Technological innovations will transform water management and infrastructure resilience

There are unpaid bills looming for communities across the country. In fact, those bills total almost $625 billion for the maintenance and upkeep of drinking water systems alone. 

That is the estimate from the U.S. EPA for the cost for the country’s 150,000 public water systems to fix a vast infrastructure of about 2 million miles of buried underground pipes that supply drinking water in the U.S.

Cities across the country rely on three critical water systems to function properly:

1. Stormwater networks that control runoff to manage flooding and reduce pollution in waterways;
2. Wastewater systems that collect, transport, and treat sewage; and
3. Drinking water infrastructure that purifies and distributes clean water to homes, businesses, and industries.

When one fails, the consequences ripple across communities. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) reported that U.S. drinking water systems leak approximately two trillion gallons of purified water each year, costing municipalities around $8 billion annually.

Also, the ASCE’s 2025 “Comprehensive Assessment of America's Infrastructure” report identified a need for $99 billion to fund renewals and updates of wastewater treatment and stormwater systems. Such high operational costs may hinder investments in infrastructure upgrades and lead to increased water bills for consumers, perpetuating a cycle of financial strain. 

In the 2024 “State of the Water Industry Report” by the American Water Works Association, respondents identified “long-term water supply availability” as the fourth most pressing challenge for communities. It ranked just behind watershed and source water protection, funding for capital projects, and the replacement of aging water and wastewater infrastructure. Notably, 68% of those surveyed were representatives from water utilities.

Most water systems in the U.S. were built just after World War II. At the time, they were given an estimated 75-year shelf life, which means time is running out for antiquated systems all over the country. 

Cities face complicated, costly water issues

Real-life impact can be seen in communities of all sizes.

Houston Public Works plant and pipe replacements

The Houston (TX) Public Works department is requesting $15 billion to replace the 70-year-old East Water Purification Plant and upgrade its wastewater system. By comparison, Houston’s 2025 overall city budget is about $5.1 billion. The city is also seeking an additional $480 million to fix the leaking pipes distributing Houston’s drinking water. Just in the last year, Houston lost 32 billion gallons of drinking water alone. That’s the equivalent of 48,457 Olympic-sized pools, enough to supply the population of Fort Worth for an entire year. 

Atlanta water main breaks

Atlanta's aging water infrastructure of more than 3,000 miles of pipes is experiencing severe water main breaks. There were more than 176 breaks between January and September 2024 alone — more than 1,000 since 2022.  In June 2024, dramatic breaks in main water pipes resulted in Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens declaring a 72-hour state of emergency.

Groundwater supply concerns in Phoenix, Arizona

In Phoenix, one of the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, approvals for new subdivisions were paused earlier this year because the area is too reliant on an increasingly finite resource: Groundwater. Phoenix is one of Arizona’s five initial groundwater Active Management Areas (AMA), all of which use more water than they replace, according to the 2022 report Overdraft, Safe-Yield, and the Management Goals of Arizona’s Active Management Areas.

External issues put more pressure on water systems

Managing municipal water assets has never been easy, but it's even more complicated and costly today. Climate change has intensified storms, adding additional pressures on coping with floods, mudslides, and other uncertainties of weather. Wastewater fluctuates with population, but becomes more expensive when a community’s population and tax base drop. 

Because the network of pipes is underground, a leak is hard to find. That soggy puddle in a neighbor’s yard is likely to come from a cracked pipe hundreds of feet away. Old-fashioned techniques (including leak-sniffing dogs) were unreliable. You had to guess where the leak might be, dig down to find it, come up dry, and then dig again until you located the source.

The growing demand for water, along with its unpredictable availability, rising maintenance costs, treatment expenses, and distribution challenges, underscores the importance of sustainable water management solutions. A key consideration is the fact that the median age of water utility workers is almost 50, and that more than half of all U.S. utility workers will near retirement in the next decade. 

New technologies combine with expertise to create efficient solutions 

Yet there is good news on the horizon. Just in the last two years, new technologies have revolutionized the most difficult step in maintaining the drinking water system: Finding a leak and estimating its size. That means repair crews could concentrate time and effort not only on the leaks causing the most current damage, but on those with the greatest potential for disaster in the future. Asset management could shift from reactive response to proactive prevention.

Imagine a technology that not only detects leaks underground but also predicts where they are likely to occur next. By using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze decades of system history, along with data from strategically placed sensors, water departments could pinpoint the exact location and severity of pipe leaks. Furthermore, that identification often came before leaks become visible on the surface, and more importantly, before they become major line breaks.

In contrast, current repair efforts succeed just one out of every three attempts, wasting time, money, and precious water. By combining ground sensors with AI-powered foresight, municipalities can move from reactive fixes to proactive prevention to save millions while preserving resources.  

Prediction over reaction

This predictive capability stands in stark contrast to current repair practices, which have a success rate of only one in three attempts, leading to significant waste of time, financial resources, and the increasingly precious commodity of water. By combining expertise,  ground-based sensors, and AI-driven predictive analytics, municipalities can transition from simply reacting to failures to proactively preventing them, resulting in substantial cost savings and the conservation of vital water resources.

This increased efficiency can be translated directly into additional clean water available to customers. Recent technological advancements offer a promising future for municipal drinking water systems, particularly in the critical area of proactive leak detection and management. Groundbreaking technologies are transforming the historically challenging process of identifying and assessing underground leaks.

These innovations allow repair teams to optimize efforts by focusing not only on immediate, high-impact leaks but also on preemptively addressing potential future failures. This shift marks a significant evolution in asset management, moving away from a reactive approach and towards a proactive strategy focused on prevention.