Old Water Pipes Becoming Hard to Ignore

It has been 2,000 years since the Romans built their aqueducts, and 200 years since Philadelphia began using cast-iron water mains. But the 6-inch-wide city pipe that still delivers drinking water to a block on Nixon Street here uses an even more primitive technology: wood.

Its wooden planks are lashed together with a coil of metal as if each section of pipe were a long, narrow barrel. And while the small stretch beneath the ground here may seem more Swiss Family Robinson than 21st century, it is not unique to Chelan.

Water officials say they believe that a handful of wooden water mains are still in use in South Dakota, Alaska and Pennsylvania, among other places. The old wood pipes offer a vivid reminder of the age and fragility of the nation’s drinking water systems, many of which rely heavily on old pipes that often remain out of sight and mind — until they burst.

And they are bursting with alarming frequency in many areas these days, particularly in systems coping with septuagenarian, octogenarian, and even century-old pipes. There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks each year in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Aging Water Infrastructure Research Program, and some water experts fear that the problem is getting worse.

“We believe that the number of breaks is increasing,” said D. Wayne Klotz, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He warned that the breaks not only waste millions of gallons of clean, treated drinking water, but also can cause tremendous damage, pointing to a major break in Maryland just before Christmas that stranded motorists on a flooded road. “When most people think of a leak, they think of a drip in their sink,” Mr. Klotz said. “These are not like that. They were rescuing people by helicopter!”

The new federal stimulus law provides $6 billion for water projects, with $2 billion of that directed to drinking water systems. But that money is only, well, a drop in the bucket: a report released last month by the E.P.A. estimated that the nation’s drinking water systems require an investment of $334.8 billion over the next two decades, with most of the money needed to improve transmission and distribution systems.

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