where the average age on the pipes -- cal berkley. studying this problem of water delivery systems. if we you know go in to it without a lot of planning we could find ourselves in a big problem. >> shows a clear benefit with spending the money on infrastructure repair now, rather than later. >> the systems to operate day-to-day are more expensive if you end up paying this money earlier. communities like san francisco, and parts of morin, and parts of any area in the bay area, are going to have he very very old water pipes that are going to fail. >> congressman, jared huffman, serves on the u.s. house transportation and infrastructure committee. he is proposing that congress spend more money to fix the problems now. >> we will have to try to get ahead of this. if we don't, regularly update and modernize that infrastructure, you are going to see massive failures. >> worse case some experts say, some communes could be cut off from reliable clean supplies of water, for weeks, months and years, depending on the breaks and they may have to treat their own water supplies in their homes. >>