> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
At least from what I've seen in my area, interruptions in water service don't result in a lack of pressure or flow, they result in contamination, and the water districts have to issue boil water orders. It's not a problem you would notice, and if you don't pay attention to local news, you might just end up drinking contaminated water.
It's interesting you said that. My experience is the opposite. In my last 10 years in California, I've had power outages a couple times a year (mostly due to storm / trees falling on the electrical lines). But I don't recall a time I got water cut off.
Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
Where do you live? I don't think I've ever lost water without a power outage.
Water infrastructure outages are typically due to failures needing repairs (relevant to this discussion: water main breaks which lead to boil water advisories). Few municipalities are fiscally responsible enough to invest in all the preventative maintenance required to completely avoid failures across all types of infrastructure (a low-priority budget item when things are working smoothly), but it also takes decades for water mains to fail.
> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid.
Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.
I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.