The status of any society’s waterworks network is both a bellwether and a foundational element of its economic and cultural dynamism. Many metropolises in America and Europe that industrialized early face the formidable challenge of modernizing their original domestic water systems. Although the quest for an era defining water innovation captures the headlines, maintaining good infrastructures for all the four main historical uses of water—domestic, economic, power generation, and transportation—is also a necessary condition of the industrial West’s ability to fully exploit its comparative, global freshwater advantage. The failure to do so imperceptibly erodes efficiency and resiliency, and makes society more prone to shocks, such as the levee failures and flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005. Yet the engineering complexities, and the low political reward of supporting costly repairs, pose enormous obstacles. Often the work involves difficult, subterranean construction, amid intense atmospheric pressures and large, fast-moving volumes of water that cannot be shut off, and in systems that had not been designed with future renovations prominently in mind.
Following revelations from Riverkeeper, the private Hudson River environmental watchdog group and a major player in the watershed program, New York authorities in 2000 admitted publicly for the first time that a branch of the Delaware Aqueduct, the city’s largest, had been leaking significantly for a decade. When first detected in the early 1990s, the tunnel’s leakage had been about 15 to 20 million gallons per day; by the early 2000s, the leakage had swelled to 35 million gallons. While that totaled only 4 percent of the aqueduct’s overall capacity, the leaks had to be fixed before they got worse and eventually the tunnel’s structure gave way. The last inspection in 1958 had been done by driving through the drained, 13-foot-diameter tunnel in a modified jeep. But with all the cracks the tunnel could no longer be shut down for fear of structural damage from the change in water pressure. So in 2003, in an unprecedented action, the city sent an unmanned, remote-controlled, torpedo-shaped, minisubmersible, with protruding, catfish-whisker-like titanium probes that had been specially designed by the sea experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on a 16-hour data gathering mission through the dark, watery 45-mile-long tunnel. After studying the results for four years, the city decided upon the first phase of the complicated repair, which would cost $239 million. A team of deep-sea repair divers, working round the clock for nearly a month in a sealed, pressurized environment, were lowered 700 feet to perform the preparatory inspections and measurements amid the tunnel’s currents in winter 2008.
New York’s struggle to plug its twenty-year-old aqueduct leaks paled in degree of difficulty and urgency, however, to completing Tunnel Number 3. The project’s genesis went back to 1954 when New York engineers descended a city shaft several hundred feet to the main control site for Tunnel Number 1 to prepare a long-overdue inspection. Their intent was to shut off the water flow so cracks could be found and repaired by welders from inside the tunnel. But when they began to yank on the old, rotating wheel and long bronze stem at the bottom of the shaft that controlled the six foot diameter open and shut gate inside the tunnel, it began to quake from intense pressure. Terrified that the brittle handle might break—or worse that the inside gate might shut permanently in the closed position and cut off all the water flowing to lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, and part of the Bronx—they dared not continue. They returned to the surface. From that day onward, New Yorkers had lived in ignorant bliss that no one could repair the two badly leaking, antiquated distribution tunnels providing all the water for their homes, hospitals, fire hydrants, and 6,000 miles of sewage pipes—or even know if a structural weakness was building to a critical threshold that would cause the tunnel to rupture and collapse in a sudden apocalypse. Some believed that only the outward force of water pressure was maintaining the tunnels’ integrity. “Look, if one of those tunnels goes, this city will be completely shut down,” said James Ryan, a veteran tunnel worker. “In some places there won’t be water for anything…It would make September 11 look like nothing.”
It took sixteen years before city officials were able to break ground on the elaborately planned remedy. Tunnel Number 3 was to be a redundant, citywide water network with many branches and a state-of-the-art central control facility. Once operative, it would allow flows to be easily turned off and repairs made anywhere in the city. The project’s problems were time, immense cost—in its early years the project was delayed by New York’s 1970s financial crisis—and the arduous, dangerous work of blasting and drilling through bedrock in tunnels that were as deep as some of New York’s tallest skyscrapers. The work was done by a specialized, grizzled, close community of urban miners, known as sandhogs. Sandhogs had built virtually every notable New York tunnel system from subways to utility shafts; in the 1870s they worked inside high atmospheric pressure caissons, excavating the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were the first workers to encounter the agonizing chest pains, nose bleeds, and other symptoms of the bends. Many were killed. Two dozen had died digging Tunnel Number 3 alone. Because of the danger, they were well paid. Sandhog jobs tended to be passed down from father to son; many sandhogs were of Irish and West Indian descent.
