Water Company, had 182 breaks last year. On average, the broken pipes were 55-years-old.

New Technology

East Bay MUD has a team of six leak investigators whose only job is to proactively uncover leaks using new technology. The teams use sound-sensitive machines to precisely detect where unseen leaks start underground in order to replace them sooner and minimize water loss.

Irias says the drought seems to be causing even more leaks that can be hard to detect. He says a drought can cause the earth to contract and that can cause abnormal stress on the water delivery pipes.

“As that soil dries, it shrinks. So if there was a pipe, that maybe without the drought, would have failed in the next couple of years, the drought just gives it that extra nudge and it breaks early,” he said.

The sound-sensitive technology can help discover those leaks deep underground.

East Bay MUD currently replaces about 10 miles of pipe per year, up from seven miles per year several years ago. But officials admit they need to start replacing 40 miles per year just to keep up. It costs about $2.4 million a mile to replace water deliver pipes.

Replace Sooner, Pay Less Later

Post-doctorate researchers at UC Berkeley’s Water Resource Center, Jennifer Stokes and Tommy Hendrickson, have been looking for ways to make water systems more energy efficient.

They found that cities can save more money in the long run if they spend on pipe replacement sooner.

“If you were able to maintain lower leak rates, it was going to be more cost effective to dramatically increase your pipe replacement rate than to keep up with these 100-200 a year replacement levels we see across California,” Dr. Hendrickson said. “Eventually somebody is going to have it pay for it.”

“Some of these infrastructure systems are massive,” said Dr. Jennifer Stokes. “It takes a long time to put them in place, and if we go into it without a lot of planning we could find ourselves in a really tough situation in 10 or 20 or 30 years.”

Increasing the replacement rates in cities across the country could cost as much as a trillion dollars in taxes and higher water rates.

“If we don’t start that investment process now we could be in big trouble,” said Dr. Hendrickson.

California congressman, Jared Huffman, is proposing legislation this year to force congress to spend more money on this problem now.

“We’re going to have to try to get to get ahead of this,” said Congressman Huffman, who represents Marin County and serves on the US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “If we don’t update and modernize that infrastructure, we’re going to see massive failures.”

The post Bay Space’s 150-12 months-Outdated Water Pipe Drawback – NBC Bay Space appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

PRESS RELEASE

Published January 26, 2024

Concord, CA: Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. is a leading provider of comprehensive plumbing services in Concord, California. Specializing in drain cleaning, water heater installation, kitchen and bath remodeling, among other solutions, the company attributes its success to a commitment to guaranteed workmanship and a customer-first approach.

“I have now worked with Ron at BAP on multiple occasions. He has done everything from a water heater installation to roughing-in of a bathroom remodel I was working on. A great company with excellent quality, great pricing and responsive communication. Look no further for your plumbing needs. Thanks for the great service.” Shared one happy client.

When it comes to plumbing services, Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. excels in addressing a variety of issues, including the installation of plumbing fixtures such as sinks, faucets, and drains. Additionally, the experienced team manages repairs, tackling everything from common clogs to challenging leaks with precision and efficiency.

For water heater services, Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. goes the extra mile. They specialize in installing and repairing both traditional tank systems and modern tankless solutions.

Moreover, Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. excels in providing water heater replacement in Contra Costa County, dedicated to ensuring homeowners with outdated or malfunctioning units receive superior solutions for enhanced efficiency and enduring performance. The company places a strong emphasis on delivering high-quality outcomes, guiding homeowners through energy-efficient upgrades designed to reduce both utility bills and environmental impact.

Centered on improving hot water availability, incorporating enhanced safety features, and extending the lifespan of the system, the team ensures a replacement process that is smooth, hassle-free, and tailored to the unique needs of each homeowner. Their commitment is further underscored by professional installation services that guarantee optimal performance, delivering a dependable and contemporary water heating solution that adheres to the highest standards of efficiency and safety.

The Plumber in Concord, California also offers comprehensive plumbing solutions for kitchen and bath remodeling projects. Acknowledging the crucial role plumbing plays in renovations, the company’s skilled professionals seamlessly integrate their services to ensure the plumbing aspects of kitchen and bath remodeling are executed with precision. From installing new fixtures to reconfiguring plumbing layouts, Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. is dedicated to contributing to the success of remodeling projects.

As a trusted plumbing partner, Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. consistently exceeds expectations, demonstrating a commitment to excellence and providing a wide range of services to meet the diverse needs of homeowners in Concord and beyond.

Recognized as a Pro Compliance-approved service provider, the company serves a broad area, including Concord, Dublin, Clayton, Berkeley, Piedmont, Lafayette, Moraga, Oakland, Emeryville, Martinez, San Francisco, Walnut Creek, and nearby regions.

About Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc.:

Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. is a premier plumber offering superior solutions. With a focus on guaranteed workmanship and transparent communication, Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc. has become a trusted partner for clients seeking reliable solutions.

