The Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. are riddled with water and sewer pipes that were laid down when Eisenhower was president, and the bill for replacing them is coming due one street at a time. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC Water) is now moving to replace both the water main and sewer line beneath Dolphin Road, part of a relentless infrastructure rehabilitation campaign across Montgomery and Prince George's counties.

WSSC Water serves roughly 1.8 million residents across the two counties, and much of the underground network keeping those homes connected to clean water and functioning sewers dates to the postwar suburban boom of the 1950s through 1970s. Those cast iron pipes are now 50 to 70 years old, well past their intended lifespan, and they show it. The utility has historically logged hundreds of water main breaks per year, with some years topping 1,000, disrupting service, flooding roads, and wasting treated water.

Beyond the inconvenience of breaks, aging sewer lines in the Chesapeake Bay watershed carry a specific environmental risk. Cracked or overwhelmed sewer pipes can discharge untreated wastewater into local streams, a problem that federal regulators have targeted under the EPA's Chesapeake Bay cleanup framework. Replacing both water and sewer infrastructure on the same street at the same time, as WSSC Water is doing on Dolphin Road, has become standard practice, cutting costs and avoiding the need to tear up the same pavement twice.

WSSC Water has ramped up capital spending significantly in recent years, committing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to pipe rehabilitation. Federal help has followed: Maryland has received substantial funding through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which directed roughly $55 billion toward water systems nationwide through EPA revolving loan programs.

The utility has also faced pressure on affordability. Rate increases needed to fund these replacements hit harder in Prince George's County, where median household incomes are lower than in neighboring Montgomery County, and residents and local officials have long questioned whether the two counties receive equal levels of infrastructure investment from the jointly governed utility.

Details on the Dolphin Road project's cost and timeline have not been publicly released as part of the solicitation posted April 16. WSSC Water will select a contractor before construction can begin.