America is the land of huge expense for capital improvements, but hardly a dime for maintenance. In all of the plant improvement projects that I helped with we specified the pumps, blowers, and other equipment based on best value over the expected life of the equipment. We spent a lot of time and effort to get as close as possible to the actual maintenance costs needed, then put the anticipated annual maintenance costs in our budget requests every year. Every year the finance department took those specific numbers out and put in their own, much lower, numbers. Then they wondered, every damned year, why our maintenance costs exceeded budget every year.
When you add that maintaining burried utilities is difficult, expensive, and inconvenient, you get ancient, decrepit water and wastewater lines that fail more and more frequently. In 1992 assisted with a repair on a broken water line on the courthouse square of the city where I was working. The line was installed in 1912, and was made of oak barrel staves. Basically about 500 feet of two foot long, 12 inch diameter oak barrels. We repaired the break with PVC and oakum sealant and got it back in service that night. That city did not replace the barrel stave pipe until around 2006, from what I was told. That is not uncommon, especially in smaller cities with very limited budgets.