Advanced Drainage Systems $WMS | Full Write up

A deep dive on a fundamentally uninteresting, but incredibly important part of our economy: Pipes

Pipes.

Not the kind of pipes in your walls and under your sinks. Not the kind that Canadian politicians smoke crack out of either (no offense to any Leafs fans out there). Nope, the pipes i’m talking about are giant, and you rarely ever see them because they’re usually buried underground. These pipes are very big, very long, and they improve your life on a daily basis without you even knowing it.

See, when water falls from the sky in large quantities, most of the time it doesn’t flood our towns and cities. More often than not, when it rains and even sometimes when it pours, you can still drive your car, flush your toilet, and walk into a grocery store. Now, I always thought that was normal and perfectly natural. Turns out, pretty much 100% of towns, villages, and cities - as well as factories, farms, and construction sites - all have a system for water management built into their construction. When it rains, that rain-water is diverted into massive stretches of giant underground pipes that redirect said water in order to avoid flooding.

Sewage pipelines are similarly important. When you use the bathroom, wash your hands, take a shower, or clean some dishes, that waste-water eventually must be transported outside your municipality where it is reclaimed, recycled, purified, and eventually ends up back in your morning cup of coffee. This sort of hydro-engineering is a modern marvel and exists in various forms throughout the developed (and developing) world. Even if you grew up in a suburb like me where you use well water and a septic system, water is still being redirected from the street into storm drains, from the well into your home, and from your toilet into the leaching fields in your back yard.

Moreover, when developers build new buildings, factories, data centers, hotels, ect, they often run into weather related delays. They must try and mitigate the flooding effects of rain, and they accomplish that task by installing large and rudimentary rain-water systems that prevent the construction sight from turning into a damn pool. Even if you run a warehouse without a sink or a bathroom, there is likely some piping around the building to prevent flooding.

Flooding is real! And when it does happen, its news. In the U.S, a lot of our infrastructure needs upgrading and that includes our storm-water and wastewater systems. Back in the day we only really had two options for our underground piping: steel and concrete. The issue with both materials is that they’re incredible heavy, cumbersome, and expensive. Now, pure steel-made pipes aren’t widely used in the U.S (way to pricey), but RCP (reinforced concrete pipe) has been the standard for a century. Virtually all of the pipe infrastructure buried underground is made of reinforced concrete, and that stuff is starting to crumble.

If you were the Mayor of a municipality - lets call it “Funtown” - and you faced the issue of aging water management infrastructure, you would be stressed. Funtown’s taxes would be wasted on constant repairs of old concrete pipes, and pretty soon you would be the mayor of Broketown. If you did nothing to repair that water management infrastructure you’d end up the mayor of Browntown, and somewhere along the line it would become either Watertown, or maybe worse: Drytown.

Clean water and the mitigation of both floods and droughts doesn’t seem like an “optional” choice for any municipalities in the U.S. Nor is it an “option” for any new constructions. I’m not sure if you knew this, but the weather isn’t becoming more predictable and stable. In fact, many cities in America have faced some challenging fluctuations between droughts and floods. Even worse, the effects of climate change pose risks to our agricultural sector as well. No food is also not an option here.

Fortunately, these problems can be solved - or at least seriously mitigated by a solid water management system. So the question is not do we need water management in the future? Realistically, what we should be asking ourselves is: who’s gonna supply that infrastructure?

This brings me to the topic of today’s write-up:

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