Media Contact

Name
Bay Area Plumbing BAP Inc.
Contact name
Ron Lem
Contact phone
925.395.0672
Contact address
1920 Johnson Dr.
City
Concord
State
CA
Zip
94577
Country
United States
Url
https://www.bayareaplumbingnow.com/

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Clean water piped into the home is a given for most Americans. But piped, running water isn’t universal, and people of color are disproportionately more likely than white Americans to lack piped water, finds new research in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Householders of color in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. are 34% more likely to lack piped water compared with white, non-Hispanic householders, the researchers find. In all, the authors estimate 1.1 million people in the U.S. lack what the U.S. Census Bureau calls “complete plumbing” with nearly three-quarters of them living in cities and suburbs.

The Census Bureau considers a household to have complete plumbing if it has running hot and cold water with a bathtub or shower used only by people living in the dwelling. People without a piped connection to water may still be able to access clean water by purchasing purified water from a store or retrieving water from other sources, such as a stream.

“It is hard for many people to imagine that communities in the modern-day U.S. lack such a basic life necessity, but for those of us who work at the crux of infrastructure provision and social and spatial inequality, this story — the story of systemic inequality — is an old story,” lead author Katie Meehan, a senior lecturer in human geography at King’s College London, told Journalist’s Resource by email.

The authors further find that renters are 61% more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with those who own their homes. They note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.”

The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted. Given census undercounting, the authors estimate the real number of people in the U.S. that lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million — roughly the size of the Kansas City metro area, for comparison.

On Sept. 4 the Centers for Disease Control and Protection put into effect a moratorium on evictions because “housing stability helps protect public health because homelessness increases the likelihood of individuals moving into congregate settings, such as homeless shelters, which then puts individuals at higher risk to COVID-19,” the agency wrote in its order.

The American Medical Association in a recent legal brief explained the eviction moratorium is helping renters maintain physical distancing, self-quarantining and hand hygiene. With the CDC eviction moratorium set to end Dec. 31, it’s not just housing at stake for millions of Americans who rent and are already at greater risk of lacking complete plumbing — it’s the ability for people to wash their hands at home during a pandemic.

Read on to learn more about the new PNAS paper, plus four other academic studies to help journalists better understand links between race and access to indoor running water.

—

Geographies of Insecure Water Access and the Housing-Water Nexus in U.S. Cities
Katie Meehan, Jason R. Jurjevich, Nicholas Chun and Justin Sherrill. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, November 2020.

The authors analyze Census Bureau survey data covering 2013 to 2017 and estimate that more than 1 million people in the U.S. lack complete plumbing in their homes.

Householders of color in the 50 largest metro areas are 34% more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with white, non-Hispanic households, the authors find. Householders of color make up about 39% of households in those areas, but represent 53% of households that lack complete plumbing, they find.

Metro areas with the highest percentages of households lacking complete plumbing include: San Francisco; Portland; Milwaukee; San Antonio; Austin; Cleveland; Los Angeles; Memphis; New Orleans; and New York. Metro areas generally encompass core cities and their surrounding suburbs.

The authors note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.” The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted. The authors note that, given undercounts, the actual number of people in the U.S. who lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million.

“Without universal water access, efforts to limit the spread of infectious diseases — such as COVID-19 — will undermine global health and benefit certain populations over others,” the authors write.

Exposing the Myths of Household Water Insecurity in the Global North: A Critical Review
Katie Meehan, et. al. WIREs Water, October 2020.

The authors dispel the myth of “modern water,” the idea that water access is universal and secure in high-income countries.

“Recent research suggests that household water access is far from universal in high‐income countries,” they write. Based on their research review on gaps in universal water access in high-income countries they identify four contributing factors.

The first is the complicated nature of water systems in the U.S., where there are tens of thousands of public and private organizations that distribute water. Smaller systems are more likely to fall short in providing water to all households in their areas, the authors write. They note that some areas, notably in some Black communities in North Carolina, racial groups were historically and systematically excluded from political control over water access.

The second factor has to do with precarious housing driven by wealth gaps among racial groups. Simply put, people with unconventional housing arrangements are more likely to lack indoor water. The third contributing factor is citizenship status and the fourth has to do with “institutionalized structures of marginalization,” such as the forced displacement of Indigenous people.

The authors go on to explore several other myths having to do with water in high-income countries, including the myth that water is always clean, safe and affordable.

“Myths are more than a collection of misleading statistics or gaps in understanding: as shared beliefs, myths create and sustain norms and perceptions of secure water, including whose water experiences are deemed hegemonic or universal, and whose experiences are made invisible,” the authors write.

Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity
Shiloh Deitz and Katie Meehan. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, March 2019.

The authors introduce the idea of “plumbing poverty” as a way to understand water insecurity in the U.S. Analyzing a trove of census data, they identify hot spots for plumbing poverty, where households lack complete plumbing at rates higher than average.

After adjusting for income, housing type and other factors, the authors find householders who are American Indians are 3.7 times more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with householders who don’t identify as American Indian. Black and Hispanic households are also more likely to be plumbing poor than white, non-Hispanic households, they find.

Geographic hotspots include communities in Alaska, the Four Corners region of the Southwest and along the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the upper Midwest, the Northeast — particularly northern Maine and New Hampshire — the Allegheny region in Pennsylvania and Appalachia in West Virginia.