The excavation work on Tunnel Number 3 was all the more difficult because the sandhogs knew they were digging against doomsday if Tunnels Number 1 or 2 collapsed before they finished. Usually they could advance no more than 25 to 40 feet per day, chiseling, dynamiting, removing endless tons of rubble. Their methods were modern-age equivalents of the fire and water rock-cracking technique used by ancient Rome’s aqueduct builders and Li Bing’s Chinese tunnelers along the Min River. Progress accelerated when a new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, set a high priority on improving water facilities citywide and invested an additional $4 billion toward finishing Tunnel Number 3. The excavation rate more than doubled with the introduction of a new 70-foot-long boring machine—called the mole—with 27 rotating steel cutters, each weighing 350 pounds. Donning a hard hat in August 2006, Mayor Bloomberg descended into the tunnels and took a seat at the mole’s controls to bore through the final foot of rock to complete excavation of the second, and most crucial, of Tunnel Number 3’s four stages. The work, however, was not finished. At least six more years of work lay ahead to line the tunnel with concrete, fit it with instruments, and sterilize it so it could carry water. By then, it would be linked up with the water system’s space age, electronically regulated, new central command center—featuring 34 precision stainless steel control valves, specially fabricated in Japan under constant, two-year vigil of New York city engineers, housed inside 17 giant cylinders weighing 35 tons. The control chamber itself was 25 stories beneath the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park in a domed vault three stories tall and the length of two football fields. Nothing aboveground, save a small guard tower and door leading into the grassy hillside indicated that it was the entrance to one of New York’s most critical infrastructures.
Throughout the industrialized democracies, localities are facing infrastructure challenges similar in kind, if usually smaller in scale, to New York’s. Estimates for upgrading America’s 700,000 miles of aging water pipes and wastewater, filtration, and other facilities at the core of its domestic water systems range from $275 billion to $1 trillion over the next two decades. Global water infrastructure needs are several quantum orders of magnitude greater. Many major world cities have notorious leaks; possibly up to half of drinking water entering cities worldwide is lost before reaching residents.
Regions that fail to improve their efficient use of existing water resources are more prone to water shocks, slower economic growth, and to become enmeshed in political clashes over water with neighbors. The state of Georgia’s unwillingness to invest to upgrade fast-growing Atlanta’s water supply system, for example, caught up with it in 2007 when a prolonged drought caused the city’s water reserves to dwindle to only four months. The governor’s only immediate recourse was to impose emergency measures
and to try to wrest a greater share of water from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system away from downriver neighbors Alabama and Florida, which depended upon the flow to keep its own electric power plants and factories running, and to sustain the Gulf coast ecosystem for its shellfish industry. Implementing simple efficiency measures, Georgia reckoned retrospectively, could have alleviated its water crisis by reducing water demand by 30 percent.
Relentless regional freshwater demand and diminished ice cover due to warming temperatures is also taking a costly toll in the north by lowering normal water levels in the immense Great Lakes. Every inch of lost water depth forces the lakes’ fleet of 63 transport ships to lighten their annual cargo load by 8,000 tons to avoid grounding mishaps. This adds another cost to the global competitiveness burdens already faced by America’s aging industrial belt of steelmakers and heavy manufacturers situated on the lakes’ edges for its cheap transport and industrial water. Seaports that don’t keep pace with the modifications required by the new generation of giant, ocean cargo supercontainers, some as long as a 70-story skyscraper and traveling halfway around the world between ports of call, likewise risk losing out on global shipping business. Extensive port restructuring helped New York recover some of its historical greatness as a harbor with renewed Asian trade following a prolonged loss of business in the second half of the twentieth century to more modern ports in America’s southern and western coasts. With Great Lakes states ever fearful of schemes to siphon their water to dry parts of America, the U.S. Congress in 2008 passed a new legal compact governing lake water that provided strict conservation measures and banned the export of the lakes’ water out of their basins.
The Great Lakes conservation measure was disappointing news to some in Texas, which had designs on its water dating back many decades. Although oil had built Texas, the state’s future prospects—its economic prosperity and its outsized leverage on American national politics—rested chiefly upon whether it could rationalize its water use to sustain its large cities and industries. In the absence of a comprehensive program that increased effective water supply through efficiency and conservation, Texas seemed set to live through an accelerated reprise of Southern California’s history of water grabs and speculations. Billionaire water speculators, including oil magnate T. Boone Pickens and Qwest Communications cofounder Philip Anschutz, for years had been exploiting a Texas law to acquire unrestricted water rights through land purchases and lobbying government officials to fulfill their ambitious plans to pump and sell nonrenewable Ogallala Aquifer water through multibillion-dollar pipelines hundreds of miles to thirsty cities such as Dallas, San Antonio, and El Paso. At $1,000 an acre-foot, their profit potential was spectacular and Texas’s good fortunes could be extended for a while—until the Ogallala fossil water itself gave out. Yet even as certain regions declined, the industrial democracies enjoyed an enormous advantage in the water infrastructure-building challenge facing the world, thanks to the existence of a competitive industry of large and small companies seeking to profit from the growing thirst and capable of expeditiously delivering solutions.
