So the gardeners and car-washers pay for their usage (and believe me, nothing works to curtail usage as well as billing does).

Chicago has literally limitless supplies of fresh water — Lake Michigan — coupled with decent rain- and snowfall, and you still have to pay for your water.

The idea of “free” delivered potable water is a totally alien one to Americans. Hence the large number of houses with wells, especially the further out you go from the cities and suburbs.

As the old joke goes: “If you want free water, set out a rainbarrel and hope there’s no drought.”

Let’s get back to the issue.

Best regards

Isn’t the fact that they were so worked over the point? – they didn’t repair, they rebuilt (with Marshall aid of course). Plus of course many of the water pipes in London are up to 150 years old.

We got Marshall Plan money too but the Labour government at the time spent most on nationalising the health system rather than fixing the infrastructure.

And I don’t know how old typical German water systems are, but I bet many are as old as London. After all a clean pure water system sound like a very German thing to want. And by way of a check on German versus British social infrastructival innovations, Bismarck introduced national old age pensions and health insurance there about 30 years before it happened here.

” It depends on where you draw the boundary.”

A couple of hundred miles in this case. And within the same country.

” That is why it is an issue and why some intelligent economic thinking might not go amiss, rather than snapping one’s fingers like an acquatic czar and demanding instant pipelines by the end of the week.”

Funny – I thought ad hominems were something you took great exception to.

As for your point about scarcity, I’m content to let people decide for themselves just how scarce water is in this country. I don’t think it needs a great genius to work out where the fault lies: not in the absence of water but in the absence of sense in the way it is delivered.

A lot of them correlate with bomb damage from the Blitz, where streets were bombed over night and people went out in the blackout and fixed water pipes together as quickly as they could to get supplies back on and nobody went back in 1946 and said let’s do the job properly.

Very drole.

Uhhh… how come the Germans, with far more thoroughtly wrecked cities by 1945 courtesy of the RAF, don’t have these problems now? (At least so far as I know.)

Can you form the following words into a sentence?

bottom of … any excuse … scraping the … desperate for … the barrel

Richard Aylard, External Affairs Director, Thames Water, when answering a questions about leaks (speaking at London Assembly’s Health and Public Services Committee meeting, 16 May 2006):

“We do know where the worst areas are. They’re in central London, north of the river. A lot of them correlate with bomb damage from the Blitz, where streets were bombed over night and people went out in the blackout and fixed water pipes together as quickly as they could to get supplies back on and nobody went back in 1946 and said let’s do the job properly. Some of those pipes have been leaking for a very long time, that’s why we’re digging up the City.”

Scarcity is a myth? Hardly. Economics, according to a widely accepted formulation, is the study of the use of scarce resources that have alternate uses. Water may be plentiful, but the material, time and energy needed to supply to A and B is scarce. That is why it is an issue and why some intelligent economic thinking might not go amiss, rather than snapping one’s fingers like an acquatic czar and demanding instant pipelines by the end of the week.

If we assume that’s so for the sake of this discussion, and the average house has about 2 inhabitants, and there are 20 million people in the affected SE area, and the 160 M^3 you quote is typical, the need is for (would you believe?) almost exactly 50M^3/sec.

However, as I said before, designing such a system without room for future expansion would be very silly, and as the SE population growa and per capita water consumption grows… a doubling of present capacity — presmably about 50M^3/sec — woud be about correct. So I seem to have sized the pipeline about right. Which is a relief (g). (This is all back-of-the-envelope stuff, as I’m sure you understand.)

(ii) A large supply-head reservoir is crucial. Without it the pipeline is like to be unable to help during a drought, because there would be no water to deliver — due to the drought.

If demand keeps growing as people say it will, it’s possible we’ll soon get to the point where the aquifers never fill up.

“No??”

No. I had already said my favoured solution was a pipline. I went on, I thought, to reiterate that belief in the second paragraph, which you quoted.

The invitation to think of the solution adopted by Birmingham council, was intended to draw attention to the way in which it is political will that is needed to solve this problem and how a brick aquaduct, built 100 years ago, was sufficient to do the job for Britain’s second largest city.

I remain unconvinced of the vastness of the quantities of water you say are required to make a substantial difference.

I apologise if I failed to make that sufficiently clear.