Case Studies

Baltimore City is nearly 300 years old and encompasses 92 square miles, more than 620,000 residents, and countless icons – the Inner Harbor, Mount Vernon, Fort McHenry, the home of the Preakness Stakes, Camden Yards, and Johns Hopkins University – but with its wealth of history comes an aging water and sewer infrastructure.

Portions of the water infrastructure date back to the Baltimore Water Company, the first water company established in the country. Major expansions and improvements to the system were made until the 1960s, but many water lines are decades old. Miles of downtown sewers were built 100 years ago, after 70 city blocks were flattened by the fire of 1904.