This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.
Seth Petersen was at his grandmother’s funeral, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
Three hours away in the village of Luck, Wisconsin, where he served as director of public works, there was an emergency. Petersen was getting calls repeatedly, asking for his expertise.
Petersen and two other employees were responsible for drinking water, wastewater, street maintenance, park and cemetery maintenance and picking up stray dogs, he said. The job never stopped.
“Seth, what the (expletive) are you doing?” his brother-in-law said to him as he came back to the family gathering from another call. “Why are you living like this?”
Petersen left that job at the end of last year. Now, he helps train water operators in small communities for the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.
Luck is not an outlier. In small and rural communities across the U.S., water system operators are stretched thin, covering around-the-clock responsibilities to keep water running safely and reliably despite aging and underfunded infrastructure.
The consequences of a water system falling behind have received the national spotlight, infamously in Flint, Michigan, and most recently in Jackson, Mississippi, where majority-Black communities bore the brunt of mismanagement and aging infrastructure.
Thousands of under-resourced systems risk a similar fate, and small water systems — defined by the EPA as serving fewer than 10,000 people, and making up more than 90% of the nation’s community water systems — are in a particularly precarious position.
Their staffing is often sparse and underpaid. Infrastructure, in many places, is crumbling and underfunded, and though there is a fresh infusion of federal money on the table, it’s a challenge to access.
The American Rescue Plan Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other programs represent a historic investment in the country’s water infrastructure, totaling billions of dollars.
But the total available funding, even after it’s all been doled out, still won’t be enough. One report from 2020 estimated that the U.S. would need to invest nearly $3.3 trillion in water and wastewater infrastructure projects between 2019 and 2039 to keep systems updated.
Many communities will also face increases in their water bills to keep up with infrastructure and staffing needs. Yet raising the price of water may prove unworkable in rural and historically-underinvested communities like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, some of the most impoverished in the country.
No one in the U.S. should have to worry about having safe drinking water, said Chris Groh, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.
Source: wisconsinwatch.org
Photo Credit: istock-AlenaMozhjer
Categories: Wisconsin, Rural Lifestyle