Covid is forcing America to fix its water supply

A little over a year ago, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) revealed a seemingly simple system for fighting Covid-19: soap, water, and about 20 seconds of scrubbing should help keep the virus from spreading. But what if you live in a home where the water from your tap is brown and smells like rotten eggs, or where water doesn’t come from the tap at all?

Jean Holloway has spent years working with communities in the US states of Delaware and eastern Maryland where this is a fact of life. Some of these residents have never been able to use the water in their homes because of contaminants. Still others have seen their water shut off because they couldn’t pay their bills during the worst of the pandemic.

“To live there is kind of like – there’s a quote about ‘lives of quiet desperation,’” says Holloway, a state manager at the Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project, speaking of one neighbourhood where residents can only use bottled water. “There’s not a lot of morale. And along comes Covid and these people, they need the water even more.”

An estimated two million Americans lack access to running water, indoor plumbing, or wastewater treatment. More than twelve percent of US households could not afford their water bills as of 2017, the same year a study projected that that number could triple by 2022. According to a 2019 report, Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing; Black and Latino households are twice as likely.

Meanwhile, more than a year of Covid-19 – of constant hand-washing and bottled water shortages, of shuttered laundromats, community centres, and schools, and of disproportionate death and disease among minority communities – has made it abundantly clear how essential clean water access is.

Now, change could come in the form of the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act, S.914, which will authorise $35 billion (£24.6bn) to upgrade American water infrastructure over the next five years. The bill passed in the Senate 89 to 2 votes at the end of April, and appears to face little opposition in the House.

“With more Americans spending time at home during the pandemic, it’s unacceptable that years of failure to make adequate investments in our water infrastructure has led to a status quo where millions of Americans lack basic access to clean, safe drinking water or functioning sewer systems,” says Senator Tammy Duckworth, sponsor of the bill, in an emailed statement. She has written she was driven to act after seeing a mother hold up a baby bottle full of dirty brown water during a House Oversight Committee hearing on the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, where cost-cutting measures led to high levels of toxic lead in drinking water.

“Now is the time for federal funding that will help us recover from the effects of the pandemic and to make sure that every American, no matter the colour of their skin or their zip code, has access to clean, safe water,” Duckworth added.

The reason such a bill is needed at all arises from a paradoxical contradiction: though US drinking water and sanitation standards have grown more and more stringent for nearly 50 years, federal investment in water systems has not followed suit. Federal investment in water infrastructure peaked in 1977, and has only declined since. As a result, neglected pipes are leaking, breaking, and leaching contaminants into America’s taps — and EPA data shows that these subpar systems are 40 percent more likely in communities with more residents of colour. A push for privatisation of water systems in the 1980s, meanwhile, promised to make water bills cheaper, a claim that hasn’t held water.

Such programs will help to address access to clean water in the first place. Yet the pandemic also highlighted another major issue: many Americans cannot afford to pay their water bills, an issue that became heightened by pandemic layoffs and lost income.

Though some states and cities enacted moratoria on water shutoffs during the pandemic, most of them were temporary, and many states provided no protection at all. Research by Cornell University and Food and Water Watch found a nationwide moratorium on water shutoffs during the pandemic could have saved more than 9,000 lives and prevented 480,715 infections.

These shutoffs disproportionately affect those who were already vulnerable to the effects of Covid-19, including the elderly and minorities. In smaller and poorer communities, the problem has been amplified by pandemic business closures: unlike companies in large cities, water service providers in these towns may have only a handful of big customers; one or two businesses closing can therefore take away a huge chunk of their revenue, pushing them to raise their prices for everyone to make up for the gap.

Many European countries proactively counteract shutoffs by offering discounted water rates based on income, and some have full-fledged water disconnection bans. In the US, no such protections exist.

Congress did approve $638 million within the December coronavirus relief package to help pay household water and sewer bills, and followed that with an additional $500 million for water debt in the March relief bill – a grand total of $1.1bn, which has not yet been disbursed. Still, the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), which advocates for publicly-owned wastewater and stormwater agencies, estimates that the total cost of unpaid water bills from the pandemic is closer to $8.7bn.

Water advocates have been pushing unsuccessfully for federal water assistance for years. In that sense, the pandemic has helped to finally attract congressional attention. Yet, water affordability is “a multi-faceted problem” that doesn’t stop at debt relief, says NACWA managing director of government affairs Kristina Surfus.

“You have ageing infrastructure and the need to replace systems, increasing regulations, increasing pollution, the growing costs of a skilled workforce and addressing changing climate. These are all huge costs,” Surfus says.

In their most recent reviews of the US water systems, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that just keeping water systems up-to-date would require $271bn for wastewater and stormwater infrastructure and $472.6bn for drinking water systems over 20 years. All told, that would mean investing the equivalent of the entire Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act – $35bn – every single year over two decades. Even with their high dollar values, these bills may therefore be just the first drop in the bucket.

There are other bills seeking to address the funding gap, such as the WATER bill, presently under review by the House, which would create a corporate tax-funded trust fund of $35bn each year for water and sewer systems. Another bill being considered by the House would make $150bn in assistance available, but only to companies that agreed to a shutoff moratorium. This faces opposition from water service providers: NACWA asserts that a moratorium would lead to higher water rates for everyone else, potentially pushing more people into being unable to pay their water bills.

As the US begins to move out of the depths of the pandemic, the importance of water may again appear to be out of sight, out of mind. For advocates, it feels similar to the crisis in Flint. Though the city’s polluted water put it in the international spotlight, after Flint’s pipe systems were repaired, lead and other contaminants in water dropped out of public discourse — even though hundreds of communities around the country still face the same problem. Yet the water issues highlighted over the pandemic year strike at some of the deepest inequities that remain in the country, and show the role that the government could play in protecting some of its most vulnerable.

“If I had to have one wish, it is that people would recognise the value of water as well as the cost of water,” says Holloway. It may be months or years, she says, for the small communities where she works to stop feeling those costs. “We might recover from a public health standpoint, but it's going to take a while to recover financially. It's a ripple effect, and I think the ripples will continue for a while.”

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