Dusty cars beat broken water mains
April 3, 2012

Omaha is in the midst of a major project that is a combined effort to replace water mains and natural-gas pipelines at the same time as the city separates old combined sewers into distinct sanitary and stormwater sewers. The Omaha World-Herald has a story highlighting the inconveniences to some neighborhoods as their utilities are being changed over. While it would be unfair to dismiss their inconvenience altogether, it's only fair to note that the city and the Metropolitan Utilities District thoughtfully planned ahead to conduct all of the work at once in order to minimize costs and disruptions to the community. One neighborhood now in the midst of construction work has cast-iron water mains that are nearly 140 years old -- so they actually got quite lucky that their utilities had been delivered reliably for so long without a replacement. There will be lots of other communities that won't get similar upgrades to their municipal utilities unless something breaks -- which is a far greater inconvenience.



Past water and wastewater news updates