Broken water main floods streets of drought-parched Los Angeles; plumbing keeps breaking as cities devolve to third-world status

(NaturalNews) To many residents of Los Angeles, the images were surreal: city streets flooded with a couple of feet of water even as California bakes in a historic drought.

To other observers, however, the image was one of the failure of Big Government. The cause of the "colossal" flood was a ruptured water main, which is just another sign of another declining American city that is lapsing into decay.

Witnesses said that the six-inch main burst some time in the early morning hours of May 12, marked by a loud rumbling and a geyser of water that was nearly ten feet tall at one point. The resulting burst flooded the local area and caused a sinkhole in the street.

Crews repaired the damage by mid-afternoon, but it was just another sign of the city's infrastructure decline.

Just a few days before, another main in West Hollywood broke, sending massive amounts of water into streets and nearby parking garages.

It's the same in virtually every major U.S. city, all of them run by liberals. As reported by NPR in October, 2.1 trillion gallons of drinking water are lost in the U.S. each year due to decaying, faltering, decrepit infrastructure that has been neglected for decades by liberal city governments:

Imagine Manhattan under almost 300 feet of water. Not water from a hurricane or a tsunami, but purified drinking water - 2.1 trillion gallons of it.

That's the amount of water that researchers estimate is lost each year in this country because of aging and leaky pipes, broken water mains and faulty meters.

Fixing that infrastructure won't be cheap, which is something every water consumer is likely to discover.

Necessary investments not being made

In Chicago, many of the city's water mains are 70 years old; in Los Angeles, some mains are more than 90 years old.

Water pipes are not the only issue causing devastation. Some liberal-run cities have bottomed out economically, such as Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore. For example, Detroit saw its population fall from a peak of 1.8 million in 1950 to fewer than 714,000 by 2010; this represents a drop of 60 percent. Once the center of the automotive manufacturing world, there are just two major car plants in the city today: the Chrysler Jefferson North Assembly plant and General Motors' Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant. Around 200,000 people once worked in manufacturing there, but fewer than 20,000 are currently employed in the field. In 2012, Detroit's crime rate was the highest in the country, according to FBI statistics. Moreover, the city is bankrupt.

"The infrastructure and the massive investment that our grandparents, great-grandparents, some of us our great-great-grandparents put in, is coming to the end of its useful life, and the bill has come due on our watch," Danielle Gallet, water supply program manager for the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, told NPR.

A study by the American Water Works Association estimates that it will cost $1 trillion just to repair water pipes. A 2011 study by the Urban Land Institute said another $2 trillion is needed to repair and upgrade America's network of roads and bridges.

Lack of funds to improve infrastructure

"You could go to any major city in America and see roads, and bridges, and infrastructure that need to be fixed today. They need to be fixed today," said former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in an interview with the CBS News program 60 Minutes in November.

The fact is that infrastructure has been permitted to deteriorate in favor of liberal city, state and federal governments that have placed more emphasis on dependency and entitlement programs.

Infrastructure is "falling apart because we haven't made investments," said LaHood.

It seems that any investments that are being made are being directed to the wrong places. The country is broke, with $18 trillion in debt and $200 trillion-plus in unfunded (and unfundable) entitlements and liabilities. Successive congresses and presidents ought to be ashamed for amassing this much debt that our children will have to pay off without keeping our infrastructure first-rate.

The solution from liberals in all levels of government is always the same: more money and higher taxes without cutting the very entitlements that have broken us economically.

At some point, Americans will have to figure out what they want more: better roads, safer bridges and upgraded water pipes, or limitless benefits and generational dependency. We cannot afford both.

Sources:

http://www.nbclosangeles.com

http://www.npr.org

http://www.awwa.org

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.cbsnews.com