BALTIMORE (Map, News) - If you pour a cold glass of water on a hot summer day, you are stressing out Richard Nuss.

Nuss, a chemist at the Montebello Filtration Plant I, which supplies water to about 2 million people in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Harford, Howard and Baltimore counties, has a few sleepless nights when water demand peaks.

“During the summer it’s stressful; there is a lot of strain on the system,” Nuss says as he gives a tour of the antiquated brick building in East Baltimore that houses the monolithic concrete filters that purify millions of gallons of water every hour. “We’re certainly taxing the system.”

Built in 1914, the Montebello plant is one of three filtration facilities built more than 50 yers ago that purify and prepare nearly 265 million gallons every day to meet the demand of Baltimore and its surrounding counties. The others are Montebello II, which began operation in 1928, and Ashburton, which was completed in 1956.

The Montebello plant, a series of quaint brick buildings with arched windows, looks more like a boarding school than a workhouse pumping out water for lawn sprinklers and shower heads throughout the region. But the 93-year-old facility is at a breaking point, particularly when temperatures hit 90 degrees and water demand soars to 300 million gallons a day.

“We’re pushing its limits,” Nuss said.

A growing appetite for water and a system that needs constant maintenance are the main reasons Baltimore’s Bureau of Water and Wastewater recently lobbied the city’s Board of Estimates to pass a controversial three-year, 9 percent rate increase.

“We have many federal mandates to improve and upgrade the water system,” Department of Public Works Director George Winfield said. “And that includes a homeland security requirement that says we must build domes to protect finished water.”

But critics of the Water Bureau, including City Comptroller Joan Pratt, called the rate increase unnecessary, arguing that her independent audit justified only a 4 percent rate hike.

“I’m concerned about people being hit with large increases in all their utility bills, and now water,” she said.

Mayor Sheila Dixon put the brakes on the increase, convincing the board to approve a one-year, one-time 9 percent hike, leaving area water consumers wondering how high rates will go.

But Kurt Kocher, spokesman for the Water Bureau, says keeping an aging system — some pipes are more than 100 years old— will require at least a 9 percent rate increase. Planning for the demands of a growing population is a delicate balancing act that requires foresight — and cash.

“We’re spending $1.3 billion for capital improvements through 2013,” Kocher said.

And making sure the tap keeps running requires not just 10, or 20 or even 30 years of forward thinking. “It’s generational,” he said. “Water analysts look 50 years ahead. If you don’t plan well into the future, you just can’t catch up.”

Consider that the first new plant to add capacity to the region’s water system in nearly a half-century, the Fullerton Filtration Plant, won’t be finished until 2017 — a decade from now.

“It certainly requires careful and forward thinking” Winfield said. “We really can’t afford not to plan.”

Water wars

The typical U.S citizen is a sponge.

Americans consume on average 96 gallons of fresh water per day — the most of any country. The frugal French use just 39 gallons daily; in Israel, it’s even less — 26 gallons.

Even as we continue to be a worldwide leader in water consumption, our thirst continues to grow, as we build larger homes, bigger lawns and more and more golf courses.

Where the new water will come from is a problem that is causing water wars across the country, and Maryland is no exception.

“The water wars have already started,” said Jesse Richardson, an associate professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech. “I foresee more and more of those conflicts. In the East we already have had Maryland and Virginia fighting over the Potomac.”

A lawsuit, filed by Virginia after Maryland tried to prevent its cross-river competitor from taking more water from the Potomac, made it all he way to the Supreme Court in 2005. Virginia won, but the Potomac is not the only river with competing interstate needs.

The Baltimore water system is preparing for the day when the city’s three reservoirs — Prettyboy, Loch Raven and Liberty — no longer will store enough fresh water to meet demand, leaving Water Bureau officials with only one option — the Susquehanna River.

“At some point, as water demands increase in our metropolitan area, we’ll have to rely more frequently on the Susquehanna ,” said Ralph Cullison, chief of Environmental Services for the Water Bureau. “The Fullerton plant is being built specifically to treat water from the Susquehanna.”

But how much water they can draw from the Susquehanna is not in Baltimore’s hands.

The Susquehanna River Basin Commission, an agency created by the federal government to dole out water to three states — New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland — has the final say on how much each state can take.

And while SRBC spokeswoman Susan Obleski said the commission has accounted for the water that Baltimore plans to use for the Fullerton Filtration Plant, droughts and other unforeseen strains on the supply are always a concern.

