When did our modern plumbing first get started? LICHTMAN: Martin Melosi, you've studied the history of American water systems. But on a daily basis, it is really problem-solvers banding together to deliver something that we know matters. But the systems out there in every city, and not just cities but all across the country that deliver these, are massive, and they're complicated, and they're complex and they're evolving.Īnd we're using computer and predictive modeling and sonar and all sorts of things to advance the industry. HAWKINS: Every life relies on what we do, and yet most people don't think about it very much, where the water comes from when they turn on the spigot or where it goes once it goes down the drain. Every building, every home, every dwelling, every place. Hawkins, how many jobs do you support, and I always say: all of them. It's one of the great realities of this industry, which is - some people ask me, Mr. Any customer base that big - and it's vital to them. There's new service connections being put in. There's construction being done all over. I mean, I'm surrounded by people - it's the ultimate problem-solvers because every day there's something that happens, there's some unforeseen event. It's a great challenge to make sure we can continue delivering service, cleanse it and then get it back to the river where it came from. So that cycle is enormous.Īnd the size of the system that's needed and the importance of it to every job, to every life, is just extraordinary, and we have to deliver that every second of every day. And then once someone has used it, it comes back to us, we cleanse it, and we put it back to the Potomac from where it came. We take the water off the Potomac, deliver it to every person who works, who lives, who comes and visits Washington, D.C. HAWKINS: Wow, it's hard to thumbnail any particular day because it changes so much. LICHTMAN: George Hawkins, give me a thumbnail sketch of your day. LICHTMAN: And Martin Melosi is the author of "Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America's Cities." He's also a history professor at the University of Houston, and he joins us today from KUHF in Houston. George Hawkins is the general manager for D.C. Joining me to talk more about that are my guests. So how are we going to fix them? Is it a matter of just replacing them? Is it more complicated than that? And why have we stuck with such old plumbing for so long? ![]() In D.C., a pipe breaks an average of once a day. Can you even believe that?Īnd not surprisingly, those aging pipes are breaking apart. Other towns still have pipes made of wood. That's because in many places the plumbing systems we depend on to get our water are at least 100 years old, and in Washington, D.C., for example, some pipes date back to the Civil War. Water tables are dropping faster than they can be replenished, and at the same time an op-ed in the New York Times today says that the United States is estimated to lose about one in six gallons, one in six gallons of clean water every day due to leaky pipes in the ground. We're in the midst of the worst drought in over 50 years.
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