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Across the northern United States and Canada, homeowners are checking their snow blowers, stocking firewood and draining outdoor pipes in preparation for cold weather. For municipalities, though, winter-proofing water mains isn’t so easy—the pipes travel long stretches underground, and this time of year, frozen ground and temperature differentials cause fine cracks to develop into full-blown leaks, often with catastrophic results.

You see news articles from time to time about sinkholes and water main breaks, but the problem is actually far more widespread, insidious and impactful than the odd chasm in a city street.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates in its 2017 Infrastructure Report Card that 240,000 water main breaks occur yearly in the U.S., with 2 trillion gallons of treated drinking water escaping. This means 14 to 18 percent of water treated each day is lost, enough to serve 15 million homes. And it’s worsening; a 2018 study from Utah State University found that pipe breaks in the U.S. and Canada have gone up 27 percent in the last […]