“Plumbing poverty is not a simple artifact of income, rurality, or housing type; infrastructure provision is clearly racialized and historically produced in the United States,” the authors conclude.

The Drinking Water Disparities Framework: On the Origins and Persistence of Inequities in Exposure
Carolina Balazs and Isha Ray. American Journal of Public Health, April 2014.

The authors spent five years — 2005 to 2010 — interviewing residents and water regulators in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater pumped from wells in the valley has been chronically laden with arsenic, a carcinogen, above acceptable levels set by the World Health Organization.

The authors identify examples of local water policies designed to “explicitly deprive communities of adequate drinking water resources.” The 1973 Tulare County General Plan, for example, says that so-called “non-viable communities would, as a consequence of withholding major public facilities such as sewer and water systems, enter a process of long term, natural decline as residents depart for improved opportunities in nearby communities.”

“These decisions, in conjunction with regulatory failures, a lack of community resources to mitigate contamination, and political disenfranchisement of local residents, help explain the origins of environmental injustice in the context of drinking water,” the authors conclude.

Racial Disparities in Access to Community Water Supply Service in Wake County, North Carolina
Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, Nicholas DeFelice, Daniel Sebastian and Hannah Leker. American Journal of Public Health, December 2014.

The authors perform the first statistical analysis of how historically Black communities in North Carolina have been systematically denied municipal drinking water. Using property tax and census data for Wake County, the most populated county in the state, they find that every 10% increase in the Black population within a census block increases by about 4% the chance that people will lack municipal water service.

The authors point to a “legacy of racial segregation,” in which cities in North Carolina are allowed planning and development powers in “extra-territorial jurisdictions” up to three miles beyond city boundaries. Black communities were often excluded from cities but included in extra-territorial jurisdictions “over which majority white town councils retained control — a practice known as ‘racial underbounding,’” they write.

“This research reveals a disparity in the physical environment — access to treated municipal drinking water — that potentially could contribute to observed racial disparities in health in Wake County,” the authors conclude.

For more on water safety issues, check out lead in drinking water: key facts and reporting tips. Plus, research on race and water access in metro areas and five tips for investigating stories on water access, affordability and safety.

The post Racial disparities in entry to working water: 5 research to know appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Millions of U.S. homeowners regularly receive official-looking notices on letterhead in envelopes bearing the logos of their utility companies. They contain ominous warnings that you, the homeowner, are responsible for repairs to water and sewer lines on your property. The clincher: If there are problems, “you could spend thousands of dollars to fix them, as most standard homeowners insurance policies do not cover these repairs,” warned one “Repair Responsibility Notice.”

These notices often convince homeowners that there are hidden defects on their properties that need to be addressed. Why else would their utility companies issue such dramatic warnings?

Although these mailings seem to come from utility companies, they’re really pitches from third-party companies that have struck partnership agreements with utility providers, allowing them use of their names and logos to sell their warranty plans.

More than 7 million U.S. homeowners have so far purchased these plans, pulling in $900 million a year, according to information disclosed in annual reports from the largest warranty companies.

In the Washington area, Dominion Energy, NOVEC (a cooperative that serves large portions of Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford counties), and the municipal governments of District Heights, Forest Heights, Laytonsville and Poolesville partner with private warranty companies to help market these plans.

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) used to help sell these plans, but in 2019, it let the agreement expire after its warranty company partner bought CroppMetcalfe, a large plumbing outfit operating in the Washington area. (WSSC issues plumbing licenses and permits and could no longer continue such a deal with a company it also regulates.)

Nationally, these deals are also widespread. The water utilities serving Baltimore, Cleveland, Louisville, Memphis, Nashville, Newark, New York City, Philadelphia, Orlando, Salt Lake City, San Diego and San Francisco have signed on to help private companies sell warranty plans.

Bath bombs smell nice, but they’re a menace to plumbing. Here’s how to minimize damage.

Marketing materials received by homeowners often warn of dramatic potential costs if they don’t protect themselves with offered coverage. One company’s website warns of an average $2,585 cost to replace a water line, and a $3,389 cost for a sewer line. Another pegs the “typical” cost of repairs higher still: $3,500 for water, $8,500 for sewer. And a video presentation used by one company to recruit utility companies features a horror story where a couple’s burst water and sewer lines caused $20,000 in damage.

But Checkbook’s research finds that few homeowners ever have to deal with expensive water or sewer line repairs or replacements. Our researchers examined permit records and dug up similar data from several large cities and found scant evidence that this is a common job at all:

●Claims data from a WSSC interoffice memo obtained by Checkbook indicated that only 4,450 exterior water and sewer claims were made from the 126,207 plans purchased during the program’s first 2½ years, an annualized incidence rate of 1.4 percent.

●Checkbook’s review of San Francisco’s permits in 2019 found that it issued only 369 water and/or sewer line restorations or replacements — out of the 112,115 single-family homes served by the city’s utility company. The chance of needing a restoration or replacement there was only 0.3 percent.

●Minneapolis approved only 667 work permits involving home sewer laterals in 2019. That works out to a rate of 0.7 percent of the city’s approximately 100,000 sewer lines serving homes there — and because the city didn’t exclude permits for new construction from its counts, 0.7 percent is overstating the chance of trouble.

