The Baltimore area’s aging and failing pipes have left area officials scrambling to find solutions to what some are calling the greatest national infrastructure problem of our time.
 
Last week, two major pipe breaks — one in Halethorpe and one in downtown Baltimore — drew attention to the need for repairs, as residents of Baltimore City and Baltimore and Howard counties lost water.

“It’s the biggest public works project that needs to be done in the nation’s history,” said Kurt Kocher, spokesman for Baltimore City’s Public Works Department. “We’re talking about millions of miles of pipe under millions of miles of road that need to be replaced.”

Donald Mohler, spokesman for Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith, said the failing pipes are a “nationwide issue.”

“Everyone recognizes the U.S. has an aging infrastructure,” he said. “As we get the economy turned around, both Baltimore City and Baltimore County are spending millions and millions of dollars” to fix the pipes.

Baltimore City provides 265 million gallons of drinking water daily to more than 600,000 residents of Baltimore County as well as additional residents in portions of Howard, Anne Arundel and Carroll counties. The city also treats about 250 million gallons of waste water daily from 1.6 million people in the metropolitan area.

But the system is stressed, officials said.
 
More than 5,000 water mains have broken in the past four years throughout the system, according to public works officials. In some parts of Baltimore — such as downtown, where streets are still closed because of last week’s pipe failure — pipes are 100 years old or older. Even newer pipes, such as the pre-stressed concrete pipe put in in the 1970s, which failed in Halethorpe last week because of a manufacturing error, are at issue.
 
Baltimore Public Works Department officials say the cost of fixing all the pipes in need of repair is about $2.2 billion. The city applied for $700 million from the Obama administration to help with the repairs, but received just $12 million in stimulus money.
 
Howard County’s public works director, James Irvin, said the pre-stressed concrete pipe, which sends water from Baltimore City to Howard County near tracks that carry MARC and Amtrak trains, had a “design defect” that causes it to fail despite its relatively young 30-something age.

“It’s a national problem,” he said. “All of that type of pipe has the same problem. There have been failures all over the country with it. It’s a big problem on a national scale.”
 
Irvin said the break in the Halethorpe pipe underscores the need for Howard County to find different ways to get its water. Irvin said county officials want to build an $18 million pipeline through Patapsco State Park near Route 1 that would act as a replacement for the current line. He said the one-year project could be started next year.
 
“It’s a very difficult place to maintain a water line,” he said of the current location. “We’re going to replace the line completely in a different location.”
 
Howard County officials are also exploring getting more of their water from sources other than Baltimore, such as increasing the number of connections it already has with the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission and Anne Arundel County, Irvin said.

“We’re exploring additional connections in the event of an emergency,” Irvin said.
 
In the meantime, Kocher said city officials will continue to try to replace aging portions of pipe before they burst.

“Old age and decades of freezing and thawing and moving will cause the pipes to crumble.”

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