Water is the most important resource on the planet. The need for water is one of the only material needs common to all living things. This fundamental need has driven all patterns of human migration and settlement throughout our history. Civilizations across the planet have, without exception, organized themselves around their ability to collect, transport, and use water.
Innovation in water infrastructure has been the driving force that opened up new lands for human settlement. Irrigation technologies have allowed people to feed themselves farther and farther away from sources of water, and to produce greater surpluses of food to support expanding populations. Canals, wells, reservoirs, sewage lines, treatment facilities: these are all ancient technologies that have been improved and expanded throughout the millennia, giving us living conditions far beyond the “natural” limit. Water infrastructure is the bedrock of human civilization.
And yet, all around us, this crucial infrastructure is crumbling. The Flint water crisis highlighted a rampant problem in the US: lead leaching into the water supply and poisoning residents — for years. Lead poisoning isn’t some distant Roman curiosity, it’s something that’s happening every day here in the United States Empire. In Hawaii, a military fuel storage facility leaked hazardous levels of contamination into the local water supply. Jackson, Mississippi has been quietly facing unsafe water for years, culminating in a boil water advisory that’s been in place for weeks. Recently, my hometown of Baltimore faced its own boil water advisory following contamination with E. coli in the poorest areas of the city. Ravaged by Hurricane Fiona, Puerto Rico is now staring down weeks or months without power or running water. Countless other failings of crucial water infrastructure continue to fly under the radar as we speak. It’s only a matter of time before they explode into the national consciousness, but only after these systemic failures ravage, sicken, and possibly kill entire neighborhoods.
Why do we see our most critical infrastructure failing? Why is this most basic necessity of life being left to the ravages of time? This is an ongoing pattern of abdication by the US government, intentionally removing itself from the role states have always played as the builders and protectors of infrastructure. Past infrastructure projects, such as the mass installation of sewage systems and water mains, were built with efficiency in mind, at a time when it was inconceivable that the maintenance of those systems would ever be abandoned by governments. And yet, abandon it they have.
For centuries, our water infrastructure has served us dutifully and invisibly, but decades of neglect are confirming a classic maxim of engineering wisdom: good engineering should go unnoticed. When you turn on the faucet, you expect clean water to immediately come pouring out. When you flush the toilet, you expect everything to be swept away in an instant. As long as everything is working as designed, you notice nothing. The second something goes wrong, the problem becomes the most obvious thing in the world. We only take note of the crucial role of our infrastructure once it starts to fail.
There are many ways for failing water infrastructure to impact us. The most obvious we tend to think of is a lack of water: reservoirs run dry or the water mains fail, and nothing comes out of your tap at home. It becomes impossible to drink, to bathe, to wash clothes and dishes, to even flush your toilet. This is often the result of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or droughts. A more common disaster is water contamination, which tends to go unnoticed, and to persist for far longer. This can take the form of old pipes degrading, allowing heavy metals to dissolve into the water, or it can come from outside contaminants getting into the supply. Whether it’s lead, industrial waste, microorganisms, or any of the many other dangerous contaminants, these failures are becoming increasingly common as outdated water lines start to break down.
It is often said in engineering circles that the goal of the engineer is not to make the most sturdy, long-lived infrastructure possible. The goal is to make the most efficient infrastructure by balancing cost, labor, and longevity. This isn’t simply a case of engineers being cheap and trying to save the most money in the short term: it simply doesn’t make sense to spend ten times as much to build something that lasts twice as long. As long as there is a commitment to continuously maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, it is worth it to do so efficiently.
The US state has, since its beginning, always served the interests of the wealthiest: the landlords, the slavers, the industrialists, and the financial elite. At times, those interests have lined up with the needs of the people. The maintenance of infrastructure is one such need. The capitalists want to be free of cholera and tainted water as much as the workers do, and it helps them to maintain their workforce if they aren’t dying of preventable diseases. However, over the course of centuries, the power and greed of capital has expanded, and those interests have shifted. More of the responsibility for public works has been offloaded to the private sector. Rather than hiring their own engineers, municipal governments give sweetheart deals to private contractors. Publicly-owned infrastructure is sold off to private corporations with the intention of raiding the public coffers. New infrastructure, such as telecommunications, is simply presumed to belong to the free market from the start.
The social context behind this shift is complex, but it can be summarized as a direct reaction to labor activism and socialist organizing. In the early 20th century, labor was ascendant in this country, especially among the sectors necessary for the construction of infrastructure: mining, processing, manufacturing, construction, and so on. The crucial nature of infrastructure for the functioning of society gave these workers tremendous leverage at the bargaining table, which made industrial capitalists very nervous. They began a protracted campaign of culture-crafting; a full scale assault on the public perception of unions. They smeared unionists, captured governments, laundered anti-worker policies through the media, and successfully turned the tide against organized labor. In the process, privatization became the law of the land, and our country’s infrastructure was stolen from us.
All of this privatization has been sold to the public as a way of enhancing these vital services, since private corporations are presented as being able to get the job done better and cheaper than governments ever could. (This, they attribute to the mysterious and illusory “market pressures”). In fact, the exact opposite is true. The only purpose of private industry is to produce profits, to give a return on investment in whatever way it can. It is possible for profit to be extracted by providing a public service that is efficient, cheap, and reliable, but this is not the rule. The most common way for a company to increase their profits is not by providing a superior product, but by cutting costs. This can be done by mistreating their workers, using cheaper materials, and neglecting maintenance, all of which the major infrastructure companies are constantly guilty of, and all of which lead to failing infrastructure. Because of the massive amounts of capital they control, as well as regulations and contracts from the governments they control, they cannot even be outcompeted by “more ethical” corporations.
The worst failures of water infrastructure have one major factor in common: they disproportionately impact the poorest sectors of our society, living on top of the oldest infrastructure. This is the result of decades of neglect, due to the perverse incentives listed above. The poorer a population is, the less profitable it is to install, upgrade, and maintain infrastructure for their use. This is the same reason it took massive government investment to get electricity and telephone lines to rural areas, the reason broadband internet is still unavailable in many parts of the country, and the reason giant shipping firms subcontract the USPS for many of their “last mile” needs. This ethos of private companies laying claim to the most profitable roles of infrastructure ownership while offloading the more costly features onto the state has created a system in which vast swathes of the country are left completely abandoned. When the water system fails, it’s the working class that shoulders the burden.
After extracting these massive profits, when these giant companies fail to fulfill their end of the bargain, what happens? Are they punished for the death, disease, and economic injury caused by their neglect of vital services? Are their ill-gotten gains seized and returned to the people they scammed? No. Instead, the government is tasked with picking up the slack, using money raised from the working class. Corporations retain their profits, retain their market share, and retain their iron grip on the infrastructure we need to live and thrive.
This fundamental failure of capitalism to provide vital public services is replicated across all sectors: healthcare, transportation, housing, energy, education, food, and especially water. The scam takes many different forms, but at its core it stays the same. There is massive profit to be made by promising the necessities of a functioning society, with none of the risk. Governments subsidize these sectors to keep society functioning, or they simply ignore the fallout of their failures. Increasingly, the ideology of the free market has shifted public policy towards the latter “strategy,” leading to a steady decline in every form of infrastructure. And we are positioned for this situation to only ever get worse.
Climate change is often presented simply in terms of rising temperatures, but the impact it is having is far more widespread, due mainly to water. More violent and unpredictable weather systems, caused by changing patterns of temperature and humidity, in turn cause unprecedented flooding. Floods wreak havoc with water infrastructure, drive people out their homes, and alter entire landscapes. Warming climates open up new aquatic breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria, which contaminate downstream water systems. Higher temperatures encourage evaporation, leading to tinder-dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires.
The same perverse incentives that make corporations unsuited for maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure also make them wholly incapable of addressing the climate crisis and its many downstream effects. Their only role in society is to generate profits, and it is more profitable to degrade the natural world and imperil our society, rather than pay the costs of clean, sustainable infrastructure. Left to its own devices, capitalism will continue to poison our water and choke off the lifeblood of civilization itself. We leave this power in the hands of capitalists at our own risk.