●The Philadelphia Water Department issued 2,459 “Notices of Defect” in 2019 for residential sewer laterals that the department discovered were in need of repair. That was 0.5 percent of its 481,728 customers.

Other research shows that water lines can be trouble-free for years. Juneseok Lee, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Manhattan College, looked at data supplied by a warranty company that had paid for more than 47,000 water line replacements or repairs over 10 years. Lee concluded that “it is not a question of if the piping will fail but rather when.”

However, that report’s findings indicate that “when” is probably a long, long time away. It found that lines made of copper, the most common material used for water lines, typically last 30 to 80 years. Galvanized steel pipes — also common — usually last even longer: 40 to 100 years. Even comparably weak plastic pipes (such as PVC and polyethylene) last 20 to 40 years. And because the study looked only at pipes that failed, your pipes may last a lot longer than these estimates.

Bottom line: Even if you own a house for decades, your odds of having a catastrophic water or sewer line failure are quite low.

Even if you need a repair or replacement, costs will probably fall well short of the thousands of dollars cited by the warranty companies.

One warranty company told Checkbook that over the past three years, it had paid for “more than 400,000 water-related repairs, . . . saving residents $232 million in out-of-pocket repair costs.”

But the company’s own numbers reveal a key issue: Divide that $232 million in repair bills by the 400,000 claimants, and the average payout was just $580.

The WSSC reported during its agreement with a warranty company that claims for sewer line repairs also averaged just $580; the average for water line claims was $1,565.

These average costs of repairs reveal that although warranty companies rely on worst-case scenarios to sell their plans, “most often, the claim you put in is for a clogged line, and the first thing they try to do is unclog it,” said Alon Abramson, program manager for the Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA). “More often than not, that fixes the problem.”

In other words, when repairs are needed, they rarely cost thousands of dollars, but are usually done by a plumber using a snake.

In exchange for lending their names and logos, the utilities that sign on to help sell these warranties get a share of the premiums.

For example, for 2020, the warranty company working with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) paid it $3.61 every month for each enrolled policy, according to a public document posted online by SFPUC. The plans were sold for $12.99 a month. That means 28 percent of premiums it collected went to the SFPUC.

That document shows that the SFPUC receives the same $3.61 from the warranty company’s $8.99/month sewer-only warranties and its $4.49/month water-only plans. So, for those, commissions equal about 40 and 80 percent, respectively. SFPUC expects to make more than $1 million from this deal over its first four-year term.

The deal signed by the PEA also funnels a portion of the premiums back to it. The plans cost $7.98 a month for water-sewer warranties purchased in 2020; the PEA got 20 percent of that, plus up to $500,000 in annual fees, according to information supplied to Washington Consumers’ Checkbook in response to a public records request. In 2019, the first full year of its contract, Philadelphia’s share was $1.3 million.

Many utilities that partner with warranty companies say they direct their shares of sales to a good cause.

Yvonne Kingman, a spokesperson for Washington (State) Water Service, told Checkbook it recycles the warranty fees it gets back to its customers: “We’re regulated. The money we collect is all used for company-related projects. We don’t pocket the money. We charge customers for the actual cost of providing the water service.”

But, of course, even if it gets directed toward a charitable fund, all the revenue collected by these warranty companies is derived from utilities’ cooperation in enrolling their customers or constituents in these plans.

Douglas Heller with the Consumer Federation of America noted that “these deals are so clearly problematic that even those willing to take them require some veneer of justification that it is a public benefit.”

Checkbook often warns about these types of “peace of mind” policies, which are typically overpriced. Although you should buy insurance to protect against risks that could be financially catastrophic — house fires, liability claims, auto accidents, medical care — you shouldn’t pay to cover the risk of paying for unlikely repairs you can afford.

Washington Consumers’ Checkbook magazine and Checkbook.org is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help consumers get the best service and lowest prices. It is supported by consumers and takes no money from the service providers it evaluates. You can access all of Checkbook’s ratings and advice free of charge until March 15 at checkbook.org/washingtonpost/insurance.

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Despite recent alarming revelations that children in 10 San Francisco and Oakland schools had been exposed to lead contamination well above federal safety standards, data from household water quality tests performed this year by the Bay Area’s two major utilities indicate that lead levels remain well below dangerous thresholds in the vast majority of the region’s homes.

In addition to routine systemwide inspections for lead and other toxic materials in their drinking water, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the East Bay Municipal Utility District, which together deliver water to more than 4 million Bay Area residents, also conduct lead tests for individual households, upon request.

San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission performed water quality analyses on 211 household faucets this year and taps from Jan. 2 to Oct. 17. Of those, six contained lead levels above 15 parts per billion. By far the most heavily contaminated sample, taken from a bathtub faucet, registered 698 parts per billion. Notably, since shower and bath faucets aren’t considered typical drinking-water fixtures, they are exempt from lead-free plumbing requirements.

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The San Francisco agency charges $25 for each tap it checks, though households eligible for the Women, Infants and Children Program, which provides food and other benefits to low-income families, can apply to have the tests performed for free.

