On average, underground water distribution pipes can last about 100 years. The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) owns and maintains roughly 4,200 miles of them. And it replaces about ten miles per year.
At that rate it would take four centuries to replace the whole system: an approach one could charitably call unsustainable even if all the pipes were brand-new today. But parts of EBMUD’s system, cast-iron pipes inherited from forgotten, now-defunct water agencies, date to the late 1800s.
After EBMUD formed in 1923, it continued installing cast-iron pipes through the 1950s, then switched to predominately asbestos-cement for the next three decades. Newer pipes are made of plastic or steel. Today the agency’s oldest 2,400 miles of cast-iron and asbestos-cement pipes account for the vast majority of its leaks, which last year numbered 1,156, far surpassing an industry benchmark of 20 leaks per 100 miles per year.
“We have a lot of pipe. About half of it is old. And it’s leaking,” says district spokesperson Andrea Pook.
Replacing or adding pipeline often requires costly and extensive trenching and disruptive roadwork. Photo: EBMUD
Serving 1.4 million people in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, EBMUD is far from alone in contending with aging, sometimes neglected infrastructure. Water and sewer agencies of all sizes nationwide find themselves in similar straits. Just consider Flint, Michigan, and all the attention it has drawn to the potentially dangerous lead pipes still coursing through many of our cities and towns — or the recent gas leak in Southern California. And that’s to say nothing of our nation’s crumbling roads and unsafe bridges.
“We’re very good at engineering and construction, but we sort of forget as engineers that things, once they’re in the built environment, require maintenance and someday even replacement. That’s something that I think we as a country are going to learn in the next ten years,” says Margo Schueler, construction and maintenance superintendent at EBMUD.
“We’ve got some catch-up work to do,” adds David Katzev, senior civil engineer. “We the industry, we the nation, we the society need to think differently about asset management.”
The City of Los Angeles, for one, recently accelerated its water-pipe replacement rate by two and a half times. It’s doing this largely through the use of open trenches, which is just how it sounds: dig up the street from one end of the targeted segment to the other in order to pull out the old pipe and install the new. Simply put, it’s disruptive.
EBMUD is trying to find a better approach, in part by learning from what other agencies have done well — and perhaps not so well. “We want to do it differently, be more efficient, more environmentally friendly, and more collaborative with the public,” says Schueler.
Pipeline replacement at Richmond’s Marina Park with minimal disruption of park use by the public. Photo: EBMUD
Discovering what that means is the goal of its new Pipeline Rebuild program. Officially launched this past January, the effort includes a series of short-term pilot projects designed to test alternative materials and construction techniques that may allow the agency to catch up on its backlog of deferred maintenance, and eventually prescribe a more manageable path forward.
At various locations in Richmond, San Pablo, Lafayette, and Walnut Creek, for example, EBMUD will spend the summer testing a technology known as cured-in-place pipe — specifically a product called Aqua Pipe that’s widely used in Canada and a handful of American cities. It’s essentially an interior liner that crews use to construct a new pipe within an old, failing one. Because excavation isn’t necessary, Aqua Pipe can be installed at a rate of up to 2,000 feet per day.
Aqua-Pipe is made up of two layers of fire hose-like material, the inner impermeable and the outer permeable. A water-safe resin is injected between the two layers, allowing the sleeve to be fused against the inner walls of an existing pipe. Photo: EBMUD
Later this fall, EBMUD will launch a separate pilot to evaluate another trenchless technique known as pipe-bursting, in which cast-iron pipes are broken from within by pulling a conical metal “head” through the pipe and chasing it with a new pipe. This technique is widely used for sewers, but more challenging for water lines.
New Aqua-Pipe liner being fed into existing older pipeline. Photo: EBMUD
A third pilot in Richmond will involve using restrained-joint connections between pipe sections, as opposed to the more common bell-and-spigot push-together fittings, which can offer additional stability during minor seismic disturbances and the opportunity to employ narrower trenches, saving time, money, and materials.
Carol Mahoney, an integrated planning manager for the Zone 7 Water Agency in Livermore, says EBMUD could also partner with cities to make street-level improvements and add green infrastructure like plantings and swales in some cases where pipeline repairs require tearing up the roadway. This piggybacking of benefits could bring additional funding opportunities, too.
Other initiatives of the Pipeline Rebuild program, which will run four years and should lay the foundation for the utility’s maintenance regime for decades to come, include GPS mapping of underground pipes, streamlining collaboration between design and construction teams, and staffing work crews more flexibly to improve efficiency.
Together, these technological and procedural improvements should help the district dig itself out of the hole in which it finds itself, once and for all. “Our point is that we need to do it now,” Pook says. “If we don’t, it will be worse later.” NS
Nate Seltenrich is a freelance science and environmental journalist who covers infrastructure, restoration, and related topics for Estuary. He also contributes to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sonoma and Marin magazines, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, and other local and national publications, on subjects ranging from public lands and renewable energy to the human health impacts of climate change. He lives in Petaluma with his wife, two boys, and four ducks. www.nate-reports.com
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...
Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems. Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...
Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.