Water infrastructure is out of sight, out of mind, says CEO

Why don’t people pay enough attention to our world’s vital water infrastructure? Because it’s invisible, says CEO of ITT Corporation Steven Loranger.

Loranger wrote in the Huffington Post that not nearly enough funds are allocated to water infrastructure. Granted, he’s a bit biased considering his company is the world’s largest supplier of water transportation, treatment and control systems.

He cited an estimate that less than 2 percent of budgets in Western countries are allocated to developing infrastructure, and usually none of that is for enhancing water infrastructure. The U.S. in particular, he wrote, is not dedicating nearly as much funding for safe water as it should. He believes the problem is that water infrastructure issues are not visible enough for people to see a problem:

One barrier to investment is that water infrastructure is almost invisible to the average person – and even when something breaks, it often goes unnoticed. Unlike a bridge collapse or a power blackout, which immediately leads to calls for infrastructure reviews, water infrastructure failures typically do not draw public outrage in the same fashion. For example, little attention is paid to the fact that 240,000 water main breaks occur around the United States each year, or that the value of the lost water alone from such breaks is $2.6 billion annually.

Among the solutions Loranger suggests for this planet’s water woes are increasing government-based financial incentives (citing the EU’s Water Framework Directive as a good model), developing new solutions in the private sector, and reducing corporate water footprints.

Read the complete column.

Water Infrastructure: The Unseen Crisis [The Huffington Post] Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roryrory/ / CC BY-SA 2.0