Across the Bay, EBMUD rolled out a program in March that allows customers to apply for a voucher for a certified lab to test their water at no cost. Since the program began, 70 tap tests have been conducted and none were found to contain lead levels above 15 parts per billion.

In 2014, the agency also analyzed the taps at 55 of its customer’s homes as part of a scheduled water quality testing program required under federal regulations. In all, 99 percent of those tests revealed lead levels below 15 parts per billion, and 90 percent were below five parts per billion.

Lead can cause a grim array of short- and long-term health problems, including brain and nervous system damage, anemia and hypertension, when enough accumulates in the body. It poses an acute threat to young children, who can absorb up five times more of it when ingested compared to adults, according to the World Health Organization.

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While no amount lead is considered “safe” to ingest, the Environmental Protection Agency’s lead and copper rule mandates that water utilities take action when systemwide lead levels exceed 15 parts per billion. Both SFPUC and EBMUD rely on that as a benchmark for household lead tests.

Since the 1980s, efforts to eliminate water service lines containing lead have “greatly reduced” exposure to lead in tap water nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control or Prevention. In most cases, when dangerous levels of lead are detected, the source can be traced back to corroded household plumbing materials, often in older homes. Lead cannot be seen, smelled or tasted when dissolved in water.

“It is much more common for older (plumbing) fixtures to have trace elements of lead than pipes underground, said David Briggs, EBMUD’s manager of water operations.

Both utilities recommend that anyone who finds elevated lead levels in their home taps arrange to have their fixtures inspected and replaced — particularly in older homes. Since 2000, California law has required that all kitchen faucets sold in the state must be “ultra-low lead.” According to the SFPUC, most faucets purchased prior to 1997 were made of brass or chrome-plated brass containing up to 8 percent lead.

“We encourage property owners to contact plumbers and contractors directly to make upgrades to their plumbing system,” said Tyler Gamble, an SFPUC spokesman. When replacing plumbing fixtures, the utility also recommends selecting products certified by the National Sanitation Foundation as being “lead free.”

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In homes with older plumbing systems and fixtures, experts also suggest flushing taps for up to two minutes before drawing water for cooking or drinking to clear away any water that might be contaminated. That’s particularly important to do for faucets that haven’t been used in several hours, when lead can leach from a faucet’s interior.

“If people aren’t clear about how safe their water is, running and flushing the taps is the best thing to do,” Briggs said.

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Many of San Francisco’s 1,250 miles of water pipes need to be repaired or replaced, requiring years of digging as the city races to fix an aging system, documents and data from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission reveal.

To keep the water system running smoothly, the city has embarked on a plan to dig up and replace hundreds of miles of pipeline in the coming decades at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion — all of which will be covered by water ratepayers.

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To hit that goal, the SFPUC, which is overseeing the project, must more than double the length of water pipes it fixes annually, going from an average of 6 miles per year to 15.

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As construction ramps up, it will tear apart asphalt, clog traffic, shut down streets and redirect buses. Downtown, which has most of the city’s oldest water pipes, will be hit hardest, and the Sunset and Richmond districts will be heavily affected.

“Fifteen miles is 150 blocks, so that’s a lot of traffic disruption; it’s major,” said Katie Miller, manager of the water enterprise division at the SFPUC.

The city, though, has no choice but to upgrade the pipes.

Cesar Robles (right), San Francisco Water Department laborer and Martin Santos (left), Synergy laborer, work on a flat bed trucks carrying replacement pipelines as one is prepared to be placed into the ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleMartin Santos, Synergy laborer, inserts locking wedges between two pipes while working on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleTwo replacement pipelines are connected during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleArturo Morones, San Francisco Water Department laborer, climbs down below ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleMartin Santos, Synergy laborer, handles a hasp as he works on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleWorkers guide a replacement pipeline as it is moved from a flat bed truck to be prepared to be placed into the ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleAn excavator removes an old railway yoke during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street between Masonic and Ashbury Streets on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleCesar Robles (l to r), San Francisco Water Department laborer and Martin Santos, Synergy laborer, work on a flat bed trucks carrying replacement pipelines as one is prepared to be placed into the ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleCesar Robles (l to r), San Francisco Water Department laborer and Martin Santos, Synergy laborer, work on a flat bed trucks carrying replacement pipelines as one is prepared to be placed into the ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleMartin Santos, Synergy laborer, and other workers guide a replacement pipeline as it is placed into the ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleA worker grasps a weight used for measuring distance and alignment of the replacement water pipes as they work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleMike Broussard, Sa Francisco Water Department plumber, passes supplies from below ground as he and others works on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleWorkers guide a replacement pipeline as it is placed into the ground during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

If the SFPUC maintained the 6-mile-per-year fix rate, more than half of the pipelines in the city would surpass their age recommendations by 2040. Leaks and breaks would become unmanageable, and scarce water would be wasted.

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“As everybody out West now understands, water is precious,” said Eric Goldstein, senior attorney in the National Resource Defense Council’s urban program. “The most efficient and least expensive way for us to ensure an adequate supply is to repair leaks and take steps to reduce waste.”

Starting in 1930, San Francisco went through a residential construction boom, with row houses topping the last remaining sand dunes in the Sunset and high-rises popping up downtown. In the 1940s alone, approximately 38,800 new units went up citywide, according to a recent report by Paragon Real Estate Group.

