Following the expensive water-main break that flooded UCLA’s campus, Los Angeles officials say they’re trying to aggressively fix the city’s aging infrastructure. 

The costs are daunting. It’s going to take the city of Los Angeles billions of dollars to fix.

“They estimate some over 20 millions of gallons of water were lost and of course it wound up on that new floor at the Pauley Pavilion Basketball Arena,” says Greg DiLoreto, former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “We have some 240,000 water main breaks a year in this country. And the age of our water infrastructure continues to get older and older and older.”

DiLoreto says the country needs something like $84 billion dollars in water infrastructure investments between now and 2020.

Carolyn Berndt, program director at the National League of Cities, says local governments haven’t had the access to the kind of capital they need to make these upgrades.

“The traditional method has been through the state revolving loan funds,” Berndt says. “Those numbers have been declining in recent years.”

Berndt says if cities are going fix their leaky pipes, they’ll need more financing than just a drop in the bucket.