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sewage that reached her knees. In 2003, the Court of Appeal at the House of Lords, the UK’s highest-level judiciary body, heard the case ofPeter Marcic, resident of Old Church Lane in the London suburb of Stanmore. Between 1993 and 1996, Marcic found sewage backed up in his garden once a year. It happened again—twice in 1997, not once in 1998, four times in 1999, and five times in 2000. During the hearings, the Lords seemed shocked by several things: that a modern-day wastewater treatment infrastructure can still spew sewage into a residential home, and that it is considered normal. That “sewerage undertakers,” as the water utilities are known, are only obliged to compensate the homeowner for the cost of his annual sewerage rates, usually around £125. That insurance companies, faced with costs of between £15,000 and £30,000 per sewer flooding incident, sometimes refuse to pay up. Under the 1875 Public Health Act, still in force, local authorities are obliged to make “such sewers as may be necessary for effectually draining their district.” “Effectually” is vague enough to leave room for loopholes and to get out of infrastructural upgrades. In some ways, this is understandable, as water utilities get no extra public subsidy for infrastructure costs and must pay for them out of water and sewer rates, but any rise in bills unfailingly causes public outrage. (A few months after raising water bills by 21 percent in 2005, Thames Water’s four directors were awarded bonuses totaling £1.26 million, a rise of 62 percent from the previous year.)
    A 2004 parliamentary committee was appalled by testimony from water industry officials about sewage backups. “Would you say,” inquired a committee member of the head of England and Wales’s water regulators Ofwat, “that sewage ending up in your living room is about the worst service failure that can happen to anybody?” The man from Ofwat had to agree. “Short of threats to life and limb and health,” he admitted, “it is one of the most unpleasant events that can happen to any household.”
    Bazalgette’s sewers may have saved London from cholera and made miracles out of brick and water, but even he couldn’t defeat decay, pinched resources, and a failure to upgrade. “If Bazalgette hadn’t built his sewers when he did,” Rob Smith tells me, “we would—literally—be in the shit today.” If Bazalgette’s sewers aren’t maintained, we will be again.
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    It’s a hot afternoon in Queens, New York, and for the first and probably last time in my life, I am stopping traffic, with the assistance of half a dozen fit young men and four large trucks belonging to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The men have been asked to show me a regulator sewer, a visit that took months of begging to arrange. The process began with a redoubtable woman in the DEP press office who declared that there was no way I’d ever get into the city’s sewers, and did I know how many people phoned her to ask the same question? But the redoubtable woman could be bypassed, and the bypass ended up in the office of Deputy Commissioner Douglas Greeley, an affable man with a hell of a job, because he is in charge of New York’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants (London, by contrast, has three).
    When I’d called him from London to arrange the appointment, he’d been helpful but doubtful. “You’ll have to do several hours of close confinement training. Then you’ll need to get a security check.” Then he said “9/11!” as if he didn’t need to say more. Precaution is understandable and probably overdue: terrorist attacks on drinking water supplies are usually planned for, but not on sewage facilities. (When an employee at a Washington, D.C., treatment plant showed me the railway trucks that until recently