To connect the new homes to running water, hundreds of miles of pipes were laid. These World War II-era relics still make up a large chunk of the city’s water infrastructure.

Roughly 28 percent of San Francisco’s pipelines were built between 1930 and 1950, according to PUC data, and 44 percent of the nearly 500 water-main breaks over the past half decade were in pipes built during the time period.

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“It’s a higher than usual amount of breaks,” Miller said.

Part of that can be blamed on their age, but another factor is the caliber of the pipes. During the war, much of the nation’s iron was used for military equipment, leaving municipalities picking from the proverbial scrap heap.

“There was not a lot of quality assurance at the time, so there was a lot of impurities in the ore that are now resulting in breaks,” Miller said.

Replacing 15 miles of aging pipes annually will cost an estimated $48 million per fiscal year. If the pipes from the ’40s and ’50s begin breaking down earlier than expected, construction — and costs — will increase.

A weight used for measuring distance and alignment of the replacement water pipes hands above a replacement water pipe during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

Water ratepayers would have to foot the bill.

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“If this turns out to be a more severe problem than we are predicting — if it is above and beyond that 15 miles — then we may need a special funding program,” said Tyrone Jue, the utility’s spokesperson. The funds would probably come from a bond or by raising water prices.

With so many streets torn up, some are seeing possible opportunities.

“It’s an opportunity to rethink things,” said Charisma Acey, assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. “To not just lay in the old infrastructure, but also think about how we put in new infrastructure.”

One idea is high-speed Internet.

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Martin Santos (l to r), Synergy laborer, and Arturo Morones, San Francisco Water Department laborer, secures a polyurethane wrap to prevent corrosion around a replacement pipeline during work on the pipeline replacement project along Haight Street at Ashbury Street on Thursday, October 1, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

Though the city is home to some of the world’s biggest tech companies, its Internet speeds lag. Thanks to the city’s Dig Once ordinance, though, authorities must at least consider installing fiber conduits for high-speed Internet during any pipe work that requires excavation.

With so many water pipes due to be replaced and repaired, there will be plenty of opportunities to speed up Web browsing.

“The PUC project will be a big part of the opportunity” to expand, said Miguel Gamiño, executive director of the Department of Technology. “It’s not just having more fiber, but where we put fiber, which allows us to have a very resilient, cost-effective network.”

That’s small consolation for some business owners in the Haight neighborhood.

For the past two months, tractors, sparks and pounding sounds have supplanted shoppers on stretches of Haight Street, as the city repairs local sewer and water lines.

The PUC expects the project to impact 12 city blocks and stretch into fall of next year.

“Construction has to be done. We understand that,” said Luke Martinez, manager of the novelty toy and clothing store Super 7. “But September is already a hard month for all of us, and I doubt anyone has made more money because of construction. … I wouldn’t want to shop on Haight Street right now.”

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An estimated 1.1 million people living in the U.S. report lacking some access to running water in their homes, with nearly three-quarters of them living in cities and suburbs, finds new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on Census Bureau survey data covering 2013 to 2017.

Householders of color in the 50 largest metropolitan areas are 34% more likely to lack what the U.S. Census Bureau calls “complete plumbing” compared with white, non-Hispanic householders, the authors find. The Census Bureau considers a household to have “complete plumbing” if it has running hot and cold water plus a bathtub or shower used only by people living in the dwelling.

Some 39% of households in the largest metro areas are represented by householders of color, but 53% of households in those areas that lack complete plumbing are represented by householders of color, they find.

Overall, the authors estimate 220,300 households and 514,000 people in the nation’s top 50 metro areas lack piped water in their homes — roughly half the number of people in the U.S. without complete plumbing.

“It is hard for many people to imagine that communities in the modern-day U.S. lack such a basic life necessity, but for those of us who work at the crux of infrastructure provision and social and spatial inequality, this story — the story of systemic inequality — is an old story,” lead author Katie Meehan, a senior lecturer in human geography at King’s College London, told Journalist’s Resource by email. “Our analysis shows that the effects of racial capitalism in the housing and water provision sectors are systemic and institutionalized, not random or accidental.”

The authors further find that renters in the top 50 metro areas are 61% more likely to lack complete plumbing compared with residents who own their homes.

According to the PNAS paper, “Geographies of Insecure Water Access and the Housing-Water Nexus in U.S. Cities,” metro areas with the highest percentages of households lacking complete plumbing include: San Francisco; Milwaukee; San Antonio; Cleveland; Los Angeles; New Orleans; New York; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and Austin, Texas.

Metro areas generally encompass core cities and their surrounding suburbs.

The top five metro areas in terms of the estimated number of people without complete plumbing are New York, with more than 65,000; Los Angeles, with more than 44,000; San Francisco, with more than 27,000; Houston, with more than 20,000; and Miami, with nearly 19,000, according to the paper.

Water access, affordability and safety are three of the primary challenges for U.S. households struggling with water security. On Sept. 4 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put into effect a moratorium on residential evictions because “housing stability helps protect public health because homelessness increases the likelihood of individuals moving into congregate settings, such as homeless shelters, which then puts individuals at higher risk to COVID-19,” the agency wrote in its order.

