(Bloomberg) -- Shannan Walton was at a conference in Utah for water workers — the often-invisible employees who ensure Americans have clean tap water and working sewer systems — when she found herself seated next to a 90-year-old gentleman.
“I thought, ‘Oh how nice, they're inviting a retiree to still participate and be involved,’” said Walton, who runs workforce development for the National Rural Water Association, a nonprofit that trains and supports industry professionals in small communities across the US. But as the conversation progressed, she learned he was still working.
“He was 90 years old and still performing the duties because of the challenge of finding someone else to step up,” said Walton.
The nonagenarian Walton encountered is the extreme end of a much larger trend. Nationwide, many of the roughly 1.7 million people employed in the water sector have hit or are nearing retirement age. In total, between 30% and 50% of the workforce will retire in the next decade and there aren’t enough younger workers in the pipeline to replace them. A Brookings Institution analysis of 2021 data found that 88% of treatment plant operators were aged 45 or older, compared with 45% nationally.
“What's keeping the leaders of these systems up at night is, ‘Who's going to operate and maintain all this stuff right for the next five, 10, 20, 30 years?’” said Joseph Kane, a Brookings Institution fellow who authored the report.
Walton’s organization is currently surveying water workers to get a deeper sense of the problem. They’re finding that overall there hasn’t been much in the way of succession planning, and that it’s even worse in rural areas.
Many communities don’t have the ability to support the wages of two individuals to do the same job, says Walton. “Especially when you're talking about smaller systems, they don't really have the capacity to hire someone that's training while they also have the licensed operator there,” she said. In fact, some very small rural communities may share a single licensed water operator.
This loss of skilled labor is another stressor on aging US water infrastructure that desperately needs to be upgraded. A 2024 report by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that water systems nationwide needed $630 billion in investments over the next two decades to keep up with necessary improvements. The amount is 73% higher than what the agency estimated was needed in 2012.
One reason for that increase is climate change. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in September, residents of Asheville, North Carolina, endured more than 50 days without drinking water as operators scrambled to restore service. Earlier this month, the Village of Whitehall in New York stopped supplying water for several days, forcing school closures. The region’s ongoing drought had caused its supply to fall 14 feet below the level required to keep water flowing.
In New York City, more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, posing new challenges. “You get very clean water if it's from snow melt and somewhat dirtier water if it is runoff from extreme storms,” said Rohit Aggarwal, the city’s chief climate officer. “It is something that is on our radar for how we think about the long-term management of the water supply.”
Shifts in rainfall also mean many wastewater managers to struggle to reign in accidental releases of raw sewage into waterways. The US loses trillions of gallons of treated water to leaks in the system, which both increase costs to users and the risk of bacterial contamination. There are an estimated 16.4 million cases of acute gastroenteritis tied to community water systems each year.
At Veolia North America’s Haworth Plant in New Jersey, James Fahey, the superintendent of operations, walks through the labyrinth of processes that turn the algal-covered reservoir outside into safe, crystalline drinking water. Before the water is piped to more than 1 million residents, it undergoes ozone treatments to remove heavy metals like iron and manganese, has chlorine added to kill pathogens and passes through filters made of layers of ever finer sediment and sand.
Fahey says it’s not just about finding workers who can attain necessary qualifications. They need years of on-the-job training to master the complex systems, which makes it even more urgent to recruit now. “Anybody can pass a test given to you,” he said. “But the real lesson is the experience working here.”
The jobs that need to be filled include construction style work such as repairing water mains, working in water treatment facilities and managing wastewater, all of which pay competitive rates. And many don’t require much formal education. While nationwide 32.5% of workers have a high school diploma or less, 53% of water workers do.
“Across the country, women, people of color and younger individuals are unemployed, underemployed,” said Kane from the Brookings Institution. “There's sort of an opportune moment here of, well, we need to invest more, we need more talent.”
There have been some efforts to try to get younger workers interested in the water industry. The National Rural and Water Association, through its state affiliates, has launched an apprenticeship program. Veolia North America, formerly known as Suez, opened Veolia Academy, its in-house training program, to the public in 2023 to help water workers pass state certification exams.
But the fundamental issue is that most people don’t know that water jobs exist in the first place. “We haven't historically been out there telling people about what we do,” said Alan Weland, the regional president for Veolia Water New Jersey.
Most workers, including Weland, discover the industry incidentally. Weland, who graduated with a civil engineering degree, ended up in the sector after an internship with the consulting firm where his father worked on water projects. Weland’s son also works in water.
For much of US history, drinking water was a risky prospect. Contaminated sources and poor waste disposal spread deadly diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid. A surge in investment in sewage and drinking water supplies in the 19th and 20th centuries helped curb those diseases, such that many Americans rarely marvel at the availability of clean water today.
But making the industry more visible is crucial if it wants to plug the gap of workers before it’s too late. Water is “out of sight, out of mind,” said Walton. “Even in disasters, the heroes are the linemen because you can see them climbing the poles and they're fixing everything for the communities. Water and wastewater is invisible.”
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