“Without changes, we’ll enter loss-of-life territory, where firefighting and emergency response may be compromised. This is serious,” Farkas wrote.

I am doing my best to not add too much of my personal opinion to this topic but as someone who works in this space I find myself being grateful this isn’t me and at the same time worried that it could happen anywhere.

The nature of my work has me working on different systems and the common thread is that places will build things, but with no plan on how to maintain or replace. A lot of water infrastructure was installed in the post-war period. At that time a useful life of 50-100 year might as well have been forever. The quantity of massive infrastructure, largely buried or otherwise not accessible or with no redundancy had not existed prior to that. Folks kicked the can down the road coupled with “efficiencies” and cuts to maintenance and replacement over the years. We got used to cheap utilities but it’s all deferred cost. Not a very fun situation.