The American Medical Association agreed in a recent legal brief, explaining that the eviction moratorium is helping renters maintain physical distancing, self-quarantining and hand hygiene. People without a piped connection to water in some areas may still be able access clean water — by purchasing purified water from a store, for example, or retrieving water from other sources, such as a stream.

Water access, affordability and safety are three of the primary challenges for U.S. households struggling with water security.

With the CDC no-eviction order set to end Dec. 31, it’s not just housing at stake for millions of Americans who rent and are already at greater risk of lacking complete plumbing — it’s the ability for people to wash their hands at home during a pandemic. The eviction moratorium applies to people renting apartments and houses, and to mobile home owners who lease the land on which they live.

“Eviction is the first phase in a cycle of household insecurity, which we know relates to food insecurity, water insecurity, job insecurity, health insecurity,” says University of Colorado Denver sociologist Esther Sullivan, who wasn’t part of the PNAS paper but has studied mobile home evictions for nearly a decade. “The best thing we can do is not let that cycle start — to invest up front to keep people in their homes.”

The authors of the PNAS paper note that the Census Bureau often undercounts renters, people without homes and people of color, “demographics that are disproportionately plumbing poor.” The Census Bureau has acknowledged that those groups are undercounted. Given census undercounting, the authors explain the actual number of people in the U.S. that lack complete plumbing is likely closer to 2 million — roughly the size of the Kansas City metro area, for comparison.

“There’s percentages and then there’s numbers,” says Manny Teodoro, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied water affordability, but was not part of the PNAS paper and hasn’t reviewed its methodology. “Even if it’s a tiny percentage, a million or two [million] people is a lot of people — and it should be unacceptable to us.”

Meehan and her co-authors focus on urban and suburban households that lack complete plumbing despite being “close to networked supply.” But their research has implications for rural households, too.

The type of structure people live in matters when it comes to access to running water. Mobile homes make up 2.6% of households in the 50 largest metros but represent 5.2% of households that don’t have complete plumbing, according to the PNAS paper. Mobile home households are 89% more likely to lack piped water compared with other types of homes, the authors find. While metro areas are often associated with cities and suburbs, they can include rural areas where mobile homes are more commonly found.

“Within a metropolitan area, there absolutely will be many mobile home parks,” says Sullivan. “It’s useful to think about the top 50 metropolitan areas. That’s big metros, small metros. That’s good because that will capture many, many types of places.”

For example, the Houston metro area, as Sullivan points out, is comprised of nine counties, several of which are rural in part.

Burdensome costs

Even for households that have complete plumbing, the cost of water can be a significant financial drain. Roughly one-third of households in the largest 50 metro areas are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs, according to the PNAS paper. The authors find almost half of households without complete plumbing are cost-burdened. The median household income across the top 50 metro areas is about $65,000, compared with a median income of about $33,000 for households in those areas that lack complete plumbing, according to the authors.

The cost of water can be a significant financial drain.

In his April 2020 paper, “Water and Sewer Affordability in the United States,” Teodoro estimates that monthly water and sewer bills eat up a substantial portion of low-income families’ disposable income. Households that are among the lowest fifth percentile of income earners use on average 12.4% of their disposable monthly income — equivalent to 10 hours of work at local minimum wages — to pay their water and sewer bills. The estimate is based on a sample of nearly 400 utilities — about three-quarters of them public and one-quarter private — serving populations ranging from 3,300 people to more than 100,000.

“What we’re trying to capture is the tradeoffs customers have to make to pay for their water and sewer bill,” Teodoro says. “The minimum wage metric is nice because it’s immediately intuitive and it provides a sense of the opportunity costs of paying water and sewer bills.”

One big idea Teodoro proposes to address water affordability in the U.S. is to consolidate water utilities. Large water systems tend to deliver higher quality water more efficiently to customers, he says. Teodoro estimates there are 30,000 to 40,000 organizations running some 50,000 water systems across the country. Some municipalities share water delivery responsibilities while others operate their own water organizations.

“To give you a sense of how much complexity that introduces, there are about 1,200 electrical utilities in the U.S. and you’ll hear the electric folks bemoan how complex their governance is,” he says. “We’re talking about an order of magnitude larger for water.”

Teodoro has proposed several other solutions, including regulatory reform and technology upgrades. But consolidation is the first step toward facilitating the rest, he says. There has been some recent progress at the federal level. In an Oct. 13 executive order, President Donald Trump laid out a range of directives aimed at improving water resource management, including the consolidation of federal water-related task forces, working groups and cross-agency initiatives.

“Water at the federal level is managed through several different agencies, which creates a lot of confusion, and sometimes these agencies work at cross purposes,” Teodoro says. “You might have the [Environmental Protection Agency] wanting utilities to consolidate but the [Department of Agriculture] has a rural development program to assist small systems. But that could also be seen as something like life support for systems that maybe ought to be consolidated.”

