Third World America - Arianna Huffington [37]
Moving forward, the price we’ll pay for getting it wrong is extremely high. Think of a patient suffering from a grave viral infection who is treated with antibiotics, effective only against bacterial infections. Not only will the treatment be unsuccessful, it will also dangerously delay the proper care.
POWER BLACKOUTS, RUSTY WATER, COLLAPSED BRIDGES, RAW SEWAGE LEAKS: A GUIDED TOUR OF THIRD WORLD AMERICA
Extending the medical metaphor just a tad longer: Having failed to treat our ailment properly, we must continue to deal with the symptoms that rage all around us. What follows are the results of our nation’s latest infrastructure checkup. The prognosis is definitely not good.
Let’s start this examination of what’s ailing America with that most elemental of elements: water. No society can survive without clean water. It’s essential for life and civilization (imagine the Roman Empire without its aqueducts). Clean, fresh water is so essential that many believe that, in the coming decades, wars will be fought over it. Among them is Steven Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, who believes the world can be divided into water haves and water have-nots (Egypt, China, and Pakistan are among the have-nots).28
“Consider what will happen,” he writes, “in water-distressed, nuclear-armed, terrorist-besieged, overpopulated, heavily irrigation-dependent and already politically unstable Pakistan when its single water lifeline, the Indus River, loses a third of its flow from the disappearance of its glacial water source.”
Despite the indispensable nature of water, America’s drinking-water system is riddled with aging equipment that has been in the ground for one hundred years—or longer.29 Indeed, some of the nation’s tap water continues to run through cast-iron pipes built during the Civil War.30 As a result of leaking pipes, we lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clean water every day.31
According to a New York Times analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, “a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country.”32 Washington, D.C., averages a water line break every day.33 “We have about two million miles of pipe in this nation,” says Steve Allbee of the EPA.34 “If you look at what we’re spending now and the investment requirements over the next twenty years, there’s a $540 billion difference.”
Even now, our tap water is becoming less and less safe to drink—in some places our citizens are already forced to fetch fresh water from tanks stored on the back of trucks, our version of the Third World communal pump.35
Meanwhile, America’s wastewater treatment facilities are also fast deteriorating. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Older systems are plagued by chronic overflows during major rainstorms and heavy snowmelt and are bringing about the discharge of raw sewage into U.S. surface waters.36 The EPA estimated in August 2004 that the volume of combined sewer overflows discharged nationwide is 850 billion gallons per year. Sanitary sewer overflows, caused by blocked or broken pipes, result in the release of as much as 10 billion gallons of raw sewage yearly.”
The wall between fresh water and tainted water has become increasingly porous.
PULLING THE PLUG ON OUR ELECTRIC GRID
Next up, electricity. America is an increasingly wired society. Advances in technology mean more electronic devices—and more demand for energy. Yet the delivery of electricity today doesn’t differ much from the way it was done more than a hundred years ago when Thomas Edison brought the first commercial power grid online in New York.
While demand for electricity has risen 25 percent since 1990, the construction of