When Reliability Stops Being Assumed

For most Americans, getting a glass of water requires almost no thought.

Turn on the faucet. Fill the glass. Drink.

That absence of thought is an achievement.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American cities were still contending with diseases such as typhoid spread through contaminated water. Filtration, chlorination, sanitation, testing, regulation, and professional water utilities helped make safe municipal drinking water ordinary enough that the CDC eventually described water treatment as one of the great public-health achievements of the twentieth century.

The infrastructure did more than provide safer water. It removed work from the household.

Most people no longer need to determine where today’s water came from, decide whether it should be boiled, keep several days of it stored, maintain their own treatment system, or independently investigate whether the people supplying it know what they are doing.

Reliability lets us outsource vigilance.

That becomes easier to see when reliability disappears.

Researchers studying households with unreliable water supplies have documented an entire secondary economy of coping: storing water, buying it elsewhere, treating it at home, collecting it from alternative sources, changing routines, and building parallel systems around the one that can no longer be depended upon.

The water itself is only part of what has been lost.

When the backup becomes your job

Electricity shows the same mechanism more visibly.

Where electric grids are unreliable, households and businesses buy batteries, generators, fuel, voltage regulators, and other equipment that people with dependable power rarely have to think about. A World Bank study of infrastructure resilience describes businesses installing their own generation to compensate for unreliable grids, often at substantially higher cost than ordinary grid power.

The generator is usually described as protection against an unreliable utility.

It is also evidence of work the utility has transferred to its customer.

Someone has to buy it, fuel it, maintain it, test it, decide when to run it, and absorb the capital tied up in equipment that would be unnecessary if the primary system were dependable.

A good electric grid therefore creates value partly through what people no longer have to do.

That absence is easy to mistake for a natural condition.

It is not.

Reliability can hide the work that produces it

When a system is built in response to a visible problem, the reason for its safeguards is obvious.

A generation later, the system may simply appear to work.

Inspection happens in the background. Redundancy can look wasteful. Preventive maintenance becomes easier to defer because the equipment is still operating. Staffing can appear excessive because serious failures are rare.

The better the system performs, the less visible the work producing that performance becomes.

An institution can begin treating reliability as an inherited property rather than as something continuously produced by maintenance, oversight, testing, expertise, funding, and the willingness to respond when those systems detect trouble.

Fixing the immediate failure is different

This is part of what makes a serious water failure so consequential.

After Flint’s water crisis, residents did not simply return to their previous relationship with the water system once officials reported improvements. Research found continuing distrust of both the water and the institutions responsible for its safety.

Before the crisis, many residents could reasonably delegate the question of water safety to engineers, laboratories, regulators, public officials, and the systems built to detect and prevent problems.

The crisis demonstrated that this delegation had failed.

Afterward, a clean test result could establish something important about the water being tested. It could not, by itself, re-establish confidence in the larger machinery that was supposed to prevent the failure, recognize it, disclose it, and correct it.

Research on Flint’s recovery found that lingering resident distrust was sometimes portrayed as irrational or as an obstacle to recovery. But residents were judging more than the latest water-quality result. They were also judging the institutions responsible for producing it.

A repaired pipe answers one question.

Whether the safeguards that allowed the problem to develop have also been repaired answers another.

The same thing happens outside infrastructure

Finance provides a different version of the same pattern.

A depositor who trusts a banking system does not ordinarily investigate the solvency of the institution every morning, maintain several independent ways of storing value, or monitor the bank’s balance sheet personally. Those tasks have been delegated to the institution and to the regulatory system surrounding it.

When that arrangement fails badly enough, people can change how they save.

Research on the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings Bank found a sharp and persistent increase in demand for life insurance as an alternative savings vehicle in affected communities. The institutional failure changed where people were willing to place money afterward.

A functioning financial institution allows depositors to stop continuously defending themselves against the possibility that the institution will fail.

Once that protection becomes doubtful, diversification, verification, and backup plans return to ordinary life.

That may be one of the least visible products of a reliable institution.

When reliability holds long enough, the checking disappears so completely that people can forget it was ever necessary.

Sources and further reading

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — A Century of U.S. Water Chlorination and Treatment
• Majuru et al. — How Do Households Respond to Unreliable Water Supplies? A Systematic Review
• World Bank — Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity
• From “trust” to “trustworthiness”: Retheorizing dynamics of trust, distrust, and water security in North America
• Arthi, Richardson, and Van Orden — Traumatic Financial Experiences and Persistent Changes in Financial Behavior: Evidence from the Freedman’s Savings Bank

Featured image: Paul Laustsen, U.S. Geological Survey. Public domain. Source.