From unpaid bills to home loss

It’s difficult to assess the number of people in the U.S. who have trouble paying their water bills because “water bills themselves are such a local issue,” says Coty Montag, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who wrote “Lien In: Challenging Municipalities’ Discriminatory Water Practices Under the Fair Housing Act,” published in July 2020 in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

No-eviction orders are helping renters maintain hand hygiene.

The average monthly cost of water for a family of four buying water from one of the 30 largest water systems in the U.S. has increased 64% in the past decade, from $44.39 in 2010 to $72.93 in 2019, according to reporting from Circle of Blue, a nonprofit journalism and research outlet that covers water access and affordability. Those figures are a small snapshot of the water systems in the U.S. and capture systems “which typically display better financial strength, greater economies of scale, and fewer health violations than their smaller counterparts,” writes senior reporter Brett Walton.

When residents cannot pay their water bills, they can face serious repercussions and even lose their homes. An unpaid water bill of just a few hundred dollars can lead to home loss in certain municipalities — even if a homeowner has paid off their mortgage.

Take an unpaid bill of $300 in Cleveland, for example, where there is “no statutory minimum to initiate this process,” Montag says. “You could have a very low unpaid bill and end up in this process.”

If a Cleveland homeowner can’t pay off a $300 bill, the city can place a lien on their property. A lien is a legal claim on an asset, such as real estate. The person or entity owning or “holding” the lien can take over the property if the debt remains unpaid. The lien certificate holder — the City of Cleveland in this example — can sell the lien to another entity, such as a bank. If the debt remains unpaid, the lienholder can initiate foreclosure, eventually leading a homeowner who otherwise legally owns the property into eviction.

In her 2019 report “Water/Color: A Study of Race and the Water Affordability Crisis in America’s Cities,” Montag documents legislation in every state that allows municipalities to place property liens for unpaid utility bills, though “not all states actually do this process,” she says.

Some cities have taken steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to ease the utility bill burden for their residents. “We began to suspend water payments to make it easier for people to have money in their pocket,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said during a Nov. 19 briefing hosted by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Ohio State Sen. Sandra Williams in March 2020 proposed legislation that would ban liens for unpaid water bills. “It’s hard to believe that this could be a condition in Ohio in how we relate to our local governments and services providers,” Ohio State Sen. Tim Schaffer said when Williams proposed the bill, according to reporting from News 5 Cleveland. The legislation remains under consideration in the Ohio Senate’s Ways and Means Committee, which reviews tax policy bills.

The Baltimore General Assembly in March 2019 passed legislation banning property liens over water debt. In December 2019, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit against the city of Cleveland, alleging liens there have a discriminatory racial impact, with three times as many water liens placed in majority Black neighborhoods compared with white neighborhoods in certain years, Montag says. The suit is ongoing in U.S. district court in northern Ohio.

“Water affordability has become a really important issue demonstrating systemic racial discrimination,” she says. “Back in the 1960s, my organization litigated a case about Black access to water in sewer systems. We’re seeing these same issues that existed more than 50 years ago still exist today.”

Another city known for issuing liens for unpaid water bills? Flint, Michigan.

‘That’s really disturbing’

Flint attracted national media attention in 2014 and 2015 after the city switched its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Scientists linked bacteria in the river water to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease and found dangerously high lead levels after corrosive river water ate into old pipes, as Kettering University political scientist Ben Pauli recalls in “The Flint Water Crisis,” published in March 2020 in WIREs Water.

The city started supplying residents with water from the Flint River while a new pipeline to Lake Huron was built. The Flint water treatment plant wasn’t ready for the switch and its staff didn’t know how to properly treat river water, according to Pauli. Residents subsequently suffered hair loss and rashes, and researchers documented elevated levels of lead and other metals in city water.

Nearly every resident of Flint was exposed to lead, according to the CDC. In the years since, journalists have shown how children in Flint exposed to lead suffered health problems and had trouble learning in school.

“Despite Flint’s water quality issues, its water rates rank among the highest in the United States and residents have faced the threat of water shutoffs and property tax liens for nonpayment of water bills,” Pauli writes.

As filmmaker Kwesi Reynolds documents in a 2017 photo essay in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, people in Flint washed their hands using canned water during the height of the crisis.

“Now all of a sudden there’s water distribution centers,” says Reynolds, who was born in Detroit and raised in Flint before moving to Dallas in 2019 for work. “You look at it now, that’s really disturbing. Five years ago in my city, you had to go get bottled water because you could not drink the water from your tap.”

Reynolds’ father, Lawrence Reynolds, a longtime pediatrician in Flint, was a member of the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, which, in 2016, provided recommendations for then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to address the crisis. Since then, the city has replaced more than 9,500 pipes. Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley has said that lead water service lines in the city would be replaced by Nov. 30. The city has completed nearly all of its home inspections, with about 2,500 households remaining as of August.

“You assume the basic amenities will be taken care of,” Reynolds says. “Water, I think, should be something that everybody should have access to. Water is not a civil right — it should be a human right.”

A mural in Flint, Michigan. (Sean Marshall / Flickr / Creative Commons)

For more on water access, affordability and safety check out racial disparities in access to running water: 5 studies to know and lead in drinking water: key facts and reporting tips. Plus, five tips for investigating stories on water access, affordability and safety.

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