“It’s a sensitive resource during dry times,” she said.

Richardson said a fight over the Susquehanna River is a distinct possibility.

“There is definitely a potential for conflict,” he said. “People take [water] for granted. As it becomes more and more scarce, that’s going to change.”

Droughts and other crises

The drought of 2002 was a scorcher.

A winter with relatively no rain or snow introduced a parched summer of sizzling hot days. The city’s three reservoirs literally were dying of thirst, falling to as much as 40 feet below normal levels.

“In the 33 years I’ve been here, that’s the worst I’ve seen,” Cullison said.

Every morning during that summer of no relief, Cullison and Water Bureau managers would review batches of reports on reservoir levels and water demand. The picture, Cullison said, was grim.

“The city has never run out of water,” he said, “and we didn’t want to be the first.”

They turned to the Susquehanna River, which flows some 400 miles mainly through central Pennsylvania and forms the headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay. Turning on three pumps, nearly 30 billion gallons of water was drawn over the course of three months to keep the region’s taps from running dry.

“It was a tense time,” he said.

But droughts are not the only calamity that can tax the area’s water system.

Nearly 60,000 residents in Howard County will suffer with water restrictions this summer due to a faulty water main in Baltimore County. The pipe, said Jim Irvin, head of Howard County’s Department of Public Works, is defective.

“Some of the pipelines constructed more than 30 years ago have failed,” he said. “It’s endemic to water systems all over the country.”

Irvin said faulty wiring used to form the concrete is to blame. But now a sense of water insecurity has Howard County looking to strengthen a water-supply system that is completely reliant on other jurisdictions.

“There are no other sources of water, they’re all used, but we’re looking to build a connection with Anne Arundel County,” Irvin said. “If either one has problem, we could at least borrow from one another.”

Water woes abound in Carroll County. In 2002, Westminster caught the state’s attention when the city’s Cranberry Reservoir dried up, forcing officials to cough up thousands of dollars to truck in water continuously for several weeks.

Then last fall, the Maryland Department of the Environment halted any new development in Westminster until the county seat could secure more water sources, sending the city into a half-year building moratorium that ended last month when the state and Westminster signed a consent agreement on several expensive projects, including a $6.5 million emergency pipeline from Medford Quarry to the city reservoir.

Baltimore City sells raw water to Carroll County and treated water to Baltimore, Howard, Harford and Anne Arundel counties, Carroll Public Works Director Michael Evans said. Carroll County officials broke ground Monday on a new water-treatment plant in Eldersburg to double their capacity to treat water from Liberty Reservoir, from 3 million to 7 million gallons of water a day.

“Carroll County is struggling,” said Richardson, who has been consulting with Evans on how to improve its water supply. “They’re trying to develop reservoirs, but that’s 20 years down the road. The question is, how are they going to have water between now and then?”

A cloudy future

Good water is a matter of taste and science, said Joe Gordon, who is the executive director of the Water Quality Association, an Illinois-based trade group that represents water-treatment companies. Unfortunately, the science is always changing — with costly results.

“They keep finding new things that need to be treated,” said Gordon, who is a former director of the Midwest Region for the EPA’s Water Quality Division. “The EPA is always raising standards.”

And this could be a problem for the region’s water supply, Nuss said.

“If the EPA raises its standards for certain types of carcinogens, then we might have to replace our sand filters with carbon filters,” he said.

And that would be — “expensive,” he said.

“Carbon filtration could double the costs of water,” said Gordon, who noted that carbon is not generally used in municipal water systems.

“Ninety percent of the water is either flushed or used for washing,” he said. “So it’s too expensive.”

And while Kocher said he doubts the city will have to change the city’s water filters from sand to carbon, he’s a realist — and what he sees is a future with more demand and less supply.

“When you look at it long-term, as our population keeps growing, it’s going to be difficult to rely on what we have now. Fifty years from now, we might be taking water out of the Chesapeake Bay through desalination,” he said. “Nothing is off the table in terms of what we’ll have do.”

FAST FACTS

» Loch Raven, Liberty and Prettyboy reservoirs store nearly 86 billion gallons of water

» The Water Bureau filters and distributes an average of 265 million gallons of drinking water daily

» On average, 1.5 million gallons of water are lost per day to open hydrants.

» The average age of a city water main is 80 years.

Examiner staff writers Kelsey Volkmann and Sara Michael contributed to this story.

sjanis@baltimoreexaminer.com