While cities are learning to use their existing water more efficiently, industry has been the largest single contributor to the unprecedented surge in water productivity. Across the industrial spectrum, water is a major input of production. Alone, five giant global food and beverage corporations—Nestlé, Danone, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch, and Coca-Cola—consume enough water to meet the daily domestic needs of every person on the planet.
Superior water productivity is one of Western industry’s competitive advantages in the global economy, helping to offset the low wages and laxer environmental standards of industries based in poorer nations. American companies began to treat water as an economic good with both a market price for acquisition and a cost of cleanup before discharge in response to federal pollution control legislation in the 1970s. With characteristic business responsiveness wherever operating rules were clear and predictable, they sought ways to do more with the water they had and to innovate in their industrial processes so that they needed to use less overall. The results were startlingly instructive of the enormous, untapped productive potential in conservation.
No industrial sector uses more water than thermoelectric power plants. Huge amounts—two-fifths of all U.S. water withdrawals—are sucked out of rivers and other water sources as coolant, even though overall net consumption is low because the water is returned to its source a few minutes later. Galvanized by federal regulations requiring that the quality of the discharged water be as pure and cool as it was when withdrawn, the power plants increased recycling and converted their once-through systems to more efficient cooling technologies. By 2000 some 60 percent of all thermoelectric power capacity was using modern systems; the amount of water needed to produce one kilowatt-hour had plunged to only 21 gallons from 63 gallons in 1950.
Manufacturers, likewise, responded impressively to the water pollution regulations. Chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, primary metals and petroleum producers, automakers, pulp and paper mills, textile firms, food processors, canners, brewers, and other large water users increased recycling and adopted water-saving processes. In just the fifteen years from 1985 to 2000, American industry’s total withdrawals were trimmed by a quarter. Pre–World War II American steel mills that needed 60 to 100 tons of water for every steel ton produced were superseded by modern mills using only six tons by the turn of the twenty-first century. Similarly, water-intensive semiconductor silicon wafer makers reduced their intake of ultrapure freshwater by three-quarters between 1997 and 2003, and recycled much of the discharge for use in irrigation. In the decade from 1995, Dow Chemical cut its water usage per ton produced by over a third. Europe’s Nestlé nearly doubled its food production while consuming 29 percent less water from 1997 to 2006. In a scheme reminiscent of New York City’s landmark ecosystem services plan, bottled water company Perrier Vittel invested in reforesting some heavily farmed watersheds, and paid farmers to adopt more modern methods, in order to protect the quality of its mineral water sources.
For years water had scarcely commanded a line item in corporate budgets or more than cursory attention from top planning executives. In the age of scarcity, more and more water-conscious companies were treating water as a key strategic economic input, like oil, with clearly reported accounting and future target goals. The most forward-looking and global-minded analyzed water risks facing their key suppliers around the world, and helping insulate the vulnerable by helping them adopt conservation and ecologically sustainable practices. Unilever’s technical and economic support, for example, enabled its Brazilian tomato farmers to adopt drip irrigation that trimmed water use by 30 percent and reduced water-contaminating pesticide and fungicide runoff. Brewer Anheuser-Busch became acutely aware of the importance of its water supply chain when it was whipsawed by a drought in America’s Pacific Northwest. Water shortages for crops pushed up the price of a key beer-making ingredient, barley, while diminished dam flows elevated hydroelectric prices and with it the cost of producing aluminum beer cans. Environmentalists, too, have been getting on board with collaborative efforts: for instance, the Nature Conservancy has been developing a plan to award good standing certificates to companies who use water efficiently.
Improved industrial water productivity not only enhances competitiveness directly. It also creates economic benefits by freeing water and lowering its cost for other productive uses. Yet the potential scale of its benefit pales next to the boon that can accrue from water productivity breakthroughs in the least efficient, most subsidized, and heaviest polluting sector of society—agriculture. That is because agriculture is still by far the greatest user of freshwater, often consuming over three-quarters of usage. As much as half of all irrigation water is simply lost due to inefficient flood techniques without ever reaching the crop’s roots. Cutting irrigation consumption by one-quarter roughly doubled the water availability for all other productive activities in
the region, including industry, power generation, urban use, or recharging groundwater and wetlands. Moreover, proven technologies to multiply agricultural productivity already existed. Microirrigation systems, such as drip and microsprinklers, and laser levels of fields to cause water to distribute more uniformly, were widely successful in reducing water consumption by 30 to 70 percent and increasing yields by 20 to 90 percent in venues around the world, including Israel, India, Jordan, Spain, and America. In the long run these and other methods are necessary elements to meeting the growing challenge of global food shortages. The problem, at bottom, is political—how to promote rapid adoption and how to level the subsidized playing field so that the most efficient farmers reap a proportionate bounty of the market profits they deserve.
Steven Solomon Page 53
