Americans are not wrong to worry about their nation’s aging infrastructure. Those crumbling “roads and bridges” that President Barack Obama has been going on about for precisely as long as Republicans have been in control of the appropriations process is, however, only half the story – and the most visible half, at that. Underground, another tale of decrepit infrastructure has been circulating, particularly among New York City residents, for decades. It is the story of near apocalyptic disaster; one which has been in the making for nearly a century. There’s a reason why you do not hear nearly as many national Democrats pointing politically charged fingers in the direction of their fellow party members in the highest echelons of city government. Theirs is a mess the national party would much rather ignore.

Few long-term New York City residents can spend much time in town without hearing about the threat beneath their feet. The city of 8.4 million’s municipal water supply, which is gravitationally drawn into the city from reservoirs further upstate, had for decades been provided by just two massive underground tunnels. Both of those had been in continuous operation since their construction. Water Tunnel Number 1 went into service in 1917 while Water Tunnel Number 2 came online in 1936, and both had for decades been in desperate need of inspection and maintenance. For years, there was one flaw in this plan: If you were to shut them down in order to perform a survey, there is no guarantee you could turn them on again. Such was their estimated state of disrepair.

First proposed in 1954, a redundancy – Water Tunnel Number 3 – has been under construction since 1970. Its construction was accelerated after Mayor Mike Bloomberg took office in 2002. One key phase of the $4.7 billion project, the tunnel’s expansion into Manhattan, was completed in 2013. The final stage of the project to finally safeguard the city’s water supply – the pipework into the Brooklyn/Queens leg of the already dug tunnel – was scheduled to be completed in 2021. That’s right: “was.”

On Tuesday, the New York Times revealed that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration postponed the completion of Water Tunnel Number 3’s extension into the outer boroughs. Citing budgetary considerations and the administration’s desire to keep the cost of municipal water and sewer services to residents low, the administration made the determination to indefinitely put the critical capital investment project on hold. “You have to make judgments about priorities, and you can’t lose sight of the fact that you need to keep water rates affordable,” one deputy commissioner with the Department of Environmental Protection told Times reporters. Weighed, however, against the cost to residents should the worst occur, such considerations seem downright quaint.

For much of its conceptual lifetime, this tunnel has been a project plagued by the seeming unlikelihood that it would ever be of critical necessity. Quite unlike issues like crime and transportation infrastructure, which are visible and of urgent concern to city residents, few question what will happen tomorrow if the faucets ran dry and never came back on. In 1981, amid a uniquely dry summer, city residents were forced to begin contemplating water rationing. It wasn’t seen at the time as a temporary emergency measure but, typically for this dystopian period, a sign of things to come.

“The Army Corps of Engineers study concludes that if New York hasn’t increased its present capacity by the year 2000, the average daily water deficit – with or without rain – could total 500 million gallons,” read a New York magazine report from the period. Without a new water tunnel, the city had to contemplate recycling “gray water” from the city’s water treatment plants or using corrosive sea water for little things like fire suppression. “The worst case?” said former DEP Commissioner Frank McArdle. “I guess we set up bleachers on the Hudson and Long Island Sound and watch Connecticut and New Jersey burn up. Once they’re gone, we’ve got about 70 days left.”

This was not a period of great optimism about the city’s future.

“If a tunnel were to collapse, first answer is, there’s no easy answer to what you would do to provide water for everybody in this city,” Bloomberg told CBS reporters in 2005. His success in overseeing the completion of the Manhattan wing of the tunnel has likely saved the city’s most glittering borough the nightmarish effects of a catastrophic failure, but Queens and Brooklyn will have no such luck. The Times report warnd that, if the worst were to happen, those boroughs would lose access to potable water – not to mention cleaning and bathing water – for no less than three months. In that time, many of the nearly 5 million people residing in those boroughs would need to be supplied with fresh drinking water from emergency services or evacuated entirely.

To read pithy left-wing commentary about life in the boroughs is to be buried under an avalanche of chips that once adorned the shoulders of the residents of Queens and Brooklyn. From asthma rates, to garbage collection, to noise pollution, to access to yellow cabs, and on and on, life outside of Manhattan seems a daily source of vexation for those who live there. The Times deserves credit for speaking up to the vulnerable borough residents who are threatened by the de Blasio administration’s refusal to complete the tunnel project, but the silence from the usual suspects over this irresponsible act is deafening. Infrastructure is only sexy, it seems, when it’s Republicans who can be attacked for failing to properly appreciate it.

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