"The Battle over Blue Gold"

WBUR - The Connection
27 August 2002

Go ahead, Turn it on. Cold, clear, life-giving water. Perfect and profitable? Maybe. Water, the resource that feeds the soil and the soul is increasingly, a la oil, a la electricity, becoming a commodity.

Looking to deal with aging water systems, tightening EPA standards, and looming shortages, cities and towns across the nation are hiring private companies to maintain their pumps and pipes. It's an effort to ensure citizens get safe H2O, and if the companies can squeeze out a profit to boot, so be it.

But some say that letting the bears and bulls loose at the watering hole is dangerous policy, that there more than anywhere, the public sector should rule. In the second part of our series, Wall Street and the Water Works, Politics, Profit, and Privatization.