USA TODAY

By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY

NEW ORLEANS — This city's post-Katrina rebuilding has revamped neighborhoods and restored streets and homes from the flood wreckage.
But one area where city leaders say recovery is falling rapidly behind is the city's antiquated sewer and water system. The 100-year-old network of underground pipes, pumps and power plants — one of the USA's oldest — was rickety before the 2005 hurricane's floods hit and got worse once they subsided.

The system showed its age last month when a century-old power plant that partly powers the city's water treatment system gave out, throwing the city into a two-day boil-water advisory.

City leaders say New Orleans cannot fully recover from Katrina until a massive, multibillion-dollar upgrade is made to the sewer and water system, first installed at the dawn of the 20th century. Federal rebuilding funds are paying only for a patchwork of repairs, and the city doesn't have the resources to do it alone, says New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat.

As with many other cities, New Orleans' aging infrastructure is low on the priority list in Washington, he says. "When the city is sitting on age-old infrastructure, something's going to give. That's true around the country," Landrieu says. "Congress and the federal government have not made it a priority. We're falling very, very far behind."

More than 1,000 aging water and sewer systems around the country need urgent upgrades, says Ken Kirk, executive director of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. With the passing of the Clean Water Act in 1972, the federal government once paid about 75% of a municipality's upkeep of water and sewer treatment systems, Kirk says. Today, that number is closer to 3%, he says.

The USA's drinking water supply is threatened daily, Kirk says. Cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Kansas City, New York and Philadelphia have antiquated systems that are in dire need of renovation. Across the country, there is a $500 billion to $1 trillion need to upgrade systems, Kirk says. Local governments should also be spending more, he says.

With the federal government in deficit-reduction mode and local municipalities battling their own budget shortfalls, that investment seems unlikely anytime soon, Kirk says.

"We are in a critical situation," he says. "If those systems break down, you go back to a time when people didn't have running water or toilets and where breakouts of major diseases like cholera were common. I don't think anyone wants to go back to that time."

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., says Congress has vastly underfinanced infrastructure. Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate's Environment & Public Works Committee, says he is working on two bills that will direct more funds to such projects, but Washington's current cost-cutting climate makes it a tough sell.

The New Orleans system was installed in the early 1900s, says Joseph Becker, general superintendent of the Sewerage and Water Board. The network includes a drainage system with 23 pumps that can move 400,000 gallons a second — enough to fill the Superdome in under an hour — a necessity for a city mostly below sea level, Becker says. During Hurricane Katrina, the pumps took just six days to clear out the floodwaters that covered 80% of the city, he says.

The network also collects water from the Mississippi River, cleans it and delivers it to homes across the city using a power plant built more than a century ago, Becker says. That power plant gave out the evening of Nov. 19, dropping water pressure across the city and propelling city leaders to call a boil-water advisory.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved about $300 million to repair more than 1,600 miles of water mains damaged by Katrina, he says. Much more money is needed for a permanent fix, including $180 million to replace the power plant that failed last month, he says. "We feel the correct way to handle the repairs is not by simply putting Band-Aids over small sections of the system," Becker says. "The United States doesn't address their infrastructure issues. It's sort of out of sight, out of mind."

The federal government is investing heavily to revamp the city's underground drainage canals, says Stan Green, a project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. The $1 billion project was approved in the late 1990s. It will add to the current system of canals and culverts that help drain the city during heavy storms, he says. "We've made significant improvements," he says.

New Orleans' entire water and sewer system needs an overhaul, says Bhaskar Kura, a civil engineering professor and director of the Maritime Environmental Resources and Information Center at the University of New Orleans.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded the nation's drinking water and wastewater systems each a "D-" on its national infrastructure report card, he says.

"Twenty years back, developing nations would look at the United States like, wow, they have all this innovative infrastructure," Kura says. "But, as time passed, some of these infrastructures have become old, and we haven't invested enough."