Still, compared to the way Congress allots money to the U.S. The EPA's 2015 estimate for overhauling such an aging system of piping was $473 billion, or $23.7 billion annually over 20 years - in other words, anything but chump change. has 2.2 million miles of waterpipes, which are, on average, 45 years old. Fixing busted pipes, which break at the rate of one every two minutes nationally, has cost nearly $70 billion since 2000. The Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA) reports that water mains, especially such old ones, rupture 240,000 times annually, while "trillions of gallons" of potable water worth $2.6 billion seep from leaky pipes, and "billions of gallons of raw sewage" pollute the surface water that provides 61% of our supply. Washington and Philadelphia are just two of the many American cities whose water-distribution systems, some of them wooden, contain pipes that predate the Civil War. Moreover, many Native Americans must drive miles to fetch fresh water, making regular handwashing, a basic precaution during the Covid-19 pandemic, just one more hardship. On average, Americans use 82 gallons of water daily Navajos, seven - or the equivalent of about five flushes of a toilet. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack this rudimentary amenity than Whites Latinos and African Americans, twice as likely. Worse yet, two million Americans still have no running water and indoor plumbing. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation?
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How, then, could the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have given our water infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations, reservoirs, and purification and recycling facilities) a shocking C- grade in their 2021 "report card"? How to explain why Yale University's Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. The United States, however, has the world's largest economy, the fifth-highest per-capita income, and is a technological powerhouse. Of course, the overwhelming majority of them live in the poorest countries on this planet. Despite modest progress globally - 71% of the world's population lacked that simple necessity then, "only" 61% today - nearly 900 million people still don't have it. After all, back in 2015, our government, along with other members of the United Nations, embraced the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals, the sixth of which is universal access to safe drinking water. When it comes to basic water supplies, that's hardly an outlandish thought.
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Even at a time of such angry political disputes, you might imagine that, in a wealthy country like the United States, it would still be possible to agree that clean water should be not just a right, but a given. And water - yes, water - is an example of just that. Think of it this way: what we don't know